Hale to a chief of TV comedy

For its generation, The Mysterious Benedict Society is a sort of hybrid of The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, with dashes of The Famous Five, Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events thrown in for good measure. It’s a slightly fantastical children’s adventure series, but written with a wry point of entry that makes it good fun for adult audiences too.

The show’s literary source, Hale says, reflects the enduring power of books in an era where entertainment is more completely defined by streaming television, particularly for younger audiences. Hale’s childhood pre-dated the publication of the Mysterious Benedict Society books in the 2000s, so “for me, growing up,” he says, “The Lord of the Rings series was huge and The Chronicles of Narnia was really big, really big.”

Hale says The Mysterious Benedict Society also unexpectedly spoke to events in 2020 in the run-up to the global pandemic. “One of the big reasons that drew me to it, especially when the pandemic hit, is that the show starts out when an emergency is happening, [referred to as] a global crisis,” he says. “And my character gathers these four kids to find the source and these kids don’t have magical powers, their super power is their intellect, their creativity and their empathy.”

Unlike many of their literary contemporaries, the younger characters of The Mysterious Benedict Society are not super-powered. They are a group of children whose differences are their strengths, gathered by a mysterious benefactor, Mr Benedict, played by Hale. (Hale also plays Benedict’s twin brother, the villainous Mr Curtain.)