- Phileas Fogg is an extraordinary character.
He starts off in the Reform Club as a repressed Englishman of a certain class, and a certain type, eating the same food every day, seeing the same people every day.
- Mr.
Fogg will have his usual Brown Windsor soup, and then the boiled beef.
- A timid man, really, and the journey of 80 days opens him up to the world to experience.
- Do you know this place?
- [Ashley] And he finds a curiosity, an intellect, an ambition that's been buried all his life.
- Trust me.
- Bit by bit, very slowly over the course of our story, we see him find himself, I suppose, and find his inner strength and find who he has the potential to be.
So that really is Fogg's journey through the story from someone who really is very ill-equipped to go on this kind of adventure, to someone who discovers that he has resources he didn't realize he had.
- Passepartout, Passepartout.
- In the beginning, I would say that Passepartout doesn't really like those kind of people, who are just sitting in the Reform Club and talking about a life that they don't know and judging people.
As we go further in the story, we realize that, in fact, they're starting to like each other.
When he discovered that he's a good person, that's how they got to appreciate each other.
- She's definitely a Daddy's girl, but she's always had everything she asked for.
And she's been given permission and the room to make her own choices, but she is in her mid-twenties and not married and doesn't have kids, and doesn't even think about it.
Thinks about her career.
And that's only possible because her father gave her that space.
- You really are the most impossible creature.
- Bernard Fortescue is the editor of the Daily Telegraph.
And he meets with his friends every day in the Reform Club in London, which is a real club that exists and leads a kind of, on one level, quite a sort of stuffy small world in a way.
He's got his office.
He's got his club where he spends most of his time there.
Of all of those three, he's the one who has a profession.
- We first meet Nyle Bellamy in the Reform Club.
We clearly see that they're three very old friends, Fogg, Fortescue and Nyle.
They've grown up together.
They've been at school together.
They've known each other an awfully long time.
They're all kind of very set in their ways at the beginning of the show.
Fortescue is very happy where he is.
Fogg isn't and he doesn't know why.
Bellamy is aware of his kind of ennui.
- See you in the morning!
- [Peter] And wager and the race against time gives him a means of escape.
- We very much wanted to give Around the World in 80 Days a contemporary slant.
So whilst it's very definitely a period story, we wanted the characters to have a modern identity and in a sense, a modern sensibility.
(dramatic music)
