Shogun star Cosmo Jarvis opens up about spending time in an Australian jail

Shogun star Cosmo Jarvis opens up about the amazing success of the hit historical drama and how it led him the inside of a jail cell in Australia.

Almost exactly a year after it was released to streaming, Cosmo Jarvis’ historical epic Shogun is still continuing to scoop up awards by the bucket load.

After winning a record 18 Emmy Awards in September – including Best Drama, Best Actor and Best Actress, a feat it repeated at the Golden Globes in January – it marched on relentlessly to clean up at the Critics Choice Awards, the Writers Guild Awards and even nabbed the AACTA International Award for Best Drama Series on the Gold Coast this month.

All of which has meant more time than they might like on the red carpet for its stars including the fiercely private, publicity-shunning English actor Jarvis, who played sailor John Blackthorne as one of the three lead roles alongside Japanese stars Hiroyuki Sanada and Anna Sawai.

“I don’t like it – it’s odd,” he admits over the phone from his London home. “It’s not my favourite place to be but apparently it’s necessary somehow.”

Despite Shogun, based on James Clavell’s 1975 novel of the same name, being one of the most acclaimed TV shows of the past year – and topping many critics’ lists including this writer’s – Jarvis says that he had absolutely no idea while making it of the phenomenon it would become.

“You never do really because there are so many different variables in the process of these things and so many different things that occur before it’s they’re finished,” he says. “So you never really know what anything’s going to be. It’s always a pleasant surprise if people actually end up liking something, so that’s good.”

UK actor Cosmo Jarvis, star of Shogun and Aussie prison drama Inside.

As for the eagerly anticipated second season, which was hastily commissioned despite there being no direct sequel to Clavell’s novel, one-time musician Jarvis is entirely in the dark and says he’s just getting on with his acting career, which has so far included TV hits Peaky Blinders and Raised By Wolves and the movies Persuasion, with Dakota Johnson and Lady Macbeth, opposite Florence Pugh.

“All I know is that the people who made the first one are busy making it, I guess,” he says. “I really know nothing about it. Has its success changed my life? No, but I’m very pleased to have been a part of it and really proud of everybody that contributed to it and worked on it in all of their various thousands of capacities. But I just continue on as normal really, trying to find interesting characters and see how it goes.”

If there was a silver lining to awards season for Jarvis, it reuniting with Aussie actor Guy Pearce at the Golden Globes, who was up for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama for his performance in The Brutalist. The pair had shot the Australian prison drama Inside in Melbourne in 2023 and despite not sharing many scenes, endured the unusual and intense experience of filming in the newly built but not yet opened Western Plains Correctional Centre in Lara. Some other scenes were shot at the then recently decommissioned Malmsbury Youth Justice Centre.

“It was nice bumping into somebody that I worked with and it was good to see him,” Jarvis says. “He was just a lovely guy and it was great to work with him and he was he was very earnest and provided a really good example and was encouraging to others with much less experience than him. It was great to have a shot at working with him.”

Cosmo Jarvis as a hardened criminal in prison drama, Inside.

After the global success of Shogun, an independent Australian film from a first time director might seem like an unusual detour for Jarvis, whose next film is the big-budget Robert De Niro crime drama The Alto Nights (“he’s a lovely man – it was amazing to have the opportunity to work alongside him”) and has just started shooting Guy Ritchie’s next drama Wife and Dog (“I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about it”) with Benedict Cumberbatch and Anthony Hopkins.

But after being sent the script for Inside by a producer he’d worked with before, he was absolutely fascinated and eagerly headed Down Under for the first time since he’d toured here as a singer-songwriter more than a decade and “another life” ago, after his song Gay Pirates had been voted No. 85 on the 2012 Triple J Hottest 100.

“It was the first time and it was lovely,” he says. “I love the country, love the people, and the sense of humour above all. The sense of humour is excellent and the general quality of the national character is lovely to be around and really good.”

With a shaved head and an impressive accent, Jarvis plays Mark Shepherd in Inside. Described as “Australia’s most despised criminal”, he is a thoroughly damaged, self-harming individual with a traumatic past, destined to die in jail for his horrific deeds, who has turned to his own brand of Pentecostal Christianity. Desperate to spread the word and maybe find salvation and forgiveness, he takes under his wing a younger prisoner who has been transferred from juvenile to adult jail.

Cosmo Jarvis, Anna Sawai, Hiroyuki Sanada, Tadanobu Asano win the Best Television Series – Drama Award for Shogun during the 82nd Annual Golden Globes in January. Picture: Gilbert Flores/GG2025/Penske Media via Getty Images

“He had to definitely be the sum of what he came from and what he done after wherever he had originated,” Jarvis says. “I enjoyed the challenge – well maybe not enjoy, enjoy is a strong word – I like being occupied by the challenge of trying to make sure that he is the sum of those things in a way that feels like it honours where he is supposed to have come from and what he is supposed to have done and what he is supposed to now be attempting with his idea of faith.”

Jarvis researched extensively for the part, who he says is “an amalgam of people”, reading up on criminals and social problems and “listening to people and talking to people to find commonalities between the ways that certain disadvantaged people speak in Australia”.

But what added real authenticity to the project was being able to shoot at Western Plains Correctional Centre in Lara, which is Victoria’s newest maximum-security correctional facility. The isolation and the feeling of the doors slamming shut behind them – even though they were free to leave at the end of the day – created an atmosphere and a realism that just can’t be replicated in a studio set.

“It certainly gave you a sense of the finality of your circumstances,” he says. “Because once we were in and the crew was in then that’s it – you were in.

Cosmo Jarvis says filming in a real Australian jail gave Inside authenticity.

“The thing that really struck me about it was how well made everything was. It’s not like you’re ever going to break a door. It’s not like you’re ever going to break a window. The finality of the location was just so potent in the air that it really did help the process … it was certainly a new experience for me and it was just so final once that you’re inside that it’s hard to even imagine what it was like outside.”

Having extras who had also spent time in prison also proved to be helpful for Jarvis and he says their sometimes scary exteriors belied their temperament and personalities.

“They were all lovely and they were all available and really enthusiastic about helping us with realism and helping answer questions. Some of their stories were amazing to hear, especially on the topics that the film is concerned with in terms of in an individual’s potential for moral rehabilitation.”

Inside opens in selected cinemas on February 27. Shogun is now streaming on Disney+.

Originally published as Shogun star Cosmo Jarvis opens up about spending time in an Australian jail