The Age, 4 Oct 2004 || The Belfast Telegraph, 24 Sep 2004 || CanWest News, 17 Sep 2004 || Zap2it.com, 2 Sep 2004 || The Scotsman, 26 April 2004 || Empire Magazine, Apr/May 2004 (scan) || The Times, 10 Apr 2004 || The Orlando Sentinel, 25 Mar 2004 || The San Bernardino Sun, 20 Mar 2004 || The Boston Globe, 7 Mar 2004 || The Chicago Tribune, date unknown || Back Stage West, 3 Mar 2004 || The Telegraph, 5 Feb 2004 || Kermode Uncut Column, Channel 4 Film || The Observer, 25 Jan 2004 || The Telegraph, 16 Nov 2002 || News snippets from WENN || BluntReview.com, 2002 || The Guardian, 22 February 2002 || BBC Online, 21 February 2002 || Planet Hollywood, 2001 || The Sunday Times, 9 December 2001 || E!Online, date unknown || USA Today, 15 May 2001 || reality, 10 May 2001 || The Toronto Sun, 9 May 2001 || The Sunday Times, 4 June 2000 KRT for The Age, 4 Oct 2004 Wimbledon's winning streak People who saw Paul Bettany as the enigmatic best friend in A Beautiful Mind, or the ship's surgeon in Master and Commander may be surprised that he was not fated to be an actor. The tall, slender Bettany longed to be a pop singer. "But I hated singing my songs in front of other people, and that's obviously quite a large stumbling block in becoming a major recording artist," he says, a slight head cold rasping his voice. "So I picked acting instead." As an ageing champion tennis player in the new film, Wimbledon, Bettany fools us again. He never played tennis in his life before he began training for the movie. Bettany is like that - blondish, with pale freckles and an open face - and completely unlike the way he looks. "I was a bit arrogant (about playing the role). I thought, 'Well people do this, don't they? They get themselves in shape, and I can do it. I'll just do it.' I loathe gyms and stuff. It was sort of six months of eating six meals a day - all of which were boiled chicken - and playing tennis and lifting up heavy objects in a room." Truth is, that was nothing compared to his early stabs at acting. Before drama school he was a busker. "It's sort of French for a vagrant with a guitar," he grins. "I played guitar in the streets. I made enough to pay my paltry rent and eat." Though London is one of the most expensive cities in the world, he says, "You can find some awful flop house room above a restaurant in Turnpike Lane in some diseased part of town. It was grisly. I lived above a restaurant so there were an enormous number of cockroaches. And I had lots of different processes to keep the cockroaches off my bed, which was a mattress on the floor. It was hideous. Then I went to college and I was given a grant and life just got much, much, much better." Ever since he played a psycho thug in Gangster No 1, life has grown considerably better. But just before Gangster, Bettany, 33, succumbed to drugs. "I was a mess," he shakes his head. "I am of the opinion that drugs can be used recreationally - just not me. I have a very strong work ethic, and it became full-time employment. I couldn't do it as fun. I sort of became a mess, really. Everybody in some way wants to recede from the world at times. If they're not drinking or smoking pot or doing whatever they're doing, they're playing golf or collecting..." "If you're collecting coins and spend your month's housekeeping on a 17th-century French coin, you're ruining your family in a different way. I think the need is to recede a little from life at times. Whatever has been going bad in my life I've always been very protective of work. I couldn't work and be a drug addict, so I stopped." He quit cold turkey - several times, he admits - applying the force of his unwavering logic to that, as he does to the rest of his life. Married to actress Jennifer Connolly, with whom he co-starred in A Beautiful Mind, he's the father of a one-year-old-son and stepfather to Connolly's seven-year-old son. About that he says, "He's an incredibly bright child and has been able to really assimilate the situation. I think it's less down to me being clever about it, it's down to him being amazingly grown up for a seven-year-old. He has a very strong relationship with his father and an understanding of the difference between me and his father. And I think that's an incredible kind of blessing, that he's OK about it all." Though he and Connolly met on A Beautiful Mind, they did not connect until later. "We'd both been around the block a bit. We were wise enough not to...we were both in relationships and those 'on-set' affairs never work. So we were bright enough not to do that," he says. "We were talking on the phone a lot, and suddenly I realised I was actually talking more to her than I was my partner at the time. So that made me kind of question: 'What am I doing here?' And a year and a half later we got together. It was very old-fashioned. We'd never lived together when we got married. We were in Scotland, we got married and she took me home like a mail-order bride and took me to New York. And they all said, 'Are you Harry Potter?'" ~~*~~ Sam Ingleby for The Belfast Telegraph, 24 Sep 2004 Paul Bettany: Let's get physical Paul Bettany's branching out, and putting on the pounds, as a romantic lead. Sam Ingleby meets a model professional. Halfway through an audience with Paul Bettany in an opulent suite at the Dorchester hotel, in London, a big bluebottle that has somehow managed to avoid the PRs and security and gain access to the room starts buzzing slowly around my head. I try to ignore it but Bettany, in the middle of an answer about his career choices, notices it and leaps up and snatches at the offending bug with one hand. He opens his palm with a sense of anticipation, but the fly has gone. "Oh," he says, a little disappointed. "I thought I was a ninja for a minute." It is one of several un-starry moments in the interview with the decidedly big-time Bettany, who is in the country to promote the release of the sports rom-com Wimbledon, in which he co-stars with Kirsten Dunst. The film charts the progress of the journeyman British pro Peter Colt through his last Wimbledon tournament. Initially, he hopes merely to avoid complete humiliation, but later on, inspired by his relationship with Dunst's character, he aims to win. The film is more than a little different from his last, the Lars von Trier- directed Dogma, which took as its subject the not inconsiderable matter of the insularity of the United States. Why did he decide to do it? Bettany immediately drops into self-deprecating mode. "My plan - well, it isn't much of a plan, but it's mine and I like it - is to try to do lots of different things. "One of my film heroes is Peter Weir, who made Fearless but also made Green Card. Ang Lee makes a western, he makes a Seventies psycho movie, a costume drama and a monster movie. I wanted to be like that. I finished this in October and I haven't worked since, because my wife [the actress Jennifer Connelly] had just had the baby and I wanted to be with them. But I've just taken on a film called The Wrong Element, which is a thriller with Harrison Ford. I'm doing it because I've never done a thriller before and I just get..." He pauses, searching for the appropriate description. "I just get bored if I don't do different things." He may get bored, but this ability to change genre and to avoid being typecast is testament to Bettany's malleability on screen. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he looks every inch the leading man: blond, blue-eyed, 6ft-plus, he definitely has the lineaments of a film star. But rather than letting his looks dictate the roles he plays, he manages to employ them in a protean, changeable way. He says that after his breakthrough success as a cold-blooded dandy in Gangster No 1 all he was offered were parts as sociopaths. Then, after his turn as a garrulous, bawdy "Jeff" Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, he was offered a series of louche, lounge lizard parts. His desire to play against what people expect of him and to try different characters was another reason he took on the role of Peter Colt. "When I read the script I thought, 'well, that really works'. I went to see the director, Richard Loncraine, and straight away he said to me, 'I think you're completely wrong for this film.' "I really loved him for it, because I agreed - I'd never done a film like it. He asked me why I wanted to do it and I said that I'd never done a Friday night date movie before, which was exactly what he was hoping to make. Not make anything more than that. That's when you get into trouble at times, when you pretend the film is something it isn't." And did he, a classically trained actor, find it easy to act in a rom-com, date-movie feature? "Not at all. I watched a lot of romantic comedies, because it's a genre and you've got to service it rather than pretend to be in a different sort of movie. The director, although he'd never done a rom-com before, really knew what he was doing. We were always frank with each other. He would say to me, 'Paul, don't do it like that, that was crap.'" How did he feel about such candour? "I really appreciate that kind of honesty because it helps things move along," he says, without a hint of affectation. The film is a Working Title production and there were rumours that the part of Peter Colt was originally offered to that Working Title stalwart, Hugh Grant. Whether or not that is the case, Bettany happily admits to studying him and others to achieve what he calls the right sort of "elegant froth" that these films depend upon. "People like Cary Grant, Will Smith and Hugh Grant do it brilliantly. They are just relentlessly charming and self-deprecating. I found that really difficult. But there may be other reasons for that," he says, self-deprecatingly. And what of the part of Colt who, I suggest, is a rather typical British sportsman: a good loser. He roars with laughter. "I love the way British people see ourselves. We say, 'He's like us, a bit of a loser.' "It reminds me of when I first went to LA. A woman, who shall remain nameless, said to me, 'You're going to love LA, Paul, because over here ambition is not a dirty word.' And I thought, 'Well, you've named one of the things that I feel quite patriotic about.' It's still a little bit embarrassing in Britain if you're seen to try. But it's a difficult trait to play. He's a nice guy. It's simply easier to play somebody with lots of mess because mess is easier to hold on to. "Apart from not having great self-esteem, which I don't think anybody really has unless they're mad, he's a nice bloke and I find them really difficult to do. It's a lot easier to say, 'Mum's got cancer' than 'Do you fancy a cup of tea?' It's easier to say the emotional, dramatic thing." He scratches his head: "They always trip me up, those lines." You get the sense that Bettany is entirely comfortable with the type of film Wimbledon is: another unchallenging, glossy, picturesque view of boy-meets-American-girl-in-London - very much in the tradition of Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral. The challenges for Bettany, apart from his character's lack of angst, were more physical. He went into training six months before filming began, in an attempt to look like an authentic tennis player. He now says that such an idea is an "enormously stupid and arrogant thing to believe you can do". "When you go and watch tennis players they move so beautifully. Doing what I did is like the equivalent of saying, 'Yeah, I'd love to play Nureyev in a film, how long will it take me to learn?' These guys have been getting up since the age of four at the crack of dawn, hitting balls. So what I do is always going to be an approximation." The tennis sequences in the film are augmented by CGI, with the ball being carefully added after the filming, but Bettany still underwent a rigorous training regime - with the former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash - to get his movements on court looking as fluent and professional as possible. "Jennifer and I got married on 1 January and a week later we were home and I started learning tennis and lifting up heavy things and eating six boiled chickens a day. It was dreadful, really, but only as difficult as getting paid a lot of money to get fit can be. It was strange, though, because my wife had bought this out-of-breath European and suddenly I was turning into all the men she had refused to go out with at college." Did she like the newly buffed-up version? "No, she hated it. I ended up putting on 16lb for the film and really I'm just a chain-smoking wreck." He does enthusiastically puff his way through the interview. Did he go and watch any of the pros? He groans. "That was another problem. I had these tapes of [Andre] Agassi's backhand and Leyton Hewitt's forehand slowed down and they became like pornography to me. "I'd be watching them and Jennifer would come in, and I would rush to the VCR to try to take the tape out in time. I'd be like, 'No, don't come in yet', and she'd say, 'Oh Paul, you're at it again.'" Has he given up his fitness regime now filming is over? "I still go to the gym because I can't face the idea of having to do it from scratch for another film. But," he says, and his eyes role skyward in gratitude, "I can eat cheese again." Cheese being a fairly modest addiction, it seems like a good moment to ask him about his reasonably low profile, despite some huge roles, a famous wife and some very famous friends, including Stellan Skarsgard (after whom his son is named) and Russell Crowe. He looks at me a little warily, presuming that we are about to enter into the section of the interview when I ask him what it was like to work with Crowe, who has a reputedly volcanic temper. "I'm only going to go to premieres if I'm in the film, or my wife is, or someone I really love. I mean, if you go to The Ivy - which has really great shepherd's pie - you will get photographed. We accept that. But other than that, we don't get bothered at all. As long as you're not one of those people who rings up and says, 'I'm sorry, do you know who I think I am?' then you don't deserve attention." He looks at me a little cautiously. Remembering that he has said that he fears that his life is becoming one long interview, and that if anyone asks him again what was it like working with Crowe, "I could answer, or I could head-butt a railway spike" I move on and ask him if he would like to work more with the Oscar-winning Connelly, with whom he co-starred, alongside Crowe, in A Beautiful Mind. He perks up immediately. "I'd love to. Really we've never worked together, because in A Beautiful Mind I was an imaginary character. We were in one scene together but she was pretending not to look at me. Of course, she was drawn to me." There follows one of the long pauses where you don't know if he's being serious, before he smiles, "I think." "Nobody has a problem with working with your wife in Europe. I mean, Monica Bellucci and her husband Vincent Cassel do it, but in the US they really come out gunning for you. They say, 'Yeah, we know you're happy - stop rubbing our faces in it.'" Perhaps if they played characters who didn't like each other? "Exactly. The only way is to do something where you really hate each other. Like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor did." He giggles. "But perhaps they're not the best example." And a final word on the film? "Well," he says, "I think that it can be said without doubt that it is the single greatest romantic-comedy tennis movie ever made. I think it's a genre of one, but it's right at the top of the heap, so we can feel completely self-assured about that". Paul Bettany seems to be assured of much more than that. ~~*~~ Jamie Portman for CanWest News Service, 17 Sep 2004 Bettany Courts Love Wimbledon, when Paul Bettany walked onto the legendary Centre Court of the hallowed tennis mecca clad in whites and carrying a racquet, and heard the roar of the crowd. "It was as close to how I imagined being a rock star feels," he says now. "You walk on and everybody is screaming your name." No matter that it was just another day of filming and that those weren't real fans in the bleachers. For Bettany, who was playing a fading British tennis star seeking to redeem himself at his final Wimbledon tournament, it was an exhilirating yet terrifying moment. "I sat down to take my racquet out and I remember thinking 'I'm so pleased that I don't actually have to play a match because I can't walk.' Literally my legs were like jelly." For Bettany, this was a watershed episode in the filming schedule, just as the movie itself is a watershed event in a meteoric career: After establishing a reputation in his native Britain as an outstanding young actor, equally at home on the stage and on the screen, laying further groundwork in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World", he is now being groomed by Hollywood as a major international star. But as the soft-spoken Bettany awaits today's release of "Wimbledon", a romantic comedy in which he and Kirsten Dunst play a couple of champion tennis players who fall in love, he keeps thinking back to the tough times - the times when he seemed to be going nowhere in life and the later times when his behaviour threatened to sabotage a fledgling acting career. He looks back on the young rebel who quit school as soon as he could, walked out of his Hertfordshire home with his guitar and tried to make a living as a busker on London's Westminster Bridge. That, he says now, was his "hardest time." He has graphic memories of sharing a flat with "two tiny lesbians" and several thousand cockroaches. "And then the lesbians did a runner and left me with the rent", he adds. He had some from a theatrical family - his parents and maternal grandmother were all actors - and he realizes now that his determination to be his own person blinded him to the fact he was destined for an acting career as well. It wasn't until he was 19 that Bettany enrolled at the London Drama Centre, where he was quickly spotted as a comer. When he graduated in 1993, he immediately found work in a hit stage revival of J.B. Priestly's classic thriller "An Inspector Calls". He was on his way and the acting opportunities began coming in thick and fast - a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company, his feature film debut as a persecuted homosexual in "Bent", and a critically acclaimed perfomance as Steerforth in an American TV cable version of "David Copperfield". But during the shooting of Copperfield, his life began spiralling out of control because of alcohol and drugs. He was thrown out of a luxury hotel for trashing his room. He got in trouble with airline authorities for playing football with a cushion on a flight. The moment of truth came when a diabetic friend collapsed in his flat. "She started having an attack. She was convulsing. And I found her insulin in her bag...and I just stabbed her with the insulin and she was fine within 10 seconds." But he had been terrified of seeking outside help. "I didn't call the ambulance because there were drugs everywhere. And I thought afterwards - I risked somebody's life. And that was the end." It's difficult to equate the quiet, reflective 33-year-old with the youthful hellraiser of the past. But he wants to make clear that this traumatic experience marked the moment when he started turning his life around. He concedes that compared to Lord Byron, his drug years were relatively brief. But "it was an intensive course." And now? "I'm 33 and seven years clean." Bettany has avoided shaking hands this morning because he's suffering from a bad cold. "I have children so it's sort of germ warfare at home," he says wryly. But the image he conveys is that of a contented man who's finding fulfilment in both life and career. He is married to actress Jennifer Connelly, and they and the two children have homes in both London and New York, with the latter city as their main base because his stepson attends school there. Like many acting couples, Bettany and Connelly try to balance their work commitments so that only one is doing a movie at a time. "That's the theory," says Bettany with a smile, "but it's open to negotiation because obviously if Jennifer had just worked and it was my turn and Martin Scorsese rang her up and said 'We're making a film tomorrow," I would obviously say, "Listen, this is too great an opportunity - you've got to go and do it." Still, when Connelly was recently filming "Dark Water" in Toronto, Bettany was content with "just being a dad." Now, it's his turn to start work on a new film, co-starring in a new thrilller with Harrison Ford called "The Wrong Element". It's the latest entry in a Hollywood career which has been going gangbusters ever since his award-winning protrayal of a comical (and frequently nude) Geoffrey Chaucer in "A Knight's Tale". There were further awards for his work as the imaginary roommate in "A Beautiful Mind" and his turn as the ship's surgeon in "Master and Commander". Wimbledon marks a new chapter for him because it is his first Hollywood lead role and his first romantic comedy. Yet he was more intimidated by the need to look believable on the tennis court than by the challenge of carrying a major studio film. "What was really daunting and sort of slightly ludicrous was that the director cast three people who couldn't play tennis - me, Kirsten Dunst and Austin Nichols - as his tennis stars," he laughs. There was the further fact that director Richard Loncraine "knows nothing about tennis." When Bettany accepted the role, he envisioned an idyllic stay in London with his family. "I'm sort of thinking - it will be fun, it will be a romantic comedy and I've never done one before and it will be a sort of paid vacation. But then six months of tennis training hove into view. It was a very different experience." Real-life Wimbledon champion Pat Cash had the task of turning Bettany, Dunst and Nichols into tennis player - of sorts. "It's all me," Bettany says proudly - with some help from digital technology. "This is how it was. When I'm serving the ball or anybody's serving a ball, it's a real ball. When I'm the only person in the frame or when there's one tennis player in the frame, they're hitting a real ball. When there are two tennis players on the screen at the same time, the ball becomes digital after the serve." The big studio offers are flowing in these days, but Bettany is being cautious. "A few years ago, I made three films a year. Now, that I'm married with a child, I can't have a life like that any more, and frankly I don't want one." But there still has to be time for risky movies like Lars Von Trier's thriller "Dogville" or the mystery, "The Reckoning". "I think to survive as an artist you have to make these kinds of movies. There are times in my life when the world is spinning so fast I feel I can't hold on any more. And then I read a poem or a book or see a play or a film or hear a song that gives me gravity again and I feel - all right, I am part of this common humanity and other people have feelings similar to mine." ~~*~~ Kelly Glover for Zap2it.com, 2 Sep 2004 Bettany Scores at 'Wimbledon' Paul Bettany is in great shape. The 6-foot-3 British actor definitely looks the part of a tennis pro, but the star has an definite aversion to working out. "I get into a gym and there's heavy things to lift and I go, 'I could do this or I could go home and read and book,' and I'm out of the gym like that," says the handsome blond. However, the star of the romantic sports comedy "Wimbledon" didn't get to play on center court without intense training. "Thankfully, Universal and Working Title paid this man called Mike Hood, who is this toughie from Flatbush Avenue who I was genuinely scared of, and he would say 'do it' and I would nod 'okay' and all the notion of reading books left," he tells Zap2it.com. The 33-year-old "Master and Commander" star plays the fictitional low-seeded tennis player, Peter Colt. When he is entered as a wild card contender to the world famous All-England Lawn Tennis Championships at Wimbledon, he meets tennis bad-girl, Lizzie Bradbury, played by Kirsten Dunst ("Spiderman") and his life and luck change. Dunst recalls Bettany's big day shooting on center court, "They were filming him [stepping] out and the actual Wimbledon crowd was there cheering him on. That's something that's lived in him his whole childhood," she says referring to the importance of the arena ingrained in English men. Preparation for Bettany's transformation from real life gym-o-phobe to tennis ace was not a simple task. The star spent six months training