Raza Jaffrey is Lance Naik Singh
"It’s been really nice to play the kind of strong and honourable man who was very much of his time. Playing Zaff in Spooks was great and people really reacted to him in a good way but my character in Sharpe is a real hero of the piece. He’s one of the last men standing, desperate to fulfil the dying wishes of his officer."
Raza was involved in some action-packed sequences during filming. He says: "I get to take out a few men with a giant plug used to ram the cannonballs and there is a very dramatic river crossing."
"But in one scene I manage to grab a gun the wrong way round; not very cool. You’d think I’d know one end from the other. All those years in MI5 haven’t really paid off!"
Explaining his character Raza says: “Naik Singh is a lance corporal in the Royal Engineers, so he is in the British Army. I am right hand man to Major Tredinnick and we are lumped together with East India Company soldiers struggling to get across India and home. That’s how Sharpe comes across us, he’s homeward bound too and we all end up in a dire situation together.
"It’s the first period drama I’ve done for television so I’m really hoping to do more. I love the costumes, and the characters you get to play are so fascinating."
It’s not the first time Raza has worked in India though: "I recorded part of the Bombay Dreams soundtrack in Madras. It was bizarre because my grandfather was actually a lighthouse engineer in Madras."
"Normally I would visit the big cities in India; Mumbai, Madras etc. But filming Sharpe out there meant we saw places you would never normally see as a tourist."
"We filmed in a dilapidated palace which was built as a folly for a rich landowner in the early 1900s. And the small village communities we filmed in around Orcha, where they haven’t seen rain for years, you would never know existed."
Raza became a fan of SHARPE while preparing for his role.
"I started watching more and more of the films when I learned of the prospect of filming out in India. I was desperate to get the part because I think Sean Bean is brilliant and have always wanted to work with him."
"As soon as you tell people you’re doing a Sharpe film you have fans coming out of the closet all around. There are a lot of real Sharpe buffs out there who live and breathe the show."
One of the most memorable experiences Raza has brought home with him is of the array of animals he worked with, and stumbled across, during filming.
"There aren’t many jobs where you get to stand next to a couple of elephants who have walked from their home in Rajasthan to work on the set. They are the most incredible animals and if you were on set with a bottle of water and they fancied a drink you could pour the contents down their trunks. Wonderful."
"Mind you they got wise to how enthralled with them we all were and they’d take water from everyone then start using it to spray us! There were also beautiful horses on this. I didn’t ride myself but I have to hold a horse during a mock avalanche which was quite scary."
"We saw great big cobras and there was a mongoose which followed the same route through our hotel garden every evening."