Ross Kemp looks every inch the fearless SAS trooper in Ultimate Force – but he admits he would be too frightened to do the job for real.
“I’m a scaredy cat. I’ve got lots of friends who are soldiers and I admire them and thank them for protecting my way of life. But I’d never have made a good soldier myself. What we are trying to do is thank them by presenting them in a hopefully good light.
“Ultimate Force seems to be incredibly popular with the services. In a way it’s a better recruitment campaign than the ads they do. We are in no way trying to be detrimental towards the armed forces, especially in the current atmosphere. I think they need all the help and backing they can get.”
“I enjoy the role and it's easy watching, very digestible and quite comic. It’s very in-your-face but it’s not trying to be anything it isn’t. It’s got its own niche and it’s very popular.
“I’m very proud of the series, what we achieve and how we get away with it in the locations that we have. Having spent a bit of time in East Africa, I never thought we’d get away with filming Africa in Oxfordshire but we did. Instead of the Amazon, we got 12 heavily-armed people with blacked out faces into a speedboat just around the corner from Windsor Castle. There would have been a major security alert if we’d gone round the next bend!
“The amount of pyrotechnics we get through is amazing. Before half past eleven on one Friday, I had blown up a helicopter and taken out a cocaine factory. We were very close to the explosion and it was one take, with rounds firing and rocket launchers going off,” he says.
“Hopefully the more you do something, the better you get. Sometimes it means more corners are cut but I don’t think we’ve done that.”
Ross admits playing Henno is physically challenging. “You have to prepare for it. I’m 41 years old now and everyone else in the cast is 15 years younger than me. They can run my socks off so I have to make sure that I’m relatively fit just to survive the filming.”
Ross spent three months in Brazil, New Zealand and Los Angeles making a documentary series on gangs. He realised he’s become a somewhat unwilling expert on weapons.
“I’m very used to guns now but every year I like them less because I’ve been handling them all day on Ultimate Force. In one of the documentaries I went to an armoury of confiscated weapons in Rio de Janeiro. I went through the weapons and the police were convinced I wasn’t a journalist but a soldier because I knew so much."
Ross says he would also like to do more comedy, following the success of his appearance in Extras. “I wish I’d had the opportunity to do comedy before now, but we’re very famous for pigeon-holing people in this country. Ricky Gervais is a very funny guy and it was hard to keep a straight face at times."