for the four-month shoot, during which time he fractured a rib. He says the only way he could deal with the schedule was to keep telling himself: "All I have to do is hit furry balls for 10 months and eat boiled chicken six times a day, for just 10 months, and then I can go back to not hitting furry balls and eating cheese." The training paid off and the star admits to working very hard on his serve with the 1987 Wimbledon Champion, Pat Cash, who worked as a tennis consultant on the film. "Pat Cash actually wanted to put me into a competition, a pro-amateur competition and I said 'No, f---ing way!' " reveals the star. "The whole notion is I'm able to fool myself that I've got the stuff to be a professional tennis player. I don't want to have it absolutely proved to me in black- and-white that 'No, you don't have the stuff, Paul, no.' " On another occasion Bettany practiced on a hotel tennis court and was approached by a high caliber amateur. "He finally came up to me and said 'I've been watching you serve and you look good. Do you want to have a set?' And I said, 'No, thank you, I've got a shoulder injury'." The cheeky star suggests he didn't have a shoulder injury at the time, explaining, "I went off because I knew my serve was s--- hot but I didn't really want to put anything to the test." The director, Richard Locraine ("Richard III") says that Paul has a lot of charisma but says he is not your obvious choice for a romantic lead. "He came to my house to meet and when you first see him you don't know whether he is going to embrace you or nut you," he says. Nevertheless, the actor was chosen for the part and the production waited a year to begin filming while Bettany completed shooting "Master and Commander. " On this occasion the actor's edgy side gives way to his typically English sense of humor. However, his role in this British romantic comedy, made by Working Title -- the same people that produced "Notting Hill," "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Love Actually" -- means there is already talk about the actor being considered the new Hugh Grant. The star says that the similarities probably end with the two of them being British, adding, "He's brilliant at being charming and doing that sort of elegant froth and I mean that in no sort of patronizing way." "I don't know what it feels like to be Hugh Grant so I have no frame of reference as to whether I'm becoming him," he laughs. "Maybe I am. My wife would be shocked -- or maybe pleased --who knows!" Bettany's wife is Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, whom he starred with in "A Beautiful Mind." The actor jests, "I did this really foolish thing of marrying a famous American and we sort of got together around her Oscar time." The couple has a one-year-old son together, which Bettany reveals has effected his communication in the adult world, saying it's difficult for him to speak "grown-up." For example, he recalls Connelly coming home after a particularly miserable day of filming "Dark Water" in Toronto. "I wanted to comfort her and I had the impulse to sing, 'The Wheels on the Bus go Round, Round, Round.'" However, the father of one admits he resisted, " I grabbed myself inwardly and tried to speak which is really difficult if you've been communicating with someone who is three-months-old at the time." Bettany's life has changed since his marriage to the actress in January 2003. He recalls being chased by five paparazzi and phoning a friend for advice. "They said, 'Well, look, it's very simple. If you don't mind getting photographed you can go out and, if you do, just stay indoors.' I went,'Those are my choices? Those are my two choices? I have to stay in?'" The star admits the situation is irritating and adds, "But, it's fine if I do go out on my own. I just get called 'naked guy' on occasion" (because of scenes in "A Knight's Tale.") With his rising popularity, the chances of Bettany getting stalked by paparazzi are higher, however the chances of him joining a gym remain the same, "It's an incredible thing actually. At the gym where we were working at the time there was this poster that said 'Think Less. Feel Better!' and I thought this is the most frightening sort of culture I'm now getting myself into, the gym culture 'Think less and feel better.'" "Wimbledon" is scheduled to be released Sept. 17 and also stars Sam Neill ("Jurassic Park") Jon Favreau ("Swingers") and Austin Nichols ("The Day After Tomorrow"). ~~*~~ Susan Mansfield for The Scotsman, 26th April 2004 My son, the actor Thane Bettany doesn’t really want to talk about himself. He wants to talk about his son. That would be Paul Bettany, the hot new Brit in Hollywood, the one who (some say) acted Russell Crowe off the screen in Master and Commander, the one who’s married to Jennifer Connelly, Oscar winner and A-list beauty. So when we meet at Dundee Rep, where Bettany senior is currently in rehearsals for Howard Barker’s play, Scenes from an Execution, he glosses over his own long and colourful career. Today, he’s not talking about dancing with Margot Fonteyn, or acting with John Gielgud, or being in a film with Roger Moore. He’s not even talking about being the godfather of Sophie, Countess of Wessex. He’s just being a doting dad. He does it well. He talks warmly, openly, without affectation. "I’m so proud of my son. As soon as the films come out on video, I say to people, ‘Haven’t you seen my son?’ Both he and Jennifer are on a roll. I can’t wait for Wimbledon [Paul’s latest film, about a tennis player, out in the summer]." "He and Jennifer presented me with a grandson, Stellan, on 5 August. They came over to Scotland to the Mull of Kintyre, and I went over and met my grandson. I’m hoping when this show is finished, I’ll be able to take a couple of weeks to fly over and spend time with them." But what about you, Thane? I want to hear about the first time you went to the ballet, aged 13, a boy with a terrible stammer. What was it like to realise, all in a rush, that here was a career you could attain without uttering a single word? A year later, you were in ballet school. A year after that at Sadler’s Wells under the tutelage of Nanette de Valois. Then, before you had time for so much as a jete in front of an audience, National Service took you into the Navy. I want to hear how, determined to keep secret from your fellow seamen that you were a ballet dancer, you volunteered for the watch in the dead of the night, sealed the massive iron locks into the ship’s hold and exercised daily using one of the ship’s warheads as a barre. After National Service, it was back to Sadler’s Wells and a debut at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Ultimately "difficulties" with Nanette de Valois took you away from the ballet to be a principal dancer in musicals. I want to hear about that night on stage in Edinburgh in the early 1950s when another dancer’s mistake caused you to dislocate your back. Despite dire predictions, swift action and osteopathy had you back on stage within three months. Perhaps realising after the accident that no dance career lasts forever, you went to learn mime at Charles Antonetti’s famous school in Paris. And there, in a school of silence, your stammer was cured. "Antonetti said to me, ‘Thane, how many mime artists can you think of who really make a living from mime?’" he recalls. "‘If you do what I tell you and stick to it, I’ll cure your stammer. I’m accepting you into the school, and from the end of this interview, don’t talk until I tell you to talk.’ "I thought he meant just during class. He didn’t. He said, ‘Don’t talk at all, unless you talk in your sleep. Either write it down or mime it, as your mime becomes proficient, use your mime.’ I did that for about seven or eight months. He made me learn the part of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet for his student’s show, so I could mime it. One night on stage, I was about a quarter of the way through the Queen Mab speech when a cry came from the circle, ‘Parle, Thane, parle!’ and I went straight into it. I’ve never stammered since." Back to England, then, to spear-carrying at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He played three seasons as Osric in Michael Redgrave’s Hamlet, and understudied Ferdinand in Peter Brook’s production of The Tempest, which starred John Gielgud. When it transferred to the West End, he took over the part. Brook redirected the scenes for him: "He wanted it to be my Ferdinand, not a copy of someone else’s". He played Hamlet on a tour of Australia, and he started to get parts in films, Fire Down Below with Robert Mitchum (1957), Richard III, which was directed by Laurence Olivier (1958). In the 1980s, he was back in film, making North Sea Hijack with Roger Moore and James Mason, and making a cult appearance in the Dr Who episode, State of Decay. But it was a tough life, peppered with periods of unemployment. The needs of a growing family meant that he turned to teaching for a while. Did he, as a seasoned actor, try to put his son off a career treading the boards? "No. If he wanted to be an actor, that was a wonderful thing. But I made sure he knew the pitfalls. I told him, ‘You’ll find you have months when you’re out of work’ - and of course he’s hardly had one!" No, Paul didn’t get the clouds, just the silver linings. He walked out of drama school straight into Stephen Daldry’s West End production of An Inspector Calls. After rave reviews, Daldry offered him a ten-month tour with the company to Australia and the US. To his father’s consternation, he said no. "Had I been faced with that offer, I’d have done the tour. He turned it down and didn’t know where the next job was coming from. I was just amazed at a boy of his age turning down that job, but he said, ‘No, if I go on that tour, by the time I get back, they’ll have forgotten me’. And he was right. Instead, within three weeks he was asked to Stratford, three very nice parts, from there into telly, from telly into films. He never looked back." Paul’s career built gradually, through low-budget and independent films, until he appeared fully fledged in Hollywood in A Knight’s Tale, A Beautiful Mind (where he met Connelly), Master and Commander, and recently Dogville with Nicole Kidman. Does it not rankle, just the tiniest bit, that it has been so easy for him? "Not one bit, I’m just so proud. To be a top actor, you need a hell of a lot of talent, but you need a hell of a lot of luck as well. Paul somehow attracts luck to him. He’s a wonderfully photogenic boy, and a fine, fine talent - and he’s played his cards brilliantly. I don’t think it’s biased to say that in a Knight’s Tale he acted everyone else off the film. In Master and Commander, he gave an extraordinary performance, so subtle. Crowe’s fine in it, but Paul’s doctor is just so well constructed." And, bang, we’re back in the rose-tinted world of Paul and Jennifer. "Jennifer is filming in Toronto at the moment. Beautiful girl, beautiful person too. Paul is looking after the baby and making the coffee in the trailer. He says it’s really quite fun being a coffee boy, not having the responsibility of a leading role. He loves being a daddy, he doesn’t mind changing nappies a bit." However, can Bettany senior be deflected long enough from his grandson’s nappies to talk about his royal connections? How did he become the godfather to the wife of Prince Edward? He explains how his family got to know the Rhys-Joneses when both families lived in Northern Borneo, how his widowed father married Pat Rhys-Jones and he became step-brother to Chris, Sophie’s father. "To cement things really, I was asked to be her godfather, never dreaming when I was holding her at the font that one day I would be at Windsor seeing her marry into Royalty. I wasn’t so much invited to the wedding, it was by royal command. If something had happened to Chris that day, I would have been going down the aisle with her. "I was doing The Importance of Being Earnest at Chichester Festival Theatre at the time. They didn’t like it, me having to go off. I had to take the letter in and show them, ‘It’s not an invitation, it’s a royal command from the Queen!’ I was delighted for her, sweet girl, sweet woman. I chat to her, see her sometimes. But I’m proudest of my son." But while Bettany junior is in a trailer somewhere in Canada making coffee for his A-list wife, what of Bettany senior? He lives a peaceful life in Cupar, Fife, in a state which he refers to as "semi-retirement". He works when he wants to and he dotes on his daughter, Sarah, who lives in Cornwall, and gave him his first grandchild, eight-year-old Emaly. There have been hard times. He divorced in 1993 and now lives with his partner, Andy Little. At least one unscrupulous journalist took advantage of his open nature to play on the tensions between his sexual orientation and his royal connections. But he has reached a good place in life. The sheen of paternal pride seems to mask a glow of deeper contentment. These days, he cherry-picks work that takes his fancy. He chose Scenes From an Execution at the Rep, just as he chose Twelfth Night last year, and the year before, The Duchess of Malfi. This year, he has chosen to do an interview for a Festival production at the Traverse. It’s a good place for an actor to be. It might be the son who’s edging his way on to Hollywood’s A-list, but Bettany senior also has things of which he should be proud. ~~*~~ Ed Potton for The Times, 10th April 2004 Not just a beautiful mind From Chaucer to Wimbledon, via the high seas, Paul Bettany has become the blue-eyed boy of British cinema, says Ed Potton Paul Bettany has just finished an unforgiving day of interviews and he’s at a precarious stage. Britain’s most compelling young actor has been asked most questions several times, so some topics will be given short shrift. But the publicity grind has also worn down his defences, which is sometimes when the juicy stuff gets said. Bettany makes two requests before we start to talk. The first is for a martini. The second is for a headache tablet. This could go either way. I’m not alone in my uncertainty. When Bettany asked Richard Loncraine why he had cast him as a faded tennis player in the forthcoming Wimbledon, the director replied: "Because I was worried about whether you were going to cuddle me or punch me." Loncraine’s conflicting image of the 32-year-old was based on a gallery of memorable screen creations whose only common trait is that they are all tall, angular and blond. He first appeared as a magnificently inept William of Orange in the television movie Sharpe’s Waterloo (1997), effortlessly eclipsing Sean Bean. He was a worryingly believable underworld psycho in Gangster No. 1 (2000); a naked, ranting Geoffrey Chaucer — a part written specifically for him — in A Knight’s Tale (2001); and the affable confidant of Russell Crowe’s mathematician in A Beautiful Mind (2001). Not for him some well-thought-out blueprint for stardom. "I just do the films that I want to do." There is little doubt, though, that he treads the tightrope between artistic credibility and commercial viability more surefootedly than most, as his last two films — Peter Weir’s Napoleonic blockbuster Master and Commander (again opposite Crowe) and Lars von Trier’s anti-populist Dogville — would suggest. But he admits to dreading the conversation about the balance between art and commerce, “Because I think you’re on the road to sucking Satan’s c*** if you start having that discussion.” He then spoils his noble sentiments by adding: “I pay people vast sums to worry about that kind of thing. When I die they’ll get 10 per cent of my ashes.” His accountant apparently had kittens when he told him he was appearing in Dogville, a revisionist Depression-era tale with no sets and an almost total reliance on improvisation. If Bettany is an unpredictable customer, he’s Ken Barlow in comparison to von Trier. “He’s convinced that he’s a genius and he’s probably right,” he says matter-of-factly of the maverick director. Von Trier is also infamous for pushing his female stars to the brink of insanity. How would Bettany feel if his wife — the Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, with whom he starred in A Beautiful Mind — appeared in one of his films? He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “I think he treats pretty much everybody quite badly. I don’t think he discriminates on gender grounds. He can be a very cruel man but he’s cruellest to himself.” In Dogville, Bettany portrayed a kindly but priggish writer who ends up being shot. “Lars told me it’s the bits of him that he wants to kill off.” If that all sounds a bit morbid, then, says Bettany, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. “You have to understand that Lars von Trier is convinced that he has never made a serious movie, and that all his films are comedies.” A similarly disarming contrariness — the outwardly serious underpinned by a wicked, unconventional sense of fun — is at the heart of Bettany’s appeal. His characters in A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander and Dogville all satisfy on a standard dramatic level. But it’s the twinkle in the blue-eyed stare that marks him out from his less talented peers. And, presumably, attracted the attention of Jennifer Connelly. The perfect pair, who married in 2003, divide their time between her native New York and London, where he was born into an acting family (his father, Thane, is still on the stage). They live with Connelly’s five-year-old son from a previous relationship and their eight-month-old baby boy, whom they named Stellan after Stellan Skarsgård, Bettany’s fellow Dogville star and bon viveur. He says he and Skarsgård hit it off because “we’re both really good at drinking,” and he speaks warmly of his chaotic brood of children and encyclopaedic knowledge of wine. “He’s about embracing life and that’s really heady to be around.” When the conversation turns back to his day job, however, the response is down-to-earth. Any chemistry he displayed with Crowe, another friend, is “all nonsense, it’s all in the editing,” he says, adding that “acting is a lot like sex in that it’s really fun to do, but slightly embarrassing to talk about afterwards”. He can list the practical ways in which he prepares for a role: before playing the aloof surgeon in Master and Commander, he learnt medical procedures at the Royal College of Surgeons and rented a house miles from the rest of the cast for solitude. “But the cerebral stuff is more difficult to talk about because it often happens when you’re having a poo.” There was limited time for toilet seat epiphanies on the set of Wimbledon, in which Bettany was cast as a romantic lead after a string of eye-catching supporting roles. “The reason they were eye-catching is that I had lots of time off to go to sleep,” he says with a smile. “The poor leading actor gets about four hours’ sleep a night.” Not that he’s complaining about his choice of profession. “The column inches given to actors talking about starving themselves make me want to put a railway spike through my head,” he sighs. “Not to dismiss it and say it isn’t difficult. It’s just not as arduous as people like to make out.” Right on cue, not one, but three martinis arrive at the table. “I love showbiz!” he grins, reaching for the first. The headache, it seems, has vanished. ~~*~~ Roger Moore for The Orlando Sentinel, 25th Mar 2004 Bettany's film reckoning takes him to varied roles Paul Bettany's been out of the country and a little out of touch. He's in Toronto, "the coldest place on earth," because "the wife's making a film" and he has the job of looking after their 14-month-old son. And he has just received some rather distressing news. "What's this I hear about there being a new Dawn of the Dead, then, eh?" The lanky 6-foot, 3-inch Brit with a soft manner is "a guy who wears his heart on his sleeve when he's acting," as his friend and director Paul McGuigan (Gangster No. 1 and The Reckoning) describes him. And, heart on sleeve, Bettany is plainly peeved that he has missed his chance. "Coulda seen myself as a zombie, really. Couldn't you?" Well, yeah. It's not just his corpselike complexion. The guy has played a psychotic, a figment of an unbalanced mathematician's imagination, a seasick naval surgeon, a couple of unfaithful lovers and a wisecrack-spouting version of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Why not the living dead? He's in two films winding their way through limited release -- The Reckoning, which opens Friday, and Dogville -- three if you count the last days in theaters of his award-winning Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. In them, he's an adulterous 14th-century priest, a spineless 1930s small-towner romancing gang moll Nicole Kidman, and the scientist, surgeon and man of hidden mettle Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander. "I like the fact that [director] Ang Lee can make a Western, then a kung fu movie, then a '70s psychodrama and then a costume drama, then a monster movie. I think actors should try for that, too." For instance, Bettany, 32, had his first big chance when, after playing a convincing psychotic in Gangster No. 1, he was offered the psycho-killer role of "The Tooth Fairy" in Red Dragon, the prequel to The Silence of the Lambs. "I had this psycho thing figured," he says, remembering Gangster. "Everyone wants to be good at something, and he's good at being cruel to people... If you happen to be really good at hurting people, it must be a massive frustration to you when you can't do it. Thus, he's psychotic." But if he had taken the role -- Ralph Fiennes eventually played the Tooth Fairy -- "I'd have been relegated to being Henchman No. 3 in Die Hard VIII or something, which is what they do with too many actors with foreign accents. I wanted to try a little of everything." He was the saucy comic relief in the Heath Ledger jousting-knights sports movie, A Knight's Tale, the man torn between Helena Bonham Carter and Olivia Williams in The Heart of Me, Russell Crowe's imaginary loopy roommate in A Beautiful Mind and his nautical pal in Master and Commander. "And I've just done this tennis thing, a comedy, really, Wimbledon. Trained and trained for it, in New York and London. Yes, I know the best training is in Florida. But my wife wouldn't let me go." He laughs. For such a quiet-voiced chap, Bettany has an explosive laugh and a ready wit. If your wife were the stunning Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly, you'd let her tell you where to train, too. Bettany seems to choose his roles based on personal connections rather than career savvy or diversifying his acting portfolio. For instance, he took on the experimental Dogville, which director Lars von Trier shot on a soundstage, sans sets, in Sweden, "because [actor] Stellan Skarsgard is a friend, and he told me I had to do it." How good a friend? His and Connelly's son is named Stellan. But Bettany might not be taking any future career advice from the actor he met on the set of 2000's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. The reviews have been mixed to OK, and the film was an award winner at Cannes. But Bettany isn't sold. "Lars makes some films I absolutely loathe, and some I adore," Bettany says of Dogville's director. "But that was a strange, oppressive set. No conversation about the film at all. We'd just go back to our cells at night. It's like being in a secular prison." Or a monastery? "Oh, yes, I've done that, too," Bettany says, laughing. It was all part of his research for The Reckoning, in which he plays a 14th-century monastery-trained priest who commits adultery, flees his parish and takes up with a traveling troupe of actors. "I went to a monastery and got so freaked out, I left the first evening I was there," he says. "Men who wore robes and sandals with socks, who had never raised their voice, except in song. It's like waking up and finding yourself Amish! I found the whole thing very frightening, that commitment and complete separation from the world. " Not unlike his character's test in the movie. As Nicholas, Bettany is a man of weak soul and weaker commitment. But when he and his troupe come to a village where a mute woman has been unjustly accused of witchcraft and murder, they take up her cause and stage a play aimed at rooting out the real killer. Nicholas thinks he has found a route for redemption. "The hardest thing in this was getting my mind around the idea that a person excommunicated from the church was basically removed from the society. Hard to understand that, today." The Reckoning is earning mixed early reviews, with many, including Newsday's Gene Seymour, praising the production design and the commitment of the actors, but not the plot's payoff. "The actors, when we cast this, thought of this movie as a big responsibility," says McGuigan. "They brought this reverence about the birth of the modern theater to it." Bettany's run of movies is at an end until Wimbledon reaches theaters this September. But he has his hopes. His year of working on -- and months of talking about -- Master and Commander have him dreaming of a sequel to the $150 million Napoleonic sea epic. But like director Peter Weir and star Russell Crowe, he's not expecting it to happen. "Would love to do it, just love it, but it was so expensive," he says. The film is not yet in the black. "What a wonderful character. But I suppose I'll have to find something else to keep me busy. "Besides baby-sitting, I mean." ~~*~~ Bob Strauss for The San Bernardino Sun, 20th Mar 2004 Paul Bettany, unleashed Paul Bettany stands out. And not just because the 6-foot-3-inch, pale blond Englishman can be spotted instantly in a crowd. In just a handful of films, the 32-year-old actor has turned supporting parts into a distinctive body of work. There was his often-naked Chaucer in "A Knight's Tale", Russell Crowe's imagined roommate in "A Beautiful Mind," Crowe's cerebral seagoing buddy in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" and, in the current release "The Reckoning", a morally complex and compromised 14th-century priest. And then there's that other standout performance of Bettany's: marrying Oscar-winning "Mind" beauty Jennifer Connelly. Impressive as all of this has been, it almost feels like prologue to Bettany's latest screen effort in Lars von Trier's three-hour, experimental extravaganza, "Dogville". The love-him-or-hate-him Danish director ("Dancer in the Dark", "Breaking the Waves") shot his parable of small-town small-mindedness on a single soundstage in Sweden. Except for some furniture and a few, two-dimensional facades, the buildings of the title Colorado hamlet were identified by chalk marks on the floor. Bettany and an ensemble that includes Nicole Kidman, Lauren Bacall, Patricia Clarkson, Ben Gazzara and Chloe Sevigny play out a Depression-era passion play, in which Kidman's stranger-on-the-run, Grace, is first welcomed and sheltered by the village folk, then exploited by them in the most unconscionable ways. Bettany is Tom Edison Jr., Dogville's self-appointed town ethicist and intellectual. It is he who speaks most fervently for Grace's cause, obviously falls in love with her and ultimately betrays her in a manner no less dreadful than his more overtly bestial neighbors. "I think the character represents the part of Lars von Trier that Lars von Trier hates of himself", reckons Bettany, phoning from Toronto where his wife is shooting a horror movie and he's baby-sitting their 7-month-old son. "He's a coward. He's this 20-year-old virgin who thinks of himself as a philosopher and a writer, and he's never actually written anything nor thought too deeply about anything. But if anybody's honest with themselves ... I mean, there's a bit of me in him, that kind of feeling so certain about things to the point of faith-shaking arrogance. He's a fool, a clown, really. But we're all hoping to be sort of more than we are." Bettany makes quite a bit of Tom. For all of its stylized artifice, "Dogville" rests on some of the most natural, subtlety-rich acting to hit the screen in ages, especially during Bettany and Kidman's closely framed dialogue exchanges. But the actor gives credit to his director for the results, not anything he thought up on his own. Take five ... hundred Operating a handheld, high-definition video camera, von Trier made the actors do the same scene over and over for the length of a day, without the usual breaks for lighting and setups. He later crafted their performances out of the resulting 10 to 12 hours' worth of takes in the editing room. "By the end of the day, you've done a scene every way imaginable", Bettany explains. "He's been going, 'Shout it! Shout it! Now do it quietly!' And that's what you do, all day long, so you don't give a performance. The consequence is, he's taken every take of people going, 'Hi, how are ya?' for an hour. But what's brilliant about it is that, when the real drama kicks off, you've invested so much time in just boring into infinitesimal details of these people's lives that it explodes with such ferocity." Bettany's refusal to take credit for his own talent is complemented by an ever-ready, self-mocking wit. That didn't prevent him from being terrified through most of the grueling production, though. "It's all on you", he notes. "You're like, 'Oh God, I've got to be really interesting now.' Behind us should be the Rocky Mountains, and that would be really beautiful to look at. But the Rocky Mountains aren't there. It's just my face; it's slightly stressful." Apparently, Bettany displays few signs of said stress. "He is a funny, tall, geeky guy," says Paul McGuigan, who gave Bettany his first major film role as the frightening "Gangster No. 1" and also directed "The Reckoning". "He's more like Chaucer than he is Gangster No. 1, that's for sure. If you look at his work, he's ranged from comedy to high drama and to very dark drama as well. Paul, like any good actor, is interested in other characters. And as a man, he's like that as well. He's interested in everybody and what they do, far more so than what he does. I can assure you that he does take his work quite seriously, but he's shy of the fact." Repeat co-star Russell Crowe, a man of strict judgments, echoes those sentiments. "Working with Paul is very easy", Crowe comments. "Paul has a long history of performing and we share some common ground, mainly in that we have both busked on the streets for a living at one point in our lives when we had no other way of making money. I think that if you ever really got down to those brass tacks, it's something that you do remember. And just who he is; he has an urbane and flowing wit, which makes him a wonderful companion." Yes, as a teenager, Bettany sang and played music on the streets and bridges of London. The son of a teacher-turned-actor, he eventually found his way into the city's prestigious Drama Centre school, and clocked a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. "Yeah, people often come out and pick up tramps", he says of his glamorous, singing-for-coins days. "No, it wasn't a good way to meet girls. Being a movie star is much better than being poor." State of the nation Disarming as he is, Bettany possesses his own strict judgments. Asked about the political implications of "Dogville" -- Von Trier alternately confirms and denies that it's a specific critique of U.S. culture, and some critics have been outraged by its perceived anti-Americanism -- the actor expressed strong opposition to the Iraq war. "The whole way through making the movie, Lars would tell us it was set on the moon," Bettany says. "I think it is about an isolated community. America was sort of born out of a sense of isolationism, which it needed to have in order to separate itself from Europe, and rightly so. But I think a sense of isolationism is quite a dangerous thing when you are then, years down the line, the most powerful nation in the world." Weighty ponderings, Bettany is relieved to note, have nothing to do with his next film, "Wimbledon", a romantic comedy set in the professional tennis world and co-starring Kirsten Dunst. Weight-training, he says, precluded any possibility of that. "I was going, 'Lovely, romantic comedy'", he initially thought. "It'll be brilliant, I won't have to do the months of research that I usually do. And then six months of tennis training came into view. And going to the gym, which is something I'd never done and is, frankly, absurd. An edifying thought might come to you if you're doing something as simple as washing up. If you're lifting something heavy, nothing comes to your mind except, 'Let this be over, let this be over, let this be over.'" "Wimbledon' was filmed last summer and opens in the fall. As for what's next, "I don't know. I'm sitting back watching my toenails grow and playing with the baby, which is fabulous." Whatever the next one will be, don't expect to see Connelly in it. "In Europe, Vincent Cassel can work with Monica Bellucci and nobody thinks about it", he observes regarding married couples acting on screen. "But over here, people sort of go gunning for you if you're in a film together. I don't know where it comes from; I think people have the sort of attitude of, 'Oh God, don't rub your happiness in our faces.' I think the only way to do it is on the Burton-Taylor model, make a film where you just loathe each other like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' So if something like that came along, yeah." Joker. But one who knows he's incredibly lucky, so early in his career, to have made such a strong impression. "I'm surprised that I'm allowed to do lots of different things, which has always been my desire", Bettany says. "It's a very boring job if you just do the same thing all the time. Imagine how tedious it would be if you had to interview me endlessly. I feel really blessed." ~~*~~ Judy Abel for The Boston Globe, 7th Mar 2004 Bringing up Bettany With roles in three upcoming movies, a famous wife, nice suits, and a bright future, he leaves behind the life of a struggling actor - but not its doubts Paul Bettany has everything a man could want: fame, a measure of wealth, a beautiful wife, and an infant son he adores. But somehow he has a hard time celebrating it all. "Everything is a double-edged sword if you're a glass-half-empty kind of guy," says Bettany, who stars with Willem Dafoe in "The Reckoning," which opens in Boston on Friday. "And let's face it, the glass is half-empty." As his star rises, Bettany says he feels increasingly haunted by doubts and finds himself second-guessing his career decisions. "All choice is loss, and I tend to mourn the path that I didn't travel," says the 32-year-old London-born actor. "If I'm choosing between two parts, I wonder if I've chosen the right one. And at a restaurant, I always want what the person next to me is having." After his appearances in the 2000 film "Gangster No. 1" and "A Knight's Tale" the following year, doors began to open for Bettany. "Gangster No. 1" was directed by Paul McGuigan, who also directed "The Reckoning." It was partly the opportunity to work with McGuigan again that drew him to the new film, which is based on Barry Unsworth's novel "Morality Play." Bettany plays a 14th-century priest on the run who joins a troupe of traveling actors and there encounters murder. "Another reason I made the film was that I decided to do it at a time when I didn't have as many choices as I do now. The truth is, your mortgage tends to play a big part in decision making," he says. Both Bettany and his mortgage holder can probably breathe easy, because he seems to have made the transition from struggling actor to star. He recently played a supporting role in "Master and Commander," his second film with Russell Crowe. In "A Beautiful Mind," Bettany played the imaginary roommate who dogged schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, played by Crowe. In fact, it was on the set of "A Beautiful Mind" that Bettany met his future wife, Jennifer Connelly. Now the two, who divide their time between homes in New York and London, are a couple who turn heads and attract attention wherever they go. "It's difficult sometimes," Bettany says, apparently unable to successfully divert his mind's eye from that half-empty glass. "We bought a house and we couldn't buy furniture because we couldn't go to the store without people photographing us. Don't people have better things to do?" Quickly, however, Bettany reminds himself that the alternative would be obscurity - the very thing he was determined to leave behind when, as a young man growing up in suburban Hertfordshire, he decided to be an actor. "I try to stop myself and really appreciate things," he says. "I can get too mixed up with the whole 'we can't even buy furniture' thing and not appreciate how extraordinarily fortunate I've been." In an effort to keep balance in their lives, Bettany and Connelly say they will try to alternate their filming schedules so that one of them will be able to care for their son, Stellan, full time. And if Bettany has his way, Stellan will be the first of a brood that will undoubtedly make demands on the couple's time. "I would like to set up a factory and just have babies all the time," he says. "Babies are marvelous. Babies are where it's at. That's why you've got to keep having them - so you've always got one that's not at the 'I hate you, Dad' stage. I'm entirely dogmatic about this. We came out of the delivery room, and I said, 'Let's do it again.' " He acknowledges that creating a "baby factory" might be a little taxing for Connelly, who actually bears the children. "But in my defense, I have told her that if I could have a womb I would do it for her, but I can't," he says. Immediately he chides himself for this comment. "Talk is damn cheap," he says, shaking his head. Bettany's role model for child rearing is Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, after whom his son is named. He and Bettany appeared together in 2000's "Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang)" and star in Lars Von Trier's latest film, "Dogville," which opens in Boston April 9. "I haven't discovered how many children Stellan Skarsgard has - it does seem to be an untold number," Bettany explains. "He's spent his life acting and traveling around the world with them, and they're just delightful. He's an amazing human being, and he's all about living life well." There will certainly be more niceties and trimmings for Bettany and Connelly's kids than there were for Bettany when he was growing up. His father, once an actor, was a teacher, and his mother a secretary. Before he began drama school, Bettany earned money as a busker, a period of his life he looks back at with some degree of bitterness. "It was a repulsive time," he says. "I have no romance about it at all - I was a vagrant with a guitar." Perhaps because he's spent time as a "have-not," Bettany says he loves being in a position to spend money relatively freely. While filming "A Beautiful Mind," he says, he spent time a good deal of time in New York and, for the first time, didn't feel like the city's hot spots were off limits to him. "It's a very different city when you've got money," he says. "It's a great city if you've got cash. It's absolutely appalling if you don't." Another perk of wealth is being able to afford good clothes. "I wash up nicely," says Bettany. "I wear a nice suit. I don't like bad suits - I hate them." And Bettany's looking better in a suit these days than he used to. He recently finished filming "Wimbledon," a romantic comedy costarring Kirsten Dunst, slated to open in September. While preparing for the movie, Bettany spent six months working out in an effort to look the part of a professional tennis player. Now that the filming is over, Bettany says he continues to stay in shape, though he finds the process "quite tiresome." "The problem is that exercise makes you ignorant," he says. "If you're washing up at the sink, you can have an interesting thought. If you're lifting something above your head, you're just thinking, 'When will this end?'" What's more, Bettany believes there's a conspiracy in society to make people believe exercise is good for their bodies and souls. "You know people lie and they say, 'I do it because it's meditative,'" he says. "Well, they're lying. Otherwise Tibet would be full of temples with statues in them of men on treadmills. Well, it's not. It's not. It's full of statues of slightly rotund men sitting down." ~~*~~ Lynn Smith for The Chicago Tribune English actor Paul Bettany finds, for him, it's 'Carry on, doctor' During filming of the swashbuckler "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," English actor Paul Bettany lived alone in a rented house, far from the others. He shrugged off "boot camp," pre-filming training exercises where cast members learned to fight, row and climb the rigging of an early 19th Century frigate. When Russell Crowe, who stars as the ebullient ship's captain, asked the actors to sew their characters' names onto T-shirts colored according to rank (an exercise in following captain's orders), Bettany showed up in his own clothes. A versatile actor hitting his stride, Bettany's standoffishness had a purpose. Just as the others were fueling their performances as 1805 sailors dedicated to God, service and Crowe's Capt. Jack Aubrey, Bettany was fueling his as Dr. Stephen Maturin, the ship's surgeon who stands apart from their authoritarian world. "Russell, to his credit, congratulated me," Bettany says. "He's a mate." Bettany dyed his white-blond hair and brushed it forward in a Napoleon-era cut, wore early 19th Century spectacles and learned about pre-Darwinian medicine, religious thought and the cello. All this was key to making audiences engage with the historical saga, based on Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels, set on the high seas during the Napoleonic wars, says Australian director Peter Weir. It is Bettany's and Weir's first action/adventure film, though Bettany calls it "an action movie where the two leads play the cello and the violin together." Coming from the theater and small European films, Bettany, 32, is probably best known to U.S. audiences as Crowe's roommate in "A Beautiful Mind" (2001). He's been character actor and leading man, but he's not your typical matinee idol. Tall and skinny, his physical appeal varies with the roles he inhabits. His roles have tended to the offbeat, ranging from the lead psychopathic killer in "Gangster No. 1" (2000) to a Monty Pythonesque Geoffrey Chaucer in "A Knight's Tale" (2001) to a loving-but-unfaithful husband in "The Heart of Me" (2003). In "Master and Commander," he and Crowe pair again as the complicated and unlikely friends Maturin and Aubrey. Weir calls Maturin "the shape of modern man," a curious man of reason one could meet today while Aubrey, a wise warrior driven by absolutes, is a man of his time, a type headed for history's dustbin. The dramatic plot--the French and British warships trying to outwit one another on the high seas--is intensified by the competing obsessions of the longtime friends who confront their differences ferociously. "What's lovely is they both have objectives that are huge for them and conflict with each other. Then, their relationship has a history. [Aubrey] feels promised things, [Maturin] feels betrayed." Casting Bettany opposite Crowe seemed "too obvious" at first, Weir says. "I thought I should have a fresh kind of combination of Russell with somebody else." What's more, a literally authentic portrayal of Maturin, whom O'Brian described as small, would rule him out. Few actors today can go toe to toe with the powerful star presence of Crowe, who tends to dominate the screen, Weir says. After what Bettany describes as endless readings and auditions, Weir concluded Bettany was most like O'Brian's Maturin because he was "somebody I could spend two years at sea with and not run out of things to talk about. Paul did hold the screen, which is essential for the story about their relationship and friendship." The actors had already developed a friendship on the set of "A Beautiful Mind"--bonding, Bettany says, over their common interests in music, Peter Cook imitations, foul language and good claret. (Bettany also met his wife, actress Jennifer Connelly, on the set. They married in January after he finished filming "Master and Commander.") "I trust Russell and he trusts me," Bettany says. "If you're working with someone you don't know and don't trust, you're worried about their ego being damaged. He and I felt completely safe and to say, `No, I think that's crap,' knowing neither one of us would be hurt by frankness and openness of our discussions. You don't have to have a discussion where you say, `Should we be pushing it in another way? I wonder if your character would do that?'" Rather than a film about a friendship, however, director Weir (who won acclaim with his early films, 1975's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" and 1981's "Gallipoli") says that "Master and Commander" is more about "a world in which we learn about a friendship." Well known for setting stories in enclosed worlds ("Witness," "Dead Poets Society," "The Truman Show"), Weir, who co-wrote the script with John Collee, piled on historically and geographically accurate detail--from using a 20th Century replica of an 1800s British Royal Navy ship to real stormy sea shots from Cape Horn and makeup to simulate the crew's tar-stained fingernails and toenails. Most of the cast is British or Canadian, many of them sailors with experience on tall ships. Weir also looked in Poland for "18th Century faces" that reflected the diet and sober yet uncynical spirit of the times. Following the custom of the time, some crew members are African and Malaysian, some are young boys. Although some fans of the novels might be disappointed, Weir felt no need to explain how Aubrey and Maturin first met (at a concert where the noisy sailor annoyed the surgeon) or that Maturin is also a spy and assassin. Bettany claims he has few of Maturin's enormous personal resources. "He could be put in solitary confinement for 10 years and be pretty much the same when he came out. I would be absolutely spare (crazy)." To learn how he moved and thought, he studied with historians at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and Scripps Institute of Oceanographic Study. Interestingly, Bettany says he understood Maturin best from watching old interviews with author O'Brian. "There's a commonly held belief that the character he identified most with was Stephen Maturin, that (the novels were) semiautobiographical." Bettany, the son of a teacher and a secretary, both of whom had experience as performers, says acting can be a waste of time unless he is learning something new. Other crew members say he was known on location as serious, curious, self-deprecating, funny and undemanding. Weir says Crowe and Bettany worked hard to apply their common musical interests to their characters' interest in violin and cello--with mixed results. Even after seven months of practice to learn four classical pieces, Bettany admits, "we sounded like two people trying to kill wounded animals." When they filmed the duets, Weir says he played the professionals' recording used in the film as background so the actors couldn't hear themselves In the end, Bettany says all the work paid off. When he saw the film for the first time recently, he was pleased with his performance. But he denies that the high-profile role means he's gone Hollywood. "It's far too hot for me out there," he says. "I like cappuccinos and scarves." More diplomatically, he says, "I love an epic movie. It's what Hollywood does amazingly well. In England, we don't have the money to blow [stuff] up in the same way." It's the variety of roles that makes acting fun, he says. He appears soon in Lars von Trier's "Dogville" with Nicole Kidman and has just finished filming a comedy, "Wimbledon," in which he stars with Kirsten Dunst. Next year, he'll co-star with Willem Dafoe in "The Reckoning" as a 14th Century priest. Now making a home in New York with Connelly, he's "gainfully unemployed," enjoying being a new father to his 2-month-old son, Stellan. ~~*~~ Jenelle Riley for Back Stage West, 3rd Mar 2004 Outside the Box Before BSW spoke with Paul Bettany, the charismatic and chameleonic English actor, someone at his management company told us, "Whatever you do, don't ask him about the lesbians and the cockroaches." If ever there was a story that needed to be heard, this surely had to be it. But when he hears this, Bettany only laughs. "My management is probably just bored of hearing that story," he says. "There isn't really a story; it was a passing comment I made once. When I started out, I was living with the two smallest lesbians and five cockroaches. Everybody loves it because it's one of those really easy things to put up in bold print at the top of the article." These days, there's a lot more to talk about than his humble beginnings. There's his on-screen work, for example. After years of working in European television and films, Bettany made a memorable first impression on American audiences by walking on-screen completely nude as a drunken Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale, an anachronism-riddled jousting film. His saucy Chaucer introduced what would become a Bettany staple over the years: the brazen intellectual with a penchant for passionate speech. The actor went on to sharpen this image in the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, where his quiet introspection was the perfect foil to Russell Crowe's physically mannered performance. Last year Bettany teamed again with Crowe in the spectacular sea epic Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, in which he played a ship surgeon during the Napoleonic Wars. With his understated naturalism, he was a comforting port in a storm of shouting and explosions. The actor was nominated for the BAFTA--his country's version of the Academy Award, for which he was surprisingly overlooked. But it was only part of a spectacular year for Bettany, who also married his Beautiful Mind co-star Jennifer Connelly and became the proud father of their new son, Stellan. This month he will be seen in two new movies. First up is the period drama The Reckoning, opening in limited release this week. Co-starring Willem Dafoe and Brian Cox, the film tells the story of a 14th century theatre troupe that stumbles into a small village where a woman is wrongly convicted of murder. By staging her story, the actors begin to unravel a mystery that has darkened the town for years. Bettany is excellent as a fallen priest who nonetheless urges his companions to risk their lives in search of what is the truth. Next up is Dogville, the controversial Lars von Trier film in which he romances a mysterious Nicole Kidman in a tiny Depression-era Colorado town. Much has been made of Dogville's filming on a bare sound stage, with only chalk outlines and a few set pieces to indicate location. But such choices only call more attention to the superior acting--particularly by Bettany in his first role as an American. He will appear later this year opposite Kirsten Dunst in the romantic comedy Wimbledon. In a frank and expletive-ridden interview, Bettany spoke with Back Stage West about dealing with directors, American accents, and not being a casting director's first choice. Back Stage West: It has been said you come from a theatrical background. Did your family encourage you to become an actor? Paul Bettany: When I was growing up, my dad was a teacher and my mom was a secretary. My mom had been a singer, and my dad was a ballet dancer. My grandfather on my mother's side was a pianist, and my grandmother was a singer. So I think it's fair to say it was a theatrical family, just not when I was growing up. Yes, I suppose they were encouraging. They weren't pushy. If you work with a kid in a movie, you can meet some really pushy parents. My father insisted I didn't go to a stage school; he wanted me to get a proper education. I think he would have been pleased if I'd gone into something else. They were good parents. When I said I wanted to be a pop star, or when I was a kid and said I wanted to be an astronaut, they said yes to everything. BSW: Would you credit A Knight's Tale writer/director Brian Helgeland with giving you your big break in American films? Bettany: I owe Brian Helgeland everything, really. He came over to England; he found a videotape of me auditioning for [an unnamed film project Helgeland had been working on] (The Sin Eater), and he went, "That's the guy I want." He flew over, auditioned me, and went back, and they said no. He said, "Well, I'm not going to make the film without him." They said, "You will." And he didn't. He didn't make the film. Then he wrote A Knight's Tale and wrote me the part of Chaucer in it. He came over and auditioned me, and then they said no. Then he flew me over to L.A. three times on his own money. They really wanted to make the picture. And his past track record [showed that] the last time he said he wanted me in a movie, he ended up not making the movie. So they yielded. They didn't want to, but they did and allowed me to be in it. And I owe him my mortgage, frankly. He's a really great man. BSW: There are endless rumors about how difficult it can be working with Lars von Trier. How did you find working with him in Dogville? Bettany: It's a really complicated answer. I think Lars von Trier is fabulous. He's probably a genius, and he would be the first person to tell you that. But he probably is. He's difficult to work for, but most of the difficulty comes from your own hang-ups, really. He wants you to sort of just yield to him completely. And having worked with bad directors, you have to sort of protect yourself, and he just wants you to yield all responsibility of it to him. And you just play. So you have no sort of cerebral input at all because at the end of the day you've shot 11 hours, and he has 11 hours of footage because he shoots on video so he can mix it up any which way. By the end of the day, you've done it every which way you can possibly do it, and then he puts it all together. You mix colors for him, and he's Jackson Pollock. There's no way that you can create a performance. But you know, in film, frankly, any thought you might have of having any kind of control is all an illusion, anyway. Because we live in a time with CGI. At the end of The Score--the movie with Ed Norton, Marlon Brando, and Robert De Niro, [for] Marlon Brando, who I think is quite a good actor and quite respected--they CGIed a smile onto his face because he didn't want to smile in the scene. He thought it was wrong to smile, and he and the director allegedly had a big fight, and they CGIed a smile onto his face. So any sort of notion of control is merely illusory, anyway. I guess all Lars really does is rob you of that illusion. But it's an illusion that's quite comforting at times. BSW: Have you seen the movie, and are you happy with how it turned out? Bettany: I saw the movie last week for the first time. I couldn't go to Cannes or New York because I was working. It was on at the London Film Festival, and I couldn't get a ticket. I was loath to say, "Do you know who I think I am?" So I finally got a video of it last week, and I was really pleasantly surprised. It's a fucking tough film--it's three and a half hours or whatever, and it really only heats up after the first hour and a half. But my feeling about it is, you spent so much time investing in the minutiae of these people's boring lives that, when everything goes wrong, you've really thought about them and had time to consider them. So I thought it was amazing, actually. I was really impressed by what he had done and really struck by how little you need. My friend was saying, "It's amazing how little you need to actually draw people in." BSW: Dogville is also the first time I've heard you do an American accent. How did you go about finding that Colorado drawl? Bettany: That was a big, big argument with Lars, because Lars, frankly, didn't care. I wanted a coach, and they wouldn't pay for one. I just thought ethically he should fucking pay for my fucking voice coaching. So I didn't have one. Then I got to film it, and Nicole lent me her voice coach, Liz Himmelstein, and we sort of tried to bang it into shape. So I think my accent gets better as the film progresses because we shot it in sequence. Liz deserves all credit for that. Mostly I was just sort of trying to attempt a lighter voice than I have. It strikes me as a bit like a Frank Capra movie, so it's kind of like James Stewart. Except this is It's a Shit Life. BSW: Do you do anything to adapt your acting style in movies as grand and epic as Master and Commander to the more minimalist ones such as Dogville and The Reckoning? Bettany: I would say that The Reckoning was the most kind of epic in terms of acting, really. It was the most stylized. Often it seems to be, the bigger the budget of the picture, the bigger the acting in it. But Master and Commander is an action movie, and I think I had a very different experience from everyone else who's ever made an action movie, because it was made with Peter Weir. And also the nature of my job in it--Peter sort of wanted me to be a place of quiet for the audience to kind of go to. Actually, two of them are quite similar, really. I think it's a quite revelatory film, Master and Commander; it just doesn't wear it all over its sleeve like Dogville does. It's an action movie with real human beings in it, which I think is a real accomplishment of Peter Weir's. He managed to make a $105 million action movie with two men who play the violin and cello together. So it wasn't such a different process, whereas The Reckoning was really quite stylized. BSW: Master and Commander marked your second collaboration with Russell Crowe. Was their any hesitation about reteaming when your relationship in A Beautiful Mind was such a plot point to that film? Bettany: No. I think Peter had those concerns, and it was a very long audition process. BSW: You had to audition? Bettany: God, yeah, endlessly. I quite like auditioning, though. If a director wants to give me a job, I sometimes ask them to screen-test me. Then they can't sort of blame me if they're not getting what they wanted later on. It's like, "You fucking hired me; you saw what you were getting." I screen-tested endlessly for it. He was worried that we would not be able to escape the same dynamic we had in the previous movie. I think the consequence was we spent a lot of time thinking about the relationship more so than we maybe would usually. And I think it really paid off. That's something you learn at drama school and then forget about. When you've got a scene between two people, there's sort of three people there. There's you, and then there's the partner you're acting with, and then there's the relationship between you that often has its own nature. In the rush that it is to get things committed to film, I often neglect that bit of it, whether through laziness or blind panic. So it was really good to kind of work specifically on the relationship. BSW: What do you enjoy the most about acting as a profession? Bettany: God, that's a really good question. I don't know. I should preface this with the fact I'm in Canada at the moment. My wife is making a movie with Walter Salles [a remake of the Japanese horror film Dark Water], and I look after the baby. And the thing of it is, it's a position in life I feel dangerously comfortable with. You get all the free meals and none of the pressure. It's fabulous. But I suppose the thing that I love about it most is, you get to work with extraordinary people. You spend enough time with [Reckoning director] Paul McGuigan and Peter Weir and Lars von Trier, and it's a hell of a life. They're extraordinary people to be around. BSW: And the worst part about the job? Bettany: It's twofold, actually. The traveling is wonderful and a real privilege. You get to go to places like the Galapagos, places I've never dreamt of being. But then you miss your family. And that's very, very hard. As I'm sure it is for people who work on oil rigs and go away for four months, for a lot less pay. Too much is spoke about the hardships of acting. It's a real privilege. But I would guarantee you that the worst thing about this job is press junkets. Because it doesn't happen like this, where we're having an interview and it sort of turns into a conversation--and a quite gratifying one, because it's all about me. But these press junkets are sort of four-minute interviews, and the poor journalist is shitting himself because he's got 10 questions that his editor says he has to get in. So the moment he's asked a question, he or she is desperate for you to finish it so they can get on to the next one. And if you do press for six weeks, you want to drive a railway spike through your head. But you have to do it, or studios are unlikely to want you to work for them again. It's in your interest for your film to be publicized. So you kind of become this salesman through complicity. BSW: What advice would you give to actors who are currently trying to make it in such a competitive business? Bettany: On one hand, it's a bit inelegant to give advice to somebody without full knowledge of them. I don't really know how these things happen. All I do know is there's a million different reasons before your talent, or lack of it, for why they don't give you the job. It's so arbitrary, and frankly, on every audition that I went up for I would work my ass off, even knowing that if Jude Law couldn't do it, and they went to Jonny Lee Miller and he couldn't do it, and they went to whoever, and if whoever was busy or ill, they might go, "Oh, what was the name of the kid who came in and gave that good audition?" ~~*~~ Catherine Shoard for The Telegraph, 5 Feb 2004 From busker to Bafta Paul Bettany used to sing beneath Westminster Bridge and fantasise about being famous. Now, in his latest film, Dogville, he stars with Nicole Kidman - and steals the show. Catherine Shoard meets him Paul Bettany stubs out his cigarette, rubs his temples and frowns at his latte. "What I really want," he says, "is to get on a plane, fly back to Brooklyn and get covered in poo again. That's what it's like when you've got a newborn. Nothing else really matters, certainly not sitting in a big suite at the Dorchester, drinking too much coffee and talking about some films you made a couple of years ago." It's a shock. You'd think Bettany would be the happiest man alive. The 32-year-old is currently one of the most sought-after British actors in Hollywood, tipped to bag a BAFTA later this month for his role as the ship's surgeon in last autumn's seafaring epic, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. His latest film, Dogville, an experimental drama directed by the bonkers Lars von Trier, is released next week. Bettany steals the show as a would-be writer who has an affair with Nicole Kidman. Not bad for a one-time busker from Harlesden in North London. But Bettany is bereft, desperate to return to his new wife, the Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, his six-year-old stepson, Kai, and his six-month-old baby, Stellan. His current means of coping seems to be mentioning them at every available opportunity. Is it stressful being Britain's new bright young thing? "It might have been, but having a baby throws all that into perspective." What does he think will be in the Hutton report (it was due out when we met)? "I doubt it'll topple Blair, sadly. The other day I was asking Kai whether he wanted to be a politician when he grows up, and he said, 'No, all the good ones get shot'." Eventually, it seems easier to let Bettany get all the baby anecdotes off his chest. "The actual birth," he beams, "was the most violent and beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. I was just so impressed by my wife's ability to cope with pain. People told me not to be there at the business end of affairs, but it was incredible. "It's funny how much wrong advice you can get. We didn't freak out five months after he was born. I haven't given anything up - apart, perhaps, from pretending I liked going to clubs and big parties. And everything that you do lose - like sleep - is worth it. Sometimes you think, 'If you don't stop screaming I'll kill you', but then they do something so cute you just melt. I managed to make my son genuinely smile for the first time the other day, and it was the greatest fucking thing in the world. I feel like I'm Uberdad." It's a relief to see Bettany smile; he has been stony-faced for much of our interview. "I don't much care for press junkets any more," he admits in his clipped North London whine. "You just go slightly mad. At first, you'll be sweet and professional and charming; then you start to lie to make it more interesting. Then there's the violent fantasy phase, followed by the meltdown stage - on my knees, begging not to be asked what it was like working with Russell Crowe again. Then you just yield to it. It's like drowning. You just breathe the water into your lungs and tell yourself to just put on a smile and plough through this bulls--t one more time." Right now, Bettany seems to be vacillating between stages one and five. He's certainly polite and beautifully turned-out, far taller and prettier than he looks on screen. But he's also edgy, morose, affectedly dyspeptic. He can be prone to bouts of luvviness, too, which manifest themselves by his mashing up his face in his hands, then pausing, melodramatically, between phrases. When he warms up, he's fun; when he cools down, he's freezing. "However naive this sounds," he explains, "when I was younger and I fantasised about being famous, I never fantasised about doing a press junket, or being a travelling salesman, which is essentially what I am now for about three months of the year." Bettany is indeed a man in transit, with a new wife, new baby and new prospects. And he seems desperate to settle down; up till now, it's been a bumpy ride. He was born in Hertfordshire in 1971, the son of a secretary and a teacher-turned-actor, Thane Bettany (who can be seen in the 1980 Roger Moore oil-rig thriller, The Enemy). It was an uneventful childhood, he says, until his eight-year-old brother Matthew died after a fall when Bettany was 16. In the past, Bettany has spoken of the damage caused by "finding out so young that the world is an unsafe place". Nowadays he prefers not to discuss it. "Because it sort of hurts. That got in the press through somebody who is a journalist and was a friend. I never wanted it to. Now if I talk about it too much, I spend the rest of the day in a bad fucking mood." After finishing his O-levels, Bettany shunned college in favour of two years busking beneath Westminster Bridge. Was he any good? "I survived. I wanted to be a pop star, but I found I didn't much like singing my own stuff in front of other people, which was a stumbling block. I still write lots of songs and record them, and they're entirely for me. With acting, people can go see any of my films and say, 'Oh, I bet he's just like that.' But they can't be certain. And I feel safer like that." Why doesn't he want people to know who he is? "I do," he continues, rather mystifyingly. "My big struggle is getting people to know who I am, but just the ones that I choose." There's something of the sixth-form guitar-strummer about Bettany in his long tweed coat and jeans. He's got a soul, and he knows it. He worships John Lennon unreservedly, followed closely by the minor Liverpool poet Brian Patten. Meeting Patten, he says animatedly, was one of the best moments of his life. What happened? "I told him how much I admired him, and he said, 'Cheers mate, a friend of mine died today called Allen Ginsberg, and I think there should be sadness all around the world and he should be taken up to heaven in a golden chariot.' I told him not to say anything more. It was too perfect." I sense another bout of luvviness coming on, so I probe no further. After he had his fill of busking, Bettany moved into a flat in Turnpike Lane with "the two smallest lesbians in the world and half a million cockroaches" and worked in an old people's home. He stayed for six months, enjoying the company, unsure about the cleaning. Then to the Drama Centre in Ealing, and from there into the West End with Stephen Daldry's production of An Inspector Calls. Two years later, he made it to the big screen in the bloody, terrifying Gangster No 1, then as an oft-naked Chaucer in the medieval romp A Knight's Tale. As Bettany's career took off, so did his interest in drugs. He insists he is now completely clean, but was apparently so wired during a 1999 BBC production of David Copperfield that the director had to shoot his scenes in slow motion to disguise how quickly he was talking. Bettany also lived the fast life romantically, getting through his fair share of actresses, among them Emily Mortimer and Laura Fraser. Why does he think on-set romances are so common? "You're young and foolish and neurotic, and being the centre of attention can be very inebriating. You mix everything up in your head, and you make these ludicrous mistakes that can only end embarrassingly. It was different with Jennifer. We were working together on A Beautiful Mind, but after it, we went home, because we were both with other people. We were just about grown up enough to decide we weren't going to do that again." They did, of course - albeit after a year or so of phone friendship - eventually marrying on New Year's Eve two years ago in a candlelit Scottish castle. "It was wonderful. We rented the whole place for a week with our friends and family. Five minutes after the ceremony, we were p---ed up in our pyjamas in front of the fire and playing Twister." Is there any professional rivalry between them? "None at all." But she's got an Oscar. "Ha! Yes, you're right. But I don't think I'm a very competitive person. And when you see what Jennifer actually has to go through, you'd have to be slightly unwell to be jealous of it." Why, what does she have to go through? Bettany looks cross and cryptic for a while. "There are far greater burdens on women in Hollywood." To look good? "Yeah, I suppose, and it's repulsive. When we do a photo shoot for this, it'll be easy. Either I'll be intense, or hard, or sensitive, which means they put you in a suit but drenched in water. Women's photo shoots are always about their availability. Jennifer was doing a men's magazine cover the other week and they wanted her in just a bra, but she insisted on wearing a jacket. So they pulled the cover. Said it wasn't sexy enough. "And recently," continues Bettany, getting into his stride, "she was working with this first-time director, and he said that he didn't like one of the shots because her bum looked big. I mean! Jennifer's bum looking big is very unlikely, for one. And I find the fact that he felt safe and powerful enough to say that to her, an Oscar-winner, just shocking." What did she say back? "I don't know, but I imagine she reverted to being a 14-year-old in front of a powerful man. That's what happens to me if someone manages to stick me somewhere where I'm still soft and childish." Where is he still soft and childish? "I wouldn't dream of telling you." He smiles. "Oh, I don't know - in my pants! Great! Now I know what the headline will be." That's better. As anyone who saw his recent game turn on the Jonathan Ross show will know, Bettany's got a sense of humour. He just hasn't let it show much during our interview. And I suspect that, when it comes to his career, he takes things rather seriously. Is he ambitious? "I think I must be, but I've also been lucky. Maybe I'm just good at auditioning. I'd always give things my best shot, just in case Jude Law dropped out, and then his replacement dropped out, and they thought of me." The way things are going, casting directors will be calling Bettany long before the likes of Law or Ewan McGregor. He is easily the most versatile of the three - handsome, yes, but with a coldness behind the eyes that enables him to play truly against type. This may scare off the teenagers, but then he's hardly interested in screaming fans. "I hope I have a bland enough face to be able to do anything," he says, peering at it in his spoon. "Someone like Johnny Depp, say, would be hard to buy as a roadsweeper, because you'd always be wondering why the Storm model agency hadn't picked him up by now." For a split second, it occurs to me to ask what he thinks his son will look like when he's grown up. But then I stop. By the time Bettany's finished telling me, I'd probably be able to see for myself. ~~*~~ Kermode Uncut Column, Channel 4 Film Good, better, Bettany From Gangster No 1 to Russell Crowe's best mate in Master And Commander, Paul Bettany is the man About 10 years ago, I interviewed the precocious antipodean star of a controversial exploitation movie. I merrily declared he was destined for greatness. Since the film in question was Romper Stomper, which at that point was being merrily picketed by the Anti-Nazi League for its allegedly fascist sympathies (it turns out they hadn't seen the film), my support for the budding Russell Crowe went down very badly with some of my more right-on colleagues. Fast forward a few years, and suddenly everyone is jumping on the 'Ice Cream for Crowe' bandwagon: praising his thuggish charm in LA Confidential; marvelling at his incredible shrinking man act in the tobacco industry thriller The Insider; giving a right royal thumbs-up to his heroic skirt-wearing turn in Ridley Scott's Roman epic Gladiator. All of which, of course, made me feel very smug indeed. For a change. In the last couple of years, Crowe's thespian reputation has continued to grow, with an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a schizophrenic scientist in Ron Howard's uneven A Beautiful Mind, and now predictions of further awards ahoy and lashings of rum all round for his seafaring role in Peter Weir's marvellous Master And Commander. Both these celebrated films do indeed feature some top-notch acting by a man I prophetically tipped for the top, even when others were slagging off his calling card film as violent exploitative trash. The man I'm talking about, however, is not Russell Crowe; it is Paul Bettany, the rising British star who I'm proud to say I praised to the ceiling for his performance in Gangster No 1, the blood-splattered British crime thriller which was derided as sickening by vast swathes of the mainstream British press. Ha! Put simply, Paul Bettany is the new Malcolm McDowell. Literally in the case of Gangster No 1, in which he shares the title role with McDowell, playing the central character's younger, flashier incarnation, and (surprisingly) acting our Malcolm off the screen. In A Beautiful Mind, while Crowe mugged and fumbled his way through his worst performance to date, Bettany rescued the film from disaster with his understated portrayal of an imaginary friend who refuses to be cast aside by his mad creator. Now, in Master And Commander, Bettany again beats Crowe at his own game, captivating the audience's attention as the ship's spiky, wiry medic while Crowe hangs chubbily off an array of masts and manfully orders "extra rations of grog all round". Although it's Crowe's rugged, pony-tailed bonce which adorns the posters for Master And Commander (and his name which is once again being whispered in Oscar circles) it is Bettany who deserves the three heartiest cheers for keeping this sea-faring drama's feet firmly on solid ground, and transcending the heave-ho mechanics of a simple boys-own adventure. So great is my admiration for Bettany (whose other movie-stealing triumphs include a kick-ass sidekick role in the soft-metal jousting romp A Knight's Tale) that I am even looking forward to the prospect of a three-hour movie by one of my least favourite filmmakers - arch Danish prankster Lars Von Trier. Dogville, which premiered at Cannes earlier this year, sounds like an absolute endurance test to me, and I would usually run screaming from screenings of it were it not for the fact that diva Nicole Kidman is supported on-screen by Bettany. Indeed, I was even alarmed to learn of rumours that a shorter version of the film was being prepared for international distribution; alarmed because I'd honestly hate to miss a single frame of Bettany's work nowadays. Now that's impressive. This morning, a friend and colleague sent me a news clipping which he thought would tickle such a die-hard Bettany advocate. The story, which first showed up on the splendidly unreliable World Entertainment News Network sometime in May 2003, concerned a flatulent bedroom japes encounter with actress Helena Bonham Carter during the filming of the cold but intriguing romance The Heart Of Me. According to popular legend, HBC had relieved the tension of filming a "love scene" by loudly breaking wind whilst astride young Paul. "She farted on me," said a delighted Bettany, "and then announced the fact to the cast and crew." Presumably, if such a thing had happened to the feted Russell Crowe, who once duffed up a shrinking British TV executive for trimming his boring BAFTA acceptance speech, he would have thrown one of his now infamous strops and stormed off. But Bettany? No such theatrics for him. "She's barking mad," he laughed of HBC, "keen as mustard, and funny as fuck!" Now that's my kind of man. Move over, Russell Crowe - your supporting cast is showing. ~~*~~ Tim Adams for The Observer, 25th Jan 2004 "I'm just a blond actor you know" He's starred opposite Russell Crowe (twice); he's married to actress Jennifer Connelly; he has the lead in Dogville, Lars Von Trier's latest movie, and he's about to become that most unlikely of british heroes - a Wimbledon tennis champion... the self-effacing Paul Bettany tells Tim Adams why he sometimes wonders where it all went right. The English actor Paul Bettany is currently giving a very convincing performance as the man who has everything. I meet the 32-year-old from Harlesden in Beverly Hills's most discreet (and expensive) hotel. Upstairs in his suite is his new wife, the Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, and their new baby boy. Up the road, on Sunset Boulevard, his face competes for space with that of Russell Crowe on billboards for Master and Commander. I'm here to talk to him about his role in Lars von Trier's controversial new film, Dogville, in which he stars opposite Nicole Kidman. The temptation is to ask him where it all went wrong. One thing Bettany does not have, however, this being LA, is anywhere to smoke, so he insists we sneak out on to a deserted patio with several waiters in hot pursuit. Another thing Bettany does not have is any sense of himself as a star. Proving this point, once he has lit up, he suggests that detailed discussion of Dogville might be tricky, because he has not yet seen the film. He could not go to Cannes, he says, because he was working. He could not go and see it in New York because he was working. So he tried to go to the London Film Festival, but he couldn't get in. He couldn't get in? 'Well, I rang up and they said it was all sold out, and I couldn't quite bring myself to say, "Do you know who I am?" So, no, I haven't seen it.' Even worse, given that it is a Lars von Trier film, and the director is famous for improvising things every which way, he has about 20 possible versions of it going round in his head. In Dogville, Bettany plays a 21-year-old philosopher-writer who gives speeches to the citizens of his isolated American town about truth and justice. His moral courage is tested with the arrival of Grace (Kidman), a fugitive from the mob. The film, which was shot on a minimalist set with the streets and houses of the town simply painted as a plan on the floor, is a sustained satire on the insularity of the world's superpower, and a stark fable of imperial hypocrisy. It also gives the impression of being a nightmare to make. Bettany suggests he was press-ganged into it by his friend, the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, who told him it would be 'so much fun'. Skarsgard (after whom Bettany has named his first son, Stellan) is, according to Bettany, 'the all-time heavyweight vodka-drinking champion of the world' and he phoned Bettany to say how 'Lars is so wonderful and articulate with actors, and it's brilliant to be around him'. About a week into filming, Bettany went up to Skarsgard to ask: 'What were you fucking talking about?' 'Oh, I lied,' Skarsgard replied, 'but I could not bear to make it without you.' When Bettany arrived in Copenhagen, Von Trier collected him from the airport and took him to the little town where they were staying during the shoot. En route they stopped for petrol, and Von Trier returned to the car with a stack of porn magazines which he gave to Bettany, despite his protestations that he 'was good for porn right now'. When they got to the hotel, they were chatting in Bettany's room when there was a knock at the door. It was Nicole Kidman, whom Von Trier introduced, and they exchanged small talk. The director then said, entirely straight-faced, 'Nicole, has Paul shown you his porn collection?' and he gestured to the side table, stacked with the magazines. By the first day on set, Bettany says, he had already got bored with being embarrassed or nervous. The cast of Dogville includes Ben Gazzara, Lauren Bacall, Nicole Kidman, John Hurt and James Caan, and most of them were sitting around that first morning waiting for Von Trier, who eventually arrived with a camera to announce, 'Paul, improvise a speech about the nature of property for 15 minutes or so,' and then started filming. 'So you stand up,' Bettany recalls, still cringing, 'trying out your crap American accent for which he [Von Trier] refused to pay for a voice coach, and start mumbling about how all property is theft. I mean, shit... I'm just a blond actor, you know.' In fact, as Bettany is archly aware, he is a great deal more than that. His compelling presence on screen was first properly announced in Gangster Number 1, Paul McGuigan's chilling movie in which Bettany plays a pretty-boy psychopath. His range was extended in Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale, where he stole the show playing Chaucer as a gambling addict who loses his shirt and keeps appearing naked, shouting couplets. His Hollywood debut was opposite Crowe and Connelly in A Beautiful Mind, and since then he has been rightly and universally talked up as The Next Big Thing. Still, he is not prepared to be nurtured. And he has a keen sense of the fantastic nonsense of it all. One of the reasons he did Dogville was that it was not another Hollywood movie. He had been a bit ambivalent about the motivation behind A Beautiful Mind: 'There we were with an absurd amount of money, tinkering about with somebody's life.' When the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, on whom the film was based, came down to the set one day, Bettany scarpered, because he 'couldn't bear that kind of thing'. He spent a lot of the PR time for the film wondering about its morality. 'In America,' he said at the time, 'they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent.' I wonder, having been subject to Von Trier, if he still feels that way. 'I guess so,' he says, 'but I doubt Dogville will hit too many multiplexes in America. Stellan said that Lars builds this intricate doll's house, and he fills it with all these dolls which he painstakingly moulds and paints, and then he cuts their heads off with a pair of nail scissors. And that's the reason why anyone would travel halfway round the world to work with him. But it doesn't make for too many laughs.' Even two years on, Bettany is a little obsessed with Von Trier's studied impossibility. And amused by it. 'Normally,' he points out, 'there's a rhythm to film-making: you set up a scene and shoot it and you break, and then, if it's no good, you shoot it again. Lars does not allow that rhythm. Because he shoots on video, if he shoots a 12-hour day, he has 12 hours of rushes. You don't rehearse. You have one scene a day, and by the end of the day you have done it in every way you can imagine. He'll say, "LOUDER Paul, LOUDER." Then, "NO, NO, NO Paul, DOWN 200 per cent; you are ruining my film." Then he says, "Now scream it! Now do it in a German accent." And on, and on. And all day, in the back of the shot, you've got Lauren Bacall sweeping up.' How did someone like Bacall, or Kidman, who spends a good deal of the film in chains, react to that? 'Really well, I think. You have no option really. I mean, we were all stuck in this place called Trollhat. The only thing there is this big Saab factory and a little pram factory. And everyone in the town works at the Saab factory and has babies that they push around in the prams from the pram factory. So he's got you. Ten weeks.' The result, I suggest, even so, is perhaps that rare thing, an important film (even if a slightly self-important one). Bettany winces as if scalded, but says he would happily do it all again. Even so, he admits, 'A couple of weeks in, I tried to drag my bed away from the wall that separated my bedroom from his bedroom in the hotel. I worked out that my head was 10ft from his head while we were asleep, and I did not want that. I wanted to be an extra 5ft away on the other side of the room. Unfortunately, the bed was bolted to the floor...' After Dogville, Bettany went immediately into Master and Commander and, he says, Peter Weir's powerfully realistic evocation of the extreme traumas of life on the high seas was like an afternoon on a boating lake compared to his time in Denmark. Of his role as Maturin, the ship's civilian doctor, he says, 'I felt desperate to do some nice kind of contained character stuff. I loved making that movie. And my character was so far away from me as a person.' In what way? 'Well,' he says, enigmatically, 'he was enigmatic, he had personal resources, that kind of thing.' Bettany is very good at not taking things too seriously, and very confident that the quality of his acting will allow him to get away with it. While shooting Master and Commander he reportedly opted out of Weir's mandatory tall ships' drill for the cast. Everyone else was put through his paces for days, hoisting sails in their heavy naval costumes. Bettany showed up on set in shorts and T-shirt and sat in a corner, smoking: his way, he claimed, of suggesting his character's intellectual distance from the ship's crew. But also, you imagine, a good way to sit in the corner smoking. As in A Beautiful Mind, he ended up playing Russell Crowe's sensitive alter ego. Is this a role he plans to pursue? He laughs. 'Well, when my wife can't play Russell's wife, I play his wife. I am his bitch for ever now.' Crowe and Bettany are great mates, though it's hard, he says, to have a beer when you live 27 hours apart. During A Beautiful Mind it was reported that the New Zealander was seeing Connelly, but since she and Bettany got together, after the film, they have been inseparable. They married in Scotland on New Year's Day last year, 'in a kind of Madonna and Guy Ritchie fashion, we like to think,' Bettany grins. 'Except there were eight people at the wedding. We had this huge house for a week. We got married. Got very drunk. And we all then changed into pyjamas and played Twister for the entire week. Fortunately,' he adds, 'we had invited a chiropractor.' The exertions proved a useful warm-up session to the next few months of Bettany's life, in which he mostly found himself 'playing fucking tennis'. He is cast as the male lead, opposite Kirsten Dunst, in Wimbledon, Working Title's romantic comedy, to be released this summer, set around the tennis championships. 'I am a sort of professional tennis player who is down on his uppers and gets one last wild card to play at Wimbledon and meets the enfant terrible of American tennis, and falls in love. To be honest, making it, I went nuts. Twelve hours a day trying to hit the ball over the net. Pat Cash coaching me every evening. It was the dullest thing. But still, I feel convinced we have made the best romantic comedy tennis movie ever done. In a field of one.' He must have got fit, at least? 'My wife didn't recognise me. It wasn't what she bought, you know. She was rightly convinced before that the way I looked, no one would be interested in me. But suddenly I was in the gym and looking lean. Fortunately, the baby then came along, and I was back to looking knackered.' Bettany is loving fatherhood hugely. He is the kind of dad, he claims, who won't shut up about the wonder of it all on the phone to his friends. To the extent that they have taken to hanging up on him. 'Stellan's just marvellous,' he says to me. 'I was walking along, crossing a road the other day and there was a car coming too quickly towards us and I absolutely knew that I would turn my back into a speeding car, no question. Even to give him half a second more of life. The thing about kids is that they almost make you feel like a proper human being. They almost make you feel good about yourself.' Bettany hopes his son - Connelly also has a five-year-old from her previous marriage - is the first of many. 'I would love six children. The Skarsgard way, as I call it. No one knows how many children Stellan has and they all travel round with him. And it's wonderful. They have a hell of a life.' He and Connelly have vowed to alternate on movie projects so that they are not working at the same time. He relishes the prospect. 'Jennifer is making a movie in Canada with Walter Salas and I'm going to be set-bitch and make coffee and hold her hand and change nappies for a few weeks; just watch my toenails grow - which I am really fond of doing.' Bettany was raised in a theatrical family, though not quite as star-studded as his own. When he was small, in north London, his dad was a drama teacher and his mum a secretary. But both were former actors, and his dad is still on stage. If Bettany had plans back then, though, they involved a career in music. 'I wanted to be a pop star. I would like to have been John Lennon, without the grisly ending.' For a few years he was a busker, often working on Westminster Bridge, 'but I discovered I did not like singing my songs in front of other people. I write lots of songs, still do. But it seemed so exposed to actually, you know, sing them out loud in public.' Acting, he suggests, allows him to give a little less of himself away. It is also a bit more lucrative than busking. He must, I suggest, subtly, be loaded by now? 'Not quite,' he insists. 'It's always like, "Next time you will be in for a big contract"; "Just get this one under your belt," you know. I'm terribly comfortable.' He adopts his Dogville American accent: 'But of course, I do intend to get fabulously rich. That's another thing about having a child; because, as a man, you can't lactate, you feel you need to compensate by working from dawn till dusk.' Does he get anxious it's not going to last? 'Yeah, I worry that people are going to come and take everything away. "Sorry, we meant Mr Battany."' If the money is one distraction, the fame, which he is just beginning to experience, must be another. How will he avoid that particular impostor? 'Well,' he says, 'baby pooh helps. Also, the further away I can get from LA the better. Yesterday I went to have lunch with Jennifer's mum and her husband, who live up in Big Sur. We went out for lunch and there are suddenly 30 paparazzi outside. And I'm running with my child through wine crates in the back of the restaurant to escape these photographers. I got a bit punchy with one of them. I meant to push him out of the way, but I got a bit, "Get out of the way of my son" and hit him a bit hard.' He and Connelly mostly divide their time between Islington in London and Brooklyn in New York, where they have houses. And generally, in those places, he says they are still left alone. 'We were apparently seen in LA looking for wedding rings last year, at a time when Jennifer was in New York and I was in Mexico. When we did go looking for wedding rings in Bond Street for four hours, though, no one took a blind bit of notice.' One of the best things about all this attention, he suggests, is that he has suddenly discovered he is fantastically amusing. 'At photo shoots now,' he says, 'jokes that I made four years ago and nobody laughed at are suddenly hysterically funny. Everything I do is very charming and everyone seems convinced I'm a genius. So that's good. In fact,' he adds, as if suddenly eyeing up the future, 'it's a job of work to keep your head straight. So I get back to London when I can. I was pouring this stuff out to a friend about fame changing people, and how he had to tell me if I was becoming ridiculous, and he just said, "Frankly, Paul, I hope fame does change you, because you've always been a total arsehole." That kind of thing helps a lot.' The thing he fears more than anything is that his life will become one long interview. He has spent the past couple of months selling Master and Commander, ('for Rupert Murdoch, a man who clearly needs the money') and has found the whole process exhausting. 'I have come to feel that the only thing anyone will ever say to me again, ever, is: "Well, what was it like working with Russell Crowe a second time?" And I've taken to thinking, "Well, I could answer that question, or I could headbutt a railway spike..."' So what was it like working with Russell Crowe a second time? 'It was great,' he says. 'We hit the ground running, and we never looked back.' Dogville is released on 13 February. ~~*~~ Craig McLean for The Telegraph, 16th Nov 2002 All or Nothing Paul Bettany will go to any length to prepare for a part - and his lust for acting has got Hollywood knocking at his door. Craig McLean meets him Today, down in Baja on the Mexican coast, Paul Bettany is sitting in his trailer and waiting for the knock to tell him it's time to load guns. It's battle week on the five-month-plus shoot for The Far Side of the World, an adaptation of the 10th book in Patrick O'Brian's swashbuckling 19th-century Aubrey/Maturin series. 'It's huge,' says Bettany of the scope of these climactic scenes. 'Two ships have rammed each other and everybody starts boarding. Five hundred extras and 25 principals fighting like mad, using whatever comes to hand - guns, swords, grappling hooks. There are cameras and cannons and smoke everywhere. The whole thing's supposed to go like a dance. But getting that many people to dance is sort of difficult.' In Peter Weir's epic action movie, Bettany plays the naval surgeon Stephen Maturin opposite Russell Crowe's Jack Aubrey. Maturin is a man of science; instead of fighting the far mightier French fleet, he would prefer to set course for the Galapagos and continue his nature studies. Aubrey, however, is a man of action. He would rather cut up Frenchies than frogs. Yet Aubrey and Maturin are great friends. Of an evening, these gentlemen adventurers discuss the differences between them as they play violin and cello. So Mutiny on the Bounty meets Hilary and Jackie? 'Exactly right,' laughs Bettany. 'Except on the cello I sound like I'm punishing a squirrel.' The $135 million Far Side of the World is the moment where this 31-year-old Londoner leaves behind his cult status and stakes his claim to join Crowe in Hollywood's big league. It was in the titular role of the British independent film Gangster No1 (2000) that Bettany's icy stare and menacing understatement announced the arrival of an actor with true presence. Last summer he received his Hollywood induction with the medieval romp A Knight's Tale, memorably marching on screen as a naked and bloodied Geoffrey Chaucer. Earlier this year, a hearty, Bridesheady performance was required of him as Crowe's imaginary roommate in the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind. Now, in The Far Side of the World, the David and Goliath pair have something approaching equal billing. Bettany and Crowe have become firm friends. Next to the rugged Aussie, the charming Brit has nary a boorish bone in his body, but both are men's men, 'pubbers' rather than clubbers, music fanatics and sporty. They are also renowned ladies' men, charismatic and possessed of something of a wild side. Paul Bettany, it is fair to say, has a lust for life, and for work. He is fast establishing himself as an actor of versatility, adroit at a range of roles and types of character. With an enthusiasm that must gladden the hearts of directors, he throws himself into his roles, and maintains that he enjoys as much of a buzz researching parts as playing them. For The Far Side of the World he has had to learn to play the cello, speak French and Portuguese, and how to dissect animals and amputate limbs convincingly. 'When everyone went to boot camp [for military training],' he says happily, 'I went to study fish.' While preparing for Gangster No1 he met with veteran Sixties criminals. One chap told him of how he once knocked someone out, fetched a hammer from his car boot and applied it to the unconscious victim's kidneys - so that he would be peeing blood. 'The thought that went into that and the fact that he managed to keep that rage going all the way to the car...' marvels Bettany. For this latest role of a cello-playing scientist, his own musical background has been useful. Bettany's days busking around Westminster Bridge are long behind him, but he still picks up his guitar most days and is forever writing songs and poems. Over the summer, he and Crowe set up recording studios in their private cabins atop the cliffs along from the studio lot. They spent their evenings 'hammering away' at old Tom Waits songs. Crowe has his own band, 30-odd Foot of Grunts. Did Bettany never fancy being a pop star? 'When I was a kid, I wrote some songs, got together with some people, stood up in front of an audience and felt completely naked and horrible,' he says with a cheery wince. Does performing a song make him feel more exposed than acting in front of millions of cinema-goers? 'Well, if [acting] does, no one knows. You're basically an impressionist. Gangster No1 is essentially just my impression of what a psychopath might be. It's not that complicated.' It is not if you are an actor as good as Bettany. The Heart of Me (his next film to be released in the UK), directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan, confirms the range and depth of his talents. He plays Rickie, a City gentleman in Thirties London. Rickie is torn between his stiff wife Madeleine (Olivia Williams) and her wayward sister Dinah (Helena Bonham-Carter). It is a slow, still movie, yet richly detailed and evocative. Bettany gives a remarkable performance. 'It was like nothing I'd ever done,' Bettany says admiringly. 'Thaddeus has made a really brave, gentle, beautiful film. He's managed to make it contemplative. The scenes are constructed a bit like Brief Encounter, really tight and economical.' Paul Bettany has acting in his blood. His maternal grandmother, Olga Gwynne, the daughter of a Nottinghamshire pub landlady, moved to America in the Thirties, married a pianist and enjoyed a career in musical theatre. Now in her 80s, and the last surviving family member from that era, Grandma Olga lives in Barnet, north London. His father Thane was in the Royal Navy, was later a member of an avant-garde theatre group and also had roles in early Eighties TV films called North Sea Hijack and Talisman. When he was nine or 10 Bettany remembers seeing North Sea Hijack on television. But he had no sense of his father being famous. He just knew him as the actor who became a drama teacher, and whose job took the young family from Harlesden, north-west London, to the suburban backwater of Potters Bar. 'My dad just wanted a family, then decided he had better support them and gave up his dream. It's his choice, but a hell of a thing to do. He has never shown me any regret or resentment.' Family is important to Bettany. He has been fixated on having children since he was a teenager. 'I want kids so badly, I want them now! Just [to] have loads of kids crawling all over me!' He has an older sister but when he was 16, his younger brother died in a fall, aged eight. 'It tore me apart,' Bettany has said. 'It's a daily heartbreak. I know people who are 40 and just finding out that the world is unsafe. If this happens when you're 16, it's really alienating.' Ask him now if his obsessive desire for children is related to his terrible loss, and he says haltingly, 'I would imagine somebody else looking in objectively might say yes, that's how it has come through.' He left school at 16, busked, worked in an old-people's home, attended London's Drama Centre and spent a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1997 a tour of Joe Penhall's play Love and Understanding took him to Connecticut, introducing him to American theatre audiences and to casting directors. That same year he made his debut in front of the cameras, in the television series Sharpe's Waterloo and a movie called Bent. Our first conversation takes place in May, just before Bettany leaves for Mexico to film The Far Side of the World. We meet in Century, a private members' club in Soho, London. As the afternoon progresses, his smoking gathers pace as he becomes increasingly enthused about music, the films he has done, and the actors he has met and loved. Soon we are drinking beer. This despite his having a cello lesson at six and having been, he tells a Century staff member after she remarks on his tousled appearance, up all night 'trying to write'. His pale, freckled complexion combines with fatigue to make his eyes piggy and pink. Add to this his battered overcoat, gingery stubble and exuberant body language and he could be a dotty albino tramp - albeit a devilishly handsome one. He is great company, radiating matey bonhomie. After insisting I invest in some Tom Waits albums, he says that I should come out to Mexico, preferably with my children, and repeats the offer in a text message from the set a month later. He is also immensely likeable, all the more so because his natural candour means his vulnerabilities are on full display. Most of the past two years have been spent on set abroad, and he misses his north London flat, family, friends and football (he supports Arsenal). 'Being away from home all the time sucks,' he says grimly. It was his demanding schedule that put paid to his last relationship, with Laura Fraser, his co-star in A Knight's Tale. He is even open enough to admit how he nearly threw it all away. In 1999 he had split with his girlfriend Emily Mortimer. He says he was also doing cocaine heavily, and to come down he would take lorazepam, the sister drug of temazepam. Accordingly, the filming of a television adaptation of David Copperfield in Dublin came at 'a very bad time in my life'. 'I was thrown out of my posh hotel for ruining rooms. On the plane from LA to Dublin I managed to play football with a pillow in the aisle and knock every exit sign off the ceiling. I was a mess. [Director] Peter Medak protected me by shooting things in slow motion so you can't see that I'm, uh-huh?' He coughs. He knew his habits were getting out of hand 'when one night I should have called an ambulance and I didn't'. For someone else? 'Yeah. In their bag I found an insulin injection and gave it to them and they were fine. But I didn't know they needed insulin because I was so twatted. The place was covered in drugs, and I didn't want a fucking ambulance coming. Then I thought, maybe it's time to kind of...So that's when all that stopped.' He says he hasn't touched drugs for two and a half years. 'The mess ended with Gangster,' he says matter-of-factly. 'I cleaned up my act, stopped doing drugs. Now I do nothing except this,' he adds, gesturing to his beer and cigarette. It is perhaps no coincidence that since Gangster No1 his career has blossomed. He has been cast as the male lead in Wimbledon, a romantic comedy set round the tennis championships. Made by Working Title, Bettany's love interest is Spider-Man star Kirsten Dunst. A dream ticket, you might say. Acknowledging the dualities of his rangy, rogueishly handsome demeanour, he says that 'When the director [Richard Loncraine] met me he said, "You're an interesting choice - if I saw you in the street I wouldn't know if you were going to say hello or beat me up!" It sort of threw the glove down, and I haven't done a romantic comedy yet.' Earlier this year, Bettany filmed Lars von Trier's Dogville. The director's Palme-d'Or-winning last film, Dancer in the Dark, gained notoriety for the clashes between the infamously taxing von Trier and his leading lady, the Icelandic singer Björk. 'It's a really weird film. I tell you exactly what it's like: a Brechtian Frank Capra movie. I have no idea what it's going to be like, because [von Trier] is Jackson Pollock and you're mixing up paints for him. It was gruelling, but also just head-over-heels-in-love-with-him fun. One minute you want to smack him, the next kiss him.' He turned down the role of the serial killer the Tooth Fairy in Red Dragon to do Dogville. Any regrets? 'I would have loved to have done it. Ralph Fiennes is much better at that sort of thing than me anyway so...hmmm...yeah. My accountant and agent were angry with me because I got 0.5 kroner or whatever for Dogville. But in five minutes, Lars von Trier taught me more about acting than I've ever learnt in my life.' Dogville also stars Nicole Kidman, who Bettany claims is his 'guardian angel. If anything happened to her, if anybody did anything to her, I would go to prison for 30 years and I would smile about it every day. 'She was just brilliant to work with. We were stuck in the most depressing place.' Although set, like Dancer in the Dark, in America, the phobic von Trier won't fly anywhere. He recreated Thirties gangland America in a former Saab factory in a small Swedish town called Trollhättan. 'I mean, there's not much light there...' Four months after our first meeting, it is announced in the tabloids that 'Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly and actor Paul Bettany, who fell in love while filming A Beautiful Mind, are engaged.' A 'friend of the stars' said Connelly and Bettany had spent $50,000 on rings from the Hollywood jeweller Neil Lane. There has been no 'official' word from either star's publicist. If true, it is this relationship, more so than any buzzy film role, that will arouse fevered Tinseltown interest in this hot young Brit. Yes, Bettany says when we talk again in Mexico, he is seeing Jennifer Connelly. No, they haven't bought $50,000 rings. There have been 'sightings' of them in New York - 'How could that have been the case?' He had been in Mexico for months, she in Los Angeles filming first The Hulk and now The House of Sand and Fog. But he says Connelly has been down to Baja to visit. This month Paul Bettany returns to Britain for the Gala screening of The Heart of Me, which closes the London Film Festival. Then he flies to the Galapagos to complete The Far Side of the World - finally. Then a break before commencing work on Wimbledon next spring. Will he get married in that break? 'I couldn't possibly comment on that,' he demurs. 'I'd have to ask my girlfriend.' Is he engaged? 'Nooo?' he exhales, unconvincingly. None the less, he admits that he and Connelly are setting up home in New York. She has a five-year-old son, Kai, and his American father (a photographer named David Dugan) needs to be able to see him. Bettany is ecstatic at being given the role of dad, with an instant family. 'Weird, I know! Exciting! It has its own difficulties, but those are far outweighed by the joys it brings. I don't know if we'll have our own child straight away. God knows, I've tried to fall pregnant for 15 years now, and I've just realised it's not really up to me. 'I'm desperately conniving to persuade Jennifer to move over to Britain, saying how brilliant England is, and that you don't get peered at!' How will he stop the conflicting schedules getting in the way of love this time? 'It's tough any way you look at it. It's so easy to say, "Yeah, we'll be together and take time off." But you're so tied into defining yourself by your work that it's difficult to say no to job offers. But,' he says, chirpily defiant and patently flushed with love in his isolated Mexican cabin, 'we've made it work this time.' ~~*~~ News snippets from WENN June 6: Odd Start for Bettany and Kidman Dogville stars Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany got a taste of maverick Danish director Lars Von Trier's eccentric ways within minutes of meeting the movie maker for the first time. First, he picked Bettany up from the airport and insisted on grabbing a pile of pornographic magazines from a gas station on the way to the hotel - and then he tried to pass them off as the A Knight's Tale star's collection. Bettany recalls, "He comes into my room with this huge stack of porn and he starts talking and he just puts it down. And then he says, 'Nicole's coming in to meet you.' "She came in and I said, 'Hi, how are you,' and then he said, 'I have to go, look at Paul's enormous stack of porn.' "I've just met her and I turned into this babbling 13-year-old boy, going, 'It's not my porn, it's not my porn.'" Von Trier's eccentricities didn't end there - five minutes later Bettany heard the director creeping around outside. He adds, "I look out and he's hanging off the fire escape listening to our conversation. He's as mad as a chicken with lips." June 13: Connelly and Bettany's Baby Name Blues Pregnant superstar Jennifer Connelly already knows she is expecting a baby boy - but finding a name for the tot is proving difficult. Connelly and A Beautiful Mind co-star Paul Bettany married on New Year's Day and announced they would be having their first child together soon after. But Bettany reveals that they are still pondering a suitable moniker for the baby. He laughs, "There's time. We'll call him 'It' for a little bit." Sep 9: Bettany's naked ambition A Beautiful Mind star Paul Bettany has plans to make a bizarre new film - starring only his penis. Many of the films Bettany's been involved in feature shots of his private parts, and he believes there's enough spare footage in existence to make a whole other movie. The actor, husband of Oscar-winner Jennifer Connelly, says, "On A Knight's Tale, I had to stand naked in a field for four days. So, as my wrap present, Brian [Helgeland] the director gave me all the raw footage they shot of my penis...all the shots of me turning away, walking through, turning into a shot." "It's endless. I have decided that I'm going to splice it together and make a film. It should be very striking, but clearly it will be a very short film." ~~*~~ Emily Blunt for http://www.bluntreview.com, 2002 A Sure Bet | Paul Bettany Paul Bettany has been on my smitten-with list since I can remember. I suffered through that horrible A Knight's Tale humble and thankful for any frame he graced. I was tickled pink when he appeared as Russell Crowe's "best friend" in A Beautiful Mind. I was not alone in my attentions. Casting agents were taking notice too. Sometimes talent is noticed and this is one young talented actor that is really getting some great roles. On top of being immensly talented Paul is positively gorgeous. He even comes with a frightfully charming near-Cockney accent. His animated eyes dance wildly about like an animal that's been caught and is biding its time before escape; amusing itself with the silly human before him. Paul's a tip-top delectable bit of naughty manyum. His latest role in Gangster # 1 ( - which in fact a kind of oxymoron since it was filmed long before A Beautiful Mind or the dreaded A Knight's Tale -) shows another side of Paulie. That cute lovable Paul we are growing accustom to, his patented choir boy pretty Bob with the cherub face we love so much, is nowhere to be found within minutes of Gangster #1's start. No, in Gangster #1 Paul plays a demon riddled bad guy beyond redemption. At first you keep expecting him to be all fluffy and that not-so-bad-bad- guy type, after all he's always been the light hearted bloke in past roles....however any hopes of his character Gangster having a heart beneath the ruthless exterior quickly dissipates as his Gangster develops into one of the meanest sonnovabitches to ever grace a screen. It's a diabolical performance. Here's our lovely chat: EMILY: Gangster's a bastard. Who's tougher your Gangster fellow or Tony Soprano? PAUL: [laughter] Honestly, I haven't seen "The Sopranos". I saw one episode and it was brilliant. Now I have to start watching it. When it came to England, I was away here making the movie. And I don't watch television. Maybe the news or documentaries. Not out of any grandeur I just don't have time.. But usually, I just don't ever turn it on. [hear that Mr. Favreau- who thought I was the ONLY person on Earth that hadn't seen the Sopranos during our interview? Hmm? Huh? I'm not as bizarre as you thought.] EMILY: Me neither. No time. What do you do instead? PAUL: Masturbate wildly! [laughs]No- no, I play guitar and I read books. And newspapers. EMILY: [silly boy….don't make me jump on you like a rabid Rhesus monkey….] What are you reading? PAUL: At the moment I am reading what is it bloody called again? Uh, "The God of Small Things." And I'm rereading"Darkness of Noon" because it's my favorite novel ever written. Then I'm reading things I won't bore you with about Naval Surgery. EMILY: [I said being all girly girl] Navel surgery? Are you planning on having this done? [kidding with him] PAUL: [fell for it-so cute and gullible] Not that navel! "In the Navy"... Surgery in the Navy, I should clear that up. Which is at best, really dull. But I'm reading lots about it. EMILY: That's for the Russell Crowe film right? PAUL: Yeah. I'm making this movie in Mexico with Russell Crowe and Peter Weir. EMILY: You are playing the same character as Malcolm McDowell at a younger age. Did you have to study him to incorporate that into your performance? PAUL: Kind of. I mean, yes, I had seen his films. I'd seen If and Clockwork Orange. If was one of my favorite films, so I knew his work. He shot his stuff first, so I watched him and we talked a bit about things we were gonna do for each other - mannerisms and such, all of which ended up getting cut out of the movie. Basically, you just try to get a sense of someone. To be frank, the way that you are going to go just sort of opens it self up and you go that way. I shouldn't be telling you that. Everybody tells me it's the secret of acting and "don't tell them it's easy." Don't let anyone know. But really it mostly is. EMILY: But it's easy for you because your bio says you come from generations of actors. PAUL: No. I don't know where that story came from. My Dad was an actor. But when I was a kid he was a teacher. He has become an actor since. EMILY: Your grandmother was a singer right? PAUL: She was a singer - and a very good one, by all accounts. EMILY: So you don't feel like an actors son. A Barrymore-style bred actor? PAUL: I feel like the son of a teacher really. EMILY: You have been in two movies where you play basically likeable characters. [should I tell him he owes me 8.50 for Knight's Tale-though he was the only saving grace in the pitiful flick] Are you excited now to be the bad guy? PAUL: I'm more likeable now. [ he sensed the hatred of Knight's Tale I just know it] I made this movie four years ago, so I'm just more likeable now. I was a bastard back then. [laughter] EMILY: I love the weird choices you've been making. All over the genres! PAUL: Acting is really dull if you just do the same thing all the time. Frankly a monkey can behave naturally in front of a camera! So it's nice to do different stuff. The shear facts that it gets really boring if ya don't. So in actual fact I've sought out to try and do different stuff…not to try and "stretch me" or anything like that. Just because it's boring doing the same stuff EMILY: Gangster #1 was made what four years ago….what was the hold-up? PAUL: The hold-up was the word [ he looks as if he is ashamed to say it to me ] "Cunt". [defending his remark] It's non gender-specific in England and I believe in Canada. It's only in America where it is gender specific. Objects are "cunts" in England. I guarantee you it's just a punctuation mark. It's how people speak. And it's how I speak if I'm in a pub and drunk. It how people speak and I question the morality of the fact that it wouldn't get released in this country because there is a scene where I stab somebody in the neck with a corkscrew and I call him a "cunt'. And they didn't mind me stabbing him in the neck. But calling him a "cunt" while I did it was apparently crossing the line. That was the hold up. EMILY: I know about the word not being "the same" here believe me. What finally changed that? PAUL: I think a sort of more broadminded distribution company picked it up. EMILY: Have you ever gotten yourself in trouble in a pub calling somebody a "cunt"? PAUL: In this country, no. I know to look at me I look like a pituitary gland retard, but I decided not to use the word here. But I got into loads of trouble using it in my own country when I was young and ill advised. [laughter] EMILY: How so? PAUL: You know. Pub fights. Bar fights. But I don't do that sort of thing anymore. EMILY: You and Russell Crowe must have had quite a bit to talk about then. [laughs] PAUL: No. I never discussed fighting with Russell. We might sit back and discuss Proust and such Remembrance of Things Past and not drink. [laughter] EMILY: What about poor Russell Crowe? He gets a load of bad press. Fair? [ I said purring softly as Mr. Bettany blushed at the controversal subject] PAUL: I think he gets a load of... the thing about Russell is that Russell speaks his mind. And that's really difficult to find in this industry. I think it comes as a shock. But I love it. I think it is a virtue, speaking your mind. I've never felt worried or intimidated by him or seen anybody else feel worried or intimidated by him and I've spent a lot of time with him. But if you took his honesty away from him, he wouldn't be Russell. EMILY: Yeah he's blunt-- I love the guy. Did you guys have a laugh together about the latest rumor? About you and Nicole Kidman? PAUL: No. In fact, I didn't know until today that there was a rumor about us being together. I just didn't have a clue. EMILY: Is it weird to have now become a guy that the gossip columns write about? PAUL: Yeah. It's absurd. Some of them are funny and laughable. And some are really annoying. EMILY: Such as? PAUL: Such as years ago in England, they put this picture of me and my girlfriend in it naked. And it was from a film, but it looked like they had taken a snapshot. And then it was just really complicated and it ended up really destroying our relationship. So that's kind of distressing because being in a nice relationship is nice isn't it? You know what I mean? EMILY: What about with you and Jennifer [Connelly]? Has the press made it more difficult for you guys to enjoy yourselves? PAUL: [ shy - grinning] Well, that's only just sort of started. It makes you feel murderous when you get followed around by people with cameras and cars. Sort of horrible. And I rang somebody up about it, and they said, "Well Paul, if you don't want to get your photograph taken, don't go out." I went, "Well what sort of life is that?" Know what I mean? EMILY: I can't even imagine. Why don't you show them a tape of Gangster#1 PAUL: [thinking- laughing] Yeah! Great! Show 'em a tape of Gangster [laughter] EMILY: So everyone cries about the icky invasion of celebrity - rightfully so. Is there a good side? PAUL: I really like the... Listen. I watched a film called Fearless by Peter Weir. It's one of the films that actually did something for me and I don't think films usually do. It did something to me. And I'm now getting to work with him. So that's the good side. And I mean that genuinely. I really don't mind waiting in line for a table. So all that stuff I think is nonsense. All the places you can get into... I don't go out clubbing. I'm 31 years old years old now and the joy of it is I don't have to pretend I like going out to clubs anymore. So a lot of the time I am at home reading Proust. EMILY: Yeah but, it most be kind of flattering though, that so many people want to know about you? [Thought but not spoken: like what a tall handsome boy like you really does for fun...] PAUL: It sounds really naive of me, but it's nice in terms of the work's great and it's nice to be congratulated on the work. I'm not gonna lie too much. It's nice when people say, "That work is good". But having people take pictures of you when you are at the beach is just fucking annoying. That's annoying. You know what I mean? EMILY: [he saw me on the beach that day? OH no!] Who do you play in Dogville? PAUL: I was trying to ask Lars von Trier that for weeks. [laughter] I never quite found out. I really don't know. I play a guy who says he's a writer, but hasn't written anything. Thinks he's a philosopher. But actually just bores the pants off anyone who listens to him! He's fallen love with Nicole Kidman [she plays Grace]. Nicole's an Australian actress. She's only done a few movies...she's new! [laughter] I think she's got a big future [laughter] I play a guy that lives in a tiny mining village and she comes and hides among us. And it's about how they absorb her and except her or don't. EMILY: So what is the title of this Russell Crowe/ Paul Bettany film anyway? PAUL: [laughter] Presently...Far Side of the World. I think...[laughter] EMILY: What's with the film Dead Babies? PAUL: [laughter] LONG may that never get anywhere...that's really independent...of ME liking it [laughter]. It's an amazing novel by a man called Martin Amos. It's a less amazing film. EMILY: Well put. What about your other film due, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? PAUL: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is film by just the most defying human being in the world, Stellan Skarsgård, who's also in Dogville. If ever he asked me to do anything again, even porn, I'll be in if he's in it! EMILY: You said the PR bios are incorrect. You don't come from from actors. Okay, so how did you get started then? Was it one movie that inspired you? PAUL: Yes. Actually there's lot's of movies that I saw, like Casablanca and my favorite film, great old films...like my favorite favorite film, which I am blushingly groping for...Brief Encounter. Films like that. Basically I really wanted to be a pop star and the thing of it is that I love writing songs and I was a Busca which is someone who plays guitar on the street for money and I realized really quickly when I stood in front of an audience to play my songs I just shook and I just hated it. I guess one of the prerequisites of being a pop star is that you don't mind singing your own songs in front of other people. Basically, I bless John Lennon every day for having written "Mother You Had me, But I Never Had You". It's an extraordinary thing to say. Very beautiful, simple; a great piece of poetry. But I wouldn't want anybody to know that much about me. Do you know what I mean? People that I absolutely have nothing...I don't mind singing to people that I know, but I have no interest in having an audience. So the good thing about acting is that you can watch Gangster #1 and you can think "He's an aggressive little bastard" but you don't know...or you can watch Beautiful Mind and go "I bet he's that cocky and full of himself" but not actually know because I'm not being myself now. You know what I mean? EMILY: How did you perfect that gangster strut? [thought not spoken: that sexy demeanor and pouty smirk?] PAUL: I wore women's underwear. [laughs]. I didn't know I had one! [laughter] It's probably an amalgamation of every film I've ever seen and I probably just ripped off Malcolm. Listen, someone puts you in an Oswald Botang suit - he makes beautiful suits, all those suits are like 4000 pounds, which is like $6,000 a piece - and you can't walk badly. It would be an insult - it's a helluva suit [laughter]. EMILY: Did you get to keep them? [thought not spoken- "I'd love to have ya model them...slowly...for me in a nice suit up stairs studmuffin...] PAUL: [winking] They weren't gonna let me, but I stole them. [laughter] I stole all three suits. I was playing a gangster. I thought it's expected ya know [ laughter]. EMILY: Your character doesn't speak much in Gangster#1. Do you feel it's was easier or harder to convey character with less words? PAUL: It's brilliant! Actors usually say its so difficult when you have no words and you have to communicate things through your eyes...it's absolutely untrue. I long for the days of silent movies. It's just much easier. Leave all the talking up to somebody else. It's one less thing to fuck up. It s the medium of pictures isn't it? EMILY: Yeah. I know what you mean. Gangster's a pretty violent film. Was it true to the original script? PAUL: Yes it was. And I am very proud of it. I think we all live in a really violent world and films should reflect the world in which we live. And if anybody doesn't think it's a violent world, I suggest that they probably don't go out much and see that somebody shot somebody at the counter at LAX or picked up a kid and bashed them on the bonnet of the car... So it's a violent world and I really don't understand the morality in films of trying to make that palatable. It's just unacceptable! We tried to make a completely palatable film and I think we succeeded! People should leave the cinema being upset by it! ~~*~~ Brian Logan for The Guardian, 22nd February 2002 "I don't want to go and do some dross in the West end. I can do that in Hollywood" There's only one interesting thing about Paul Bettany's role in A Beautiful Mind, Hollywood's would-be inspiring but actually rather sickly biopic of the troubled maths genius John Forbes Nash. But he's not allowed to talk about it. "It's just impossible," says the 30-year-old actor. "I really will be sued if I answer that question." Bettany, fast-rising star of Britflick Gangster No 1, plays Charles Herman, close college friend of Russell Crowe's Nash who transpires - avert your eyes, spoiler-phobes - to be a figment of Nash's schizophrenic imagination. "But I'm contracted not to talk about the fact that quite clearly I'm imaginary," says Bettany, who's obviously still to acquire the rigid discipline Hollywood demands of its emerging starlets. Here's hoping he never does. Far too charming to be wholly trustworthy, there's nevertheless a raffish, devil-may-care quality to this thrusting young Harlesden boy that makes of him a more entertaining interviewee than many a doe-eyed Tinseltown wannabe. When historians questioned the authenticity of his 2001 movie A Knight's Tale, in which Bettany played Chaucer, the actor playfully challenged them to a fight. But he's no apologist for Hollywood. To Bettany, taking the blockbuster shilling is "sucking the devil's cock". It's a phrase that, in an hour's conversation, crops up frequently. He certainly makes little secret of his ambivalent regard for Ron Howard's inevitably Oscar-tipped Nash biopic. He loathed the silly hairstyle he was forced to adopt for the film. "How many people," he wails, "have had that haircut in showbusiness? I can only bring to mind the guy who played Dano in Hawaii Five-0 and Leo Sayer." He doesn't disagree with the suggestion that Gladiator star Crowe's fidgeting Nash is by-numbers, megastar-does-disabled grandstanding. "It wouldn't be for me," he purrs, "to comment." He questions Hollywood's ability to tell true stories faithfully ("there we were," he says of the shoot, "with an absurd amount of money, tinkering about with somebody's life") or to handle tough subjects like schizophrenia. He's not alone in this - several protest groups have challenged the film's sanitised representation of the Nobel prize-winning mathematician's life. The film depicts Nash combating schizophrenia with doggone American grit and the love of a good woman; critics have argued that drugs offer a more reliable cure. Gay rights campaigners in the US have protested that the film excludes any reference to Nash's bisexuality, far less his arrest for indecent exposure in a public loo. In A Beautiful Mind, Nash imagines himself embroiled in a (conveniently action-packed) CIA scheme to stave off Russian attacks on the US. In real life, he fantasised communication with aliens and developed an obsession with the TV series Doctor Who. Bettany claims ignorance of the arguments raging around the film. "Being an actor and a natural blond," he says, "people tend to shield me from that kind of thing. But if you read the book that it's based on [Sylvia Nasar's Pulitzer prize-winning biography of Nash], there are a lot of things in there that would not turn up in a major Hollywood motion picture. It's just easier, bearing in mind the legal implications and the kind of audience you're making it for, not to tell the whole story. Besides, you can't tell anybody's life in detail in two or three hours, can you?" He shrugs. "I don't know how much of the film bore any relation to the truth, to be honest. John Nash came down to the set one day and I ran away, because I can't bear that kind of thing." In any event, says Bettany, the film's weaknesses are nothing to do with him. He agreed to appear with the noblest of intentions. "I would genuinely never do a job - once I'd read the script and if someone had been sweet enough to say, 'Would you do it?' - without concerning myself about what the outcome of the project might be and what it was trying to say." But actors have no control over the finished product. He cites the film adaptation of Martin Amis's Dead Babies, in which he starred. "I thought, well, somebody's actually attempting to do something meaningful. Then you see a rough cut and realise they've made a film about yoof drug culture, which was a film you never intended to be in." He also cites Paul McGuigan's Gangster No 1, in which Bettany first signalled his considerable screen presence in the role of the sleek, menacing anti-hero. "Whatever the result, we seriously attempted to look at why people live those violent, pornographic lives." He's worried that the final cut made violence sexier than it should have done. "I'm middle class and I never thought of running around with a gun and fighting somebody. I got really sick of all those movies. Maybe Stephen Lawrence got killed by a funny little cockney - it's not really that amusing. "But I've got to work," he says. And there's no shortage of offers. Bettany appeared in last year's influential Variety magazine list of "Ten to Watch". His career trajectory suggests an actor being rigorously groomed for stardom. Characteristically, he dissociates himself from the hype. "Two years ago, when I was filming Dead Babies, I got pissed with the woman who put my name forward for it. And that, I'm absolutely convinced, is why I'm in that Ten to Watch." He professes reluctance to "go to LA and hawk my sorry arse around" for work, and boasts - possibly to impress Guardian readers - that he was hounded out after his last visit for expressing lefty views on US foreign policy. But he admits he comes under pressure to maximise his money-making potential. "There are people that are not pleased with me," he says darkly, "because I didn't take certain jobs." The only obstacle, then, between Paul Bettany and superstardom is his self- image. He doesn't want to be uncool. "The people that I love and admire and want to love and admire me back, I don't want them going: 'You're only 30 and you've already sucked the devil's cock.' Which I'm sure they would and probably rightly so." His curse, perhaps, is his classical background. He comes from a theatrical family. He attended the notoriously ascetic Drama Centre (nickname: the Trauma Centre) in north London, where contemporaries had him down as Most Likely To, albeit for his ambition as much as his talent. He had a distinguished, if fledgling, theatre career before film came a-wooing. His role in Joe Penhall's hit play Love and Understanding, which took him to the US, helped spark the film industry's interest. (Coincidentally, Penhall himself recently brought schizophrenia to the big screen as screenwriter of the film Some Voices). Perhaps it's because he has experienced high quality that he can't bring himself to embrace the alternative. "There has been, in my opinion, a massive trend in American movies to ask people questions then answer them all, the second after they've been asked. There's no ambiguity. Where are people making Five Easy Pieces and films like that nowadays? A lot of American movies are soporific: 'Shut up America, go to sleep, stop thinking, don't ask too many questions. Here's Melrose Place or 90210 or whatever it is. Shut up!' It's depressing, a lot of American cinema." But it makes him money, so he intends to keep working in it. "I just received an enormous tax bill," he says by way of explanation, "that I can't possibly pay for." His current lofty standards aren't intended to last. "If we meet in 10 years I'd have far too much make-up on and be in my ranch in California." A return to the theatre, meanwhile, isn't on Bettany's immediate agenda. "I don't want to go and do some dross in the West End. That appeals to me not at all. I can do dross in the cinema, it'll be over more quickly and I'll get paid more money for it." Happily, he's found a halfway house, between West End dross and Hollywood dross, in which he's keen to reside: European cinema. "In America," he says, "they shoot budgets and schedules, and they don't shoot films any more. There's more opportunity in Europe to make films that at least have a purity of intent." Which leads us to his next project, about which Bettany comments, "I'm shitting myself." He heads this month to Sweden to film the latest feature from Danish maverick Lars von Trier, titled Dogville. "When he made [the Cannes-winning, Björk-starring musical] Dancer in the Dark," says Bettany, "all these American journalists went crazy at him, saying 'How dare you comment on American society when you've never been there?' So Lars went, 'It's a real shame that you didn't like the movie because it's the first of a trilogy about America.' Which it wasn't, but now he's said it, he's decided to do it." Bettany will co-star with Nicole Kidman, Chloë Sevigny and Stellan Skarsgard in a Rocky Mountain-set story in which a fugitive gangster's moll seeks sanctuary in a remote mining community. "I can't wait to do it," he says - and he has the air of a young man who appreciates that he's at an exciting moment in his career. "It's difficult talking about acting because you either go" - and here he flashes an inanely jaunty smile - " 'It's better than working!' or you go, 'Well, I think it's at the vanguard of changing people's lives'. And it's not, it's somewhere in between. But Lars von Trier is without doubt a very bright person, Stellan Skarsgard is a very bright person. To go and spend 13 hours a day, six days a week for two months with these people; to be challenged and made to think...it's a lovely life." ~~*~~ Stephen Applebaum for BBC Films, 21st February 2002 Paul Bettany (A Beautiful Mind) "Gangster No.1", "A Knight's Tale", and "A Beautiful Mind" are very different films. What attracts you to a project? Up until like five seconds ago, I just took what jobs came along. Having said that, you can be a bit of a monkey when you're an actor and stand there going "Ooh, Ooh, Ooh" when you're told to. That's quite dull so I do like doing different things. For instance, I had never done a comedy before "A Knight's Tale". With that you not only entered a new genre but you did it on the world stage. Did it feel like a fresh start? Absolutely. It's weird, because usually if you're British and you go to America you play baddies; but I play naughty people here and goodies in America. Because of "Gangster No.1", though, that baddie option's always open - but I can't bring myself to do some dreadful Jerry Bruckheimer movie quite yet. Brian Helgeland, the director of "A Knight's Tale", was instrumental in your getting a part in "A Beautiful Mind" wasn't he? Brian took a lot of people into the editing suite - I assume he did it with a gun and violence and forced them to watch – and then I got a phone call asking if I'd like to do "A Beautiful Mind". I met Ron Howard, he was very personable and funny, and then they rang up and said, "Do you want to do it?". It's never, ever, been that easy. And it hasn't been since. You've just finished filming "The Heart of Me" on the Isle of Man and you're about to work with Lars von Trier. You're not already bored of Hollywood, are you? I'm scared to use the word but it's just easier to do films that you really care about in Europe. There are more options to do films that have the potential to be really good. At the risk of sounding like a massive arse, there's a purity of intent. ~~*~~ Prairie Miller for PlanetHollywood.com, 2001 Paul Bettany, Behind the Knight Paul Bettany, who mirrors character Geoffrey Chaucer's quick and lively wit, railed on about the dark side of fame and why American actors get all the luck... Paul Bettany may be the first actor to run around in the buff in a movie that is not rated X. Perhaps that's because we always catch sight of him in A Knight's Tale from the rear view. But that didn't minimize the boldly charismatic personality Bettany displays in this medieval rock 'n roll fantasy, as a very fictionalized, unemployed version of writer Geoffrey Chaucer. Bettany, who easily mirrors Chaucer with the quick, lively wit he demonstrated during this interview, railed on in his own very charming way about the dark side of fame that befalls an actor like Russell Crowe, and what he feels is the routine dissing by Americans of British actors in general... PLANET HOLLYWOOD: How did you end up in A Knight's Tale, not to mention completely nude in it? PAUL BETTANY: Well, I was supposed to be in another movie being made by Brian Helgeland, a horror tale called The Sin Eater, but when they got a look at me in some scenes sent over to Hollywood, they watched it and said, 'Wait, he's British and he's not Ewan McGregor! I don't get it.' So, that's what happened. And after that, Brian refused to make the movie. Six months later, Brian rang me up and said, 'I've written you the part of Geoffrey Chaucer in a movie, would you like to play it?' And I went, 'Give me two min...Yes! Yes!' And Brian said, 'Fantastic.' And I said, 'Great!' Then Brian sent me a picture of an enormously fat, bald and bearded dwarf. I went, 'Oh bugger.' And I did what any self-respecting actor would do, you know, which was to throw any pretension of doing any research whatsoever, straight out of the window and then hope for the best, really. And there followed a two week rehearsal process in Prague... PH: How did you and Brian first meet? PB: Brian met me on a tape that had been shelved. And then he put on the tape and went, 'I want him.' Then he went and met me about the film that never happened, the one that I just told you about. PH: Did you have a wild time playing the naked comic relief in A Knight's Tale? PB: Oh yeah. Because I had never done any comedy, ever. It was a real joy. You're a writer, so you should understand how lovely it is to speak in paragraphs in a movie, because usually you don't even get to speak in sentences. So it was a real joy to exercise that muscle. Brian writes very well, he won an Oscar for L.A. Confidential. Brian has a great touch with language, and it just falls out of your mouth, so it was very easy to do. Except for the fact that everybody who is supposed to be laughing at you is from the Czech Republic! So, obviously they don't understand a word that you're saying. They lifted flags up, to make them laugh. And it was a bit strange when three thousand people would laugh, and I knew it was because of a flag! PH: What was the rehearsal period like? PB: It essentially took the form of an intense period of... enforced alcoholism! We drank a frankly mesmerizing amount of alcohol. And we bonded very quickly! So I think that if there's a success to this movie, not speaking financially, it's that we all get on now. PH: Who drank the most? PB: I can't remember! But when we were on the set, nobody was drinking or behaving badly. As for me, as a British actor in my first SAG film, you have the work rights of a sort of 18th century pit horse. You know, they basically film you until you buckle under your own weight. And then they go, 'Oh take him home.' PH: Is there an equally strange story around how you got involved in the movie, A Beautiful Mind? PB: Yes! Brian Helgeland took Ron Howard by gunpoint into a cinema and said, 'Watch Paul Bettany in this.' So, Brian is really my champion. And when he's old, senile and doddering, and writing really stupid films, I'm still going to be in them. PH: What is A Beautiful Mind all about? PB: Well, Russell Crowe plays John Nash. He's a mathematician who won the Nobel Prize for economics. He had a very troubled, disturbed life, and I play his best friend who nudges him, and who doesn't turn his back on him when everybody else does. PH: Did you and Russell become friends? PB: Yeah, doing Dudley Moore and Peter Cook impressions. That's what we do -- and we swear a lot. And Russell has an amazing ability to change accents, really amazing. We're filming in New Jersey right now, in Bayonne. In one of the poisoned military bases! But I've since discovered that it's not true, so my life now is less exciting. Thanks a lot! PH: You weren't bad in the movie Dead Babies... PB: Oh, did you see that? You and my mom I think have gone to see that one! But Dead Babies is an extraordinary novel, one of my favorites, about apathy among young people. It's a very dark comedy, and it was very difficult to make, but if anybody asked me if I'd do it again, I'd say yes. Golly, this is weird. We're having an intelligent interview! I haven't been asked all the details about my nudity in A Knight's Tale yet. This is the first time I haven't had to talk about my genitals! PH: Hey, I can go there, too! But getting back to A Beautiful Mind, were you there the day Russell Crowe gave somebody the finger? PB: On second thought, you are the weakest link. Goodbye! All right... So, what happened was that I spent eleven hours and fifty-five minutes of those twelve-hour shooting days with Russell. And I left five minutes before that happened. But during those eleven hours and fifty-five minutes, Russell shook everybody's hand. He ruffled people's hair, and was signing autographs. And that incident happened during an exterior scene, where he was trying to work. It's like if you were busy typing up this interview we're doing, and I started going, 'LA, LA, LA, LA' ....in front you. So, Russell was trying to do this scene, and behind him is an entire bank of people, waving their arms at him and stuff. And that's tough, you know. Like Russell is at the top of his game, as he is at the moment, and he kind of wants to stay there -- and suddenly you're faced with people screaming at you, 'Russell, Russell.' So, there were those eleven hours and fifty-five minutes of hair ruffling, pressing flesh, kissing babies and signing autographs. Then I leave five minutes before the end of the shoot, when Russell flips one person the finger. And that's the bit that's kind of remembered. I mean, it must be hell sometimes, being Russell Crowe. Like at the end of a seventeen-hour day once, he had forty photographers outside his trailer. And Russell is just trying to present a schizophrenic on the screen, banging his head against the window, or whatever he's been doing. Then there are forty people interested in how you look after seventeen hours of shooting. Actors get paid a lot of money, and I suppose if you get in bed with the devil, you're going to expect him to screw you once or twice, but I wouldn't want to put up with, you know, the sheer volume of crap that Russell has to put up with. It's sort of frightening, I've never seen anything like it, but I had never seen anything like that in Europe. It was a real feeding frenzy. I just would never want to be in that position. PH: What's it like working with Ron Howard on A Beautiful Mind? PB: It was sort of like meeting an old mate, because I grew up with him, watching him on TV. He's very soft spoken. Usually when he says something, it's sort of annoyingly brilliant and insightful. I like him very much. He's entirely how you would imagine him. But with less hair! It's great, though, because British actors usually don't get to do great things in American movies. Maybe because of that whole War of Independence thing. French actors get to play good lovers, because of American gratitude to Lafayette. And we get to play baddies, in Die Hard [Alan Rickman]! PH: Hmm, I never thought of it quite like that... What are you doing next? PB: After that, I'm... gainfully unemployed! I'm tired. I might just sit and watch my turnips grow. ~~*~~ Stephen Hobbs for The Sunday Times, 9th December 2001 Even in lousy films he shines. And Hollywood is mad for him. Paul Bettany turns his dangerous charm on Stephen Hobbs The world is split into two kinds of people,' Paul Bettany is explaining, arms raised for added theatrical effect: 'those who would go out for a drink with John Lennon, and those who'd choose Paul McCartney.' It's barely 10.30am, and the actor has already hit upon a favourite topic. His arguments are slick and practised, the result of conversations he has been having since he was 15 years old. And he sides so firmly with Lennon that there's no room for manoeuvre. 'Put it this way,' he adds, 'after the Beatles came back from India, Lennon wrote Happiness Is a Warm Gun and McCartney wrote Ob-La-Di. End of argument.' What if Sir Paul phones after this interview to invite you for a swift half? 'He'd have to write me a note personally apologising for Mull of Kintyre first.' Seeing him in such a jocular mood, it's easy to forget that Bettany is the critically lauded star of 1999's ultra-violent movie Gangster No 1 and is one of the great white hopes for British talent in Hollywood. Ten years ago, the closest the 30-year-old might have got to meeting Macca would have been if the former Beatle had thrown a handful of coppers to the young actor while he busked on Westminster Pier. Today, the odds against the two meeting at some celebrity gala have slimmed dramatically enough for Bettany to consider moderating his world view. After returning from filming the Oscar hopeful A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe and Ed Harris, Bettany was to be seen recently on the big screen playing Geoffrey Chaucer in the historically ambivalent A Knight's Tale. His next British outing will be this month as the lead in The Reckoning, directed by Paul McGuigan (who directed Gangster No 1), a reworking of Barry Unsworth's Booker-nominated Morality Play. Bettany plays Nicholas, a medieval priest on the run from adultery and murder who finds redemption with a troupe of travelling players. Eighteen months after he shocked cinema audiences with the dangerous charm he brought to Malcolm McDowell's psychotic younger (and considerably taller) incarnation in Gangster, Hollywood is well and truly calling. Producers and directors have been lining up to work with him. More than that, various projects have even been put on hold to ensure that Bettany will be on set - something unheard of for a relative unknown. 'I owe so many people,' Bettany admits. 'Paul McGuigan took such a risk when he cast me, an unknown actor, in Gangster. And Brian Helgeland [the Oscar-winning writer of LA Confidential, and director of A Knight's Tale] refused to do a movie because they wouldn't have me in it. He wrote the part in A Knight's Tale specifically for me. And I had no qualifications at all to do cheeky or funny acting. I play stoics and bad guys. I really turned up on set expecting them to say, 'Oh no, we wanted Paul Battany.'' Although Jude Law and Ewan McGregor have finally made their mark in the United States, precious few Brits, save Vinnie Jones and Mr Bean, have followed in their wake. So what is it that Bettany has that so many actors such as Rhys Ifans, and even David Thewlis, appear not to have? 'I like working,' he grins. 'I'm quite chipper on set.' His personal charm cannot be a handicap. Tall and striking, with those piercing blue eyes, Bettany has oodles of charisma. Initially he comes across as quite languid, but the chain-smoking and restlessness soon put paid to that. In front of an audience, even when it's made up of just one interviewer, he shines. It seems that for every quip he makes, another four have been rejected. He just likes everyone to be at ease. Besides, Bettany is famous now and this is supposed to be fun. 'Being on set with the likes of Willem Dafoe or Ed Harris is just the best thing in the world. Stitch a few days like that together and you have a hell of a life,' he says. But more than the charm, or the chipper on-set banter, what's really got Hollywood interested is his genuine talent. Bettany is good even when a film is bad. He almost made William Marsh's adaptation of Martin Amis's Dead Babies watchable - impressive for a film so terrible that there are no plans to release it on video. But it was in Gangster No 1 that he mesmerised the industry scouts at Cannes with a performance of such dead-eyed violence and blood-splattered playfulness that it made the film an overnight classic, a welcome antidote to the middle-class gangster glam of Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels that British cinema needed. Reminiscent of both a young Malcolm McDowell ('I watched a lot of his films, especially A Clockwork Orange. There is a lot of Alex in Young Gangster') and, more frighteningly for a psychotic killer, Michael Caine circa Alfie, Bettany was the quintessential British antihero. Cheeky and attractive, yet disturbingly dark. Harris, his co-star on A Beautiful Mind, sums it up best when he tells me: 'It's in his eyes. He's got those eyes that can either love you or spook you.' It's true. 'Look into my eyes,' was Young Gangster's catchphrase, and Bettany rarely breaks contact during our conversation. His eyes are not that brilliant blue of Paul Newman's, more a steel blue. Mostly they laugh when he does, but sometimes they don't, and it's unnerving. It is then that you get a hint that Bettany has lived a little more than his chirpy cockney demeanour betrays. 'I am so badly prepared for fame,' he remarks as he fumbles through his pockets for a credit card. He lost his wallet somewhere last night - par for the course, he assures me, where money is concerned. 'Six months ago I didn't even have a credit card. No credit rating, you see. Luckily, the bank have taken care of me. They pointed out that it was stupid to suddenly have all this money in a current account.' He produces a credit card from the recesses of his army greatcoat with a snort of triumph. 'You could buy a house on this little baby,' he grins, then immediately looks worried. 'It's scary.' In fact, Bettany has been buying a house while he's back in London. 'It's nice to feel a bit settled here,' he says. 'I thought about New York, because it's not really American. It's the fourth important European city. But I love living in London too much to leave it.' The city has always been Bettany's home. Born in Willesden, north London, and brought up in nearby Harlesden, he describes his childhood as 'thoroughly middle class'. The son of an actor - 'He mostly taught drama when I was growing up' - and a school secretary, he was bright enough at school, if fairly unremarkable. Then, at the age of 16, he was thrust into the centre of playground attention when his younger brother, Matthew, was killed in an accident. 'Death is quite alienating. Everyone around me was a teenager and felt indestructible. And there I was, constantly reminding them that you're not.' Matthew's death affected Bettany profoundly. When he talks about the years that directly followed, his eyes stop laughing and he glosses over events with pat one-liners: 'I lived in Turnpike Lane with 50,000 cockroaches and the two smallest lesbians in the world;' 'I once busked on a Tube train with a man called Barry the Bat. Not because he only came out at night or had a propensity to hang upside down, but because of his choice of weapon.' Boom, boom Push him and he'll admit: 'I was really lost, and I didn't talk to anyone for a year and a half. It wasn't much fun. I didn't take part in life. I went out busking, bought food, ate it and then went out busking again.' His favourite pitch was Westminster Pier: 'Play Cure songs when French girls are there and you make a lot of money.' On a good day, Bettany would make £20 an hour. On a bad day, he'd end up in a fight with another busker who'd stolen his pitch. He worried a lot, drank too much and developed a taste for cocaine. 'Once I discovered chemical drugs, I wasn't so interested in other things any more. There are people who can take drugs recreationally, but I couldn't.' Then he grins and, with a passable Caine impression, drawls: 'For me, it was a full-time job.' Aged 20, Bettany finally got back in touch with his only remaining school friend, the actor Dan Fredenburgh. Fredenburgh's mother, a therapist, took him under her wing. 'She gave me the vocabulary to help understand what was happening to me,' Bettany says, unconsciously slipping into the shorthand of professional analysis. Then he catches himself and shakes his head. 'They bothered to put up with me while I was being an ahole.' A place secured at London's Drama Centre made things better. 'I was happy there. I was reading for pleasure for the first time and I started to enjoy the process of acting, of finding out how characters emotionally get from A to C.' Then he pauses, and the eyes are distant as he thinks about what he is trying to say. 'Let me put it another way. When Lennon recorded Mother, it was first-person, honest and revealing. I wouldn't want people to know that much about me. Acting is like a buffer. And I'm in a better place because of it.' Watching him as he flirts with the photographer and makes jokes about his nudity in A Knight's Tale -'A burly Czech grip came at me with a roll of gaffer tape' - it's hard to imagine any better place for him to be, if only because Bettany doesn't have any of the skills that your father might call 'useful'. 'I can make an origami rabbit's head that you inflate,' he offers, rather apologetically, when I ask what his options might have been. 'And I play guitar like a cobbler. Will that do?' For the moment it appears more than enough. Finally, Bettany has found a home and, for the moment at least, someone to share it with: his co-star in A Knight's Tale, the Scottish actress Laura Fraser. But she comes under the category of things he doesn't want other people to know. 'Do you mind if we don't talk about her?' he asks. 'Only last time I did, we stopped being together for four months. And I loathed every minute of it.' Then he's off again, excited and full of had-to-be-there fanecdotes about meeting his heroes: 'The first time I was introduced to Peter O'Toole he yawned and walked away,' or 'On my headstone I want them to put 'Saffron Burrows spat on him 40 times in one day' [for a three-minute scene in Gangster No 1]. Later, she told me she'd had TB.' As epitaphs go, it's not a bad one. But death is no longer a big preoccupation with Bettany. Certainly not when there are more important things to consider. Like the great McCartney-vs-Lennon debate. 'Now you're just being controversial,' he snaps irritably, eyes sliding away again, as I point out that Macca didn't break up the Beatles, abandon Britain for the US or replace songwriting with staying in bed. 'But you couldn't have the Beatles without both of them,' he concedes. 'Sometimes you need those two different sides to make good things happen.' And maybe he's right. ~~*~~ J. Sperling Reich for E!Online, date unknown Paul Bettany: The Naked Truth It's no small task to steal a scene from an up-and-coming heartthrob like Heath Ledger. But Paul Bettany does just that in A Knight's Tale, playing legendary author Geoffrey Chaucer with dead-on comedic flair. Of course, running around stark naked in his first scene doesn't hurt either. The British-born actor originally trained to be a thespian at the Drama Center in London and has been acting on stage since he was a teen. After appearing in nearly a dozen major plays, Bettany began to segue into British film and television, then into American film with the World War II drama Bent, costarring Ian McKellen and Jude Law. Next up is the Russell Crowe vehicle A Beautiful Mind, about Nobel Prize winner John Nash. The easygoing, fair-haired Bettany is such a convincing comedic actor that Knight's Tale writer-director Brian Helgeland refused to make a movie without him, penning the role of Chaucer with Bettany in mind. Not bad for a guy who swears he isn't funny. Which got us to wondering... Did he realize he would steal a lot of the scenes? "No, not really. I didn't pay it much thought. I've got no history in comedy. I've never done stand-up or anything like this before. I usually play monosyllabic, moody bastards, so it was a real shock when this part opened. I was frankly flattered that Brian saw all that in me." We hear the director is a big fan. "Yeah, it's a really beautiful story. What happened was that Brian had found a video of me doing an audition for him--it had been hidden and shelved. He flew over to London and, for two days, filmed me. He took it back to the studios, put it together painstakingly to make me look halfway decent, and they went, 'Well now, let's be honest: He's English, and he's not Jude Law. What the fuck would we use him for?' I rang up Brian and said, 'Don't be a fool. Make your film.' And he said, 'Don't flatter yourself. If I yield on you, I'll have to yield on everything. I will never leave you out in the cold.' " So, it's not through any skill of mine. It's through his pigheaded tenacity that I ended up doing the film. Which means I owe him a lifelong debt. When he gets old and doddery and senile and starts writing really stupid movies, I'll still be in them. Well, hopefully, he won't still be nude. What was it like shooting that first scene? "It was the first day. There were 7,000 crew members or something like that. We were in a field--you can't make that a closed set--and you are, frankly, naked. I hear rumors that some people wear socks over their stuff. But that's just silly, that's just drawing attention to yourself. It's like, I'm wearing a sock on my penis! I couldn't really do that. "For some ungodly reason, I end up being naked in a lot of stuff. But there is a certain grace and kudos that come with taking your clothes off on the first day, a respect that is given by the rest of the cast. They look at your body and go, 'Fuck, you're brave! You can't even spell gym, can you?' That's one good thing about it." And the worst thing? "People come up to you and say, "Paul, we're seeing your testicles--and we can't be seeing your testicles." Then, of course, this enormous man comes to you with a piece of gaffer's tape. And you go, 'Call me Old Mr. Picky, but I'm doing it myself!' " Maybe he can give some nude-scene tips to Russell Crowe. Any good stories about working with him? "The day after he won the Oscar, he turned up on set, and he was brilliant. Then he took us to a bar for a drink...only he came in through the back. Then when we left, we all went out the front, and we realized why he'd come in through the back--because it took him half an hour to get across the room. He was entirely humble about it. I would have been naked, running around going, 'I've got an Oscar, and you haven't!' " ~~*~~ Jeannie Williams for USA Online, 15th May 2001 Breakout: Paul Bettany Who's hot: Paul Bettany Why now? This London-born-and-bred actor plays bawdy bard Geoffrey Chaucer as a young man in A Knight's Tale, the medieval jousting movie starring Heath Ledger. The buzz: Bettany, 29, makes his entrance naked (rear view only) and steals the movie with his charm and mobile face. "I guess I'll be known as Naked Guy," says Paul Bettany. "It's very strange to sit in a screening room and see your buttocks get a laugh." Actually, it's not new for him: In his many European films, often as a gangster, "I don't think I've done one where I haven't been naked." Bettany, a onetime London busker, or street entertainer, knew director Brian Helgeland, who tried to get him into a movie Helgeland had written. "The studio looked at the screen test and said, 'Wait, he's English and he's not Jude Law.' " But six months later, Helgeland called to say, "Would you like to do Geoffrey Chaucer? I've written it for you." "He sent me a picture of a fat, bald, bearded dwarf. I am blond, 6-foot-3, and, frankly, emaciated. So I threw out pretensions of doing any research. The Canterbury Tales are bawdy gags, so we were irreverent." This Chaucer is "a rabble-rouser who played to the crowds." Tale's score incorporates classic '70s arena-rock music, from Queen to David Bowie to Thin Lizzy. Bettany plays acoustic guitar and always travels with it to movie locations. John Lennon is "my all-time hero as a songwriter," he says. When it comes to discussing his personal life, he's going the privacy route. He has a girlfriend, but he made her a promise he wouldn't discuss their relationship. He will say he's "entirely a natural blond, and therefore prone to trailing off into silence and looking dumb." He studied at London's Drama Center, and says his his first break was the play Love and Understanding by Joe Penhall (who this year won many awards for Blue Orange), which Bettany also did at Connecticut's Long Wharf Theater. He has had small parts in the movies Dead Babies, Kiss Kiss and The Suicide Club, and in TV's David Copperfield. He's now at work with Russell Crowe and Ed Harris on A Beautiful Mind. Crowe, he says, is "very charming and humble." Bettany plays a composite character who is loyal to the schizophrenic genius played by Crowe. His other movie out this year is Morality Play, in which he's a medieval priest found having sex with a parishioner by her husband. Wouldn't you know, Bettany kills the husband — while naked. Breakout is an occasional feature spotlighting emerging artists. ~~*~~ reality, 10th May 2001 Behind the scenes with Paul Bettany Paul Bettany came into Philadelphia two weeks ago to promote his role of Geoffrey Chaucer in the new movie, "A Knight’s Tale," which opens tomorrow. Bettany, a native of England, started his career doing theater in London, before coming stateside. reality: You started out doing theater in London. What was that experience like? PB: Good and bad. Some parts were better than others. I much preferred working on fringe plays I did. reality: What originally did you like about the script for "A Knight’s Tale?" PB: The fact it was entirely irreverent and it was a giggle and my mate wrote the part for me. He said, ‘Do you want to do this?’ And I said, ‘Give me two seconds, yes. Of course I wanna do it.’ I just thought it lampooned. It is actually written about Brian Helgeland, who is the writer. It is basically an analogy. He is William, really. He wanted to write a film about a young screenwriter wanting to direct a movie. And he wrote some ideas and we went back and forth and not even he wanted to see those movies. So he ended up making it about knights and chose the peasants for the writers. He changed the lords to the directors. Yeah. reality: In the film you play the writer, Geoffrey Chaucer. How did you prepare for the role? PB: An enormous amount of alcohol. Brian got us out two weeks early. Lied to all of our management and Sony Pictures, Columbia, said that we needed to rehearse. Then we didn’t rehearse. I read "Canterbury Tales" and basically they are one fart gag right after another. I saw a picture of Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a very, very small, fat, bald-headed man with a beard. I’m not and I can’t lose height. So there is no mention of a gambling problem or stuff like that. So you have to realize we were leaving reality quite far behind. Preparation didn’t really matter. reality: Was "Canterbury Tales" all that you read of Chaucer’s work? PB: Yeah, because it is Middle English and it is a frightful bore. So yes it was, I’m ashamed to say. reality: It’ll be our little secret. Next question: Did you have any problems playing Chaucer, other than not being able to shrink to his height? PB: Yes. Basically, he is an entire fabrication of Brian. The spirit of him is at the end of the movie, when he says, all human life is under the artist’s scope. It’s a lovely thing to say at the end of a movie. The conceit is the six months of Chaucer’s life that are completely unaccountable for when he went off and no one knows where he went. Apparently the conceit is that this is the six months. He came and his life was changed and he came back and started writing "The Canterbury Tales" instead of a book. Bearing in mind that it is entirely fabricated and just irreverent and fun, the real problem was you are doing a speech in front of 3,000 extras. You’re doing a speech that you have prepared and nobody laughs. And the reason they don’t laugh is because they are in the Czech Republic and they don’t understand a fucking word you say. So what you do is you discover how shallow you are, because you have this flag system where it’s written down in the script when people should hold flags up prompting the whole bunch of people laugh. And because I am so shallow I thought I was killing them, even though I knew they were lifting up flags. I just thought this was going so well. They didn’t understand a fucking word I was saying. Five Questions 1. What color underwear are you wearing right now? I don’t wear any. However, I now feel unchic because of it. 2. If you could be any animal, what would you be? A furry squirrel. 3. Would you rather be one of Charlie’s Angels or Josie’s Pussycats? Charlie’s Angels. Cameron Diaz, to be more specific. 4. What was the last thing you bought? A video camera. 5. What are you most afraid of? Being alone. ~~*~~ Liz Braun for The Toronto Sun, 9th May 2001 Paul Bettany makes merry with A Knight's Tale Paul Bettany plays Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight's Tale and is happy to tell all he knows about the famed 14th-century poet: "He was small and fat," says the very tall, very thin actor. "He told a lot of fart jokes." Alllrighty, then. Bettany is part of the very cheerful enemble cast of A Knight's Tale, the film based -- very lightly -- on a section of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Led by Heath Ledger, A Knight's Tale works out to be a rousing mix of jousting and metal rock; it opens here Friday. Having confessed to being naked in many movies ("I've done it so often now I don't have to be quite so drunk beforehand,") to having been arrested by a former flatmate ("The smallest lesbian in the world,") who turned out to be a transit cop, to busking in his youth and to being a Gemini ("I like windsurfing and men who can cry,") Bettany is more than willing to discuss the filming of A Knight's Tale in the Czech Republic. Director Brian Helgeland had the cast, which also includes Rufus Sewell, Alan Tudyk, Mark Addy and Shannyn Sossamon, assemble in Prague for a month of rehearsals. "And then, he just imposed alcoholism on us, really," says Bettany, deadpan. "The thing is, you do bond enormously, but nobody did a jot of work in that period. It was like a paid vacation." Prague, meanwhile, he describes as one of the most beautiful cities he has ever visited. "Say what you will about communism," jokes Bettany, "but they didn't have the money to knock everything down and build something new, so the buildings are ancient and magnificent." Bettany, who will turn 30 later this month, grew up in London, where he trained at the Drama Centre. The move from "student actor" to full-time actor came about, he says, because "I had enormous debts. The principal sweetly let me leave to do a job." We'll assume he is referring to his role in An Inspector Calls, which was his stage debut. He had a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company and also appeared on stage in One More Wasted Year and Stranger's House. Bettany made his film debut in Bent. He was in Morality Play, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Land Girls and Dead Babies and played Steerforth in the TNT production of David Copperfield. Bettany also stars in Gangster No. 1 with Malcolm McDowell, which opens here later this year. He's currently filming A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe. Working with Crowe is an experience he is happy to discuss. "Our entire time together was spent doing Dudley Moore and Peter Cook impressions." His career he laughs off by saying, "I'm only in this for the art," in an arch fashion, but it's difficult not to believe him. Success, Bettany says, you do not measure by money. You measure it by the piece. "And four things that have moved me forward as a person are Love And Understanding, Morality Play, Gangster No. 1 and An Inspector Calls. They are just things that taught me about human beings." How -- as a human being and all -- did he fare with the complicated period costumes in A Knight's Tale? Certainly, Heath Ledger and Rufus Sewell had stories about wearing the armor. Says Bettany, "Taking a piss when you're wearing those things is a complete nightmare. I haven't had any NASA training, and it ties in the back. There are so many strings in the back you feel like a puppet." Smiling a wicked smile, he adds, "Which many people think actors are, anyway." ~~*~~ Chrissy Iley for The Sunday Times, 4th June 2000 Shooting Star When I first met Paul Bettany and had dinner with him, all I knew was that he was charismatic and handsome, which was why everyone in the restaurant, Orso in Los Angeles, was looking at him rather than at Sharon Stone, who was dining in the opposite corner. This was a year ago, when he had only some dangerously good theatre roles and television series to his credit. Now it's very different. This year's Cannes Film Festival was wowed with his performance in Gangster No 1. Directors have been battling for him, and producers upping their deal. People are saying he's the most exciting British actor since Daniel Day-Lewis. And, at 29, he is the first young British actor to be given a "pay or play" guarantee. That's the deal that only stars as big as Tom Cruise can generally demand. It means if you accept a role in a film, you will be paid full price whether or not that film gets made and released. Even if they never shoot a day. Less than 10 years ago, Bettany had no acting ambitions and was a busker on Westminster Bridge singing John Lennon songs. Right now he's basking in the glow that Gangster has afforded him. The film is not a gangster caper in the mode of Lock, Stock and the several copycat movies it's spawned. It's a much darker tale of jealousy, greed and the destructive forces of human nature. The story, set in the 1960s, centres on a violent criminal looking back at his life and some of the terrible thing he's done. Its violence isn't jokey or video game arcade. It features terrifying and compelling scenes, like the one where a person is being bludgeoned to death, filmed as if you are that person. For a moment, you feel that you, too, have died. Bettany stars as the young version of the mad killer who grows up to be played by Malcolm McDowell. They both have those terrifyingly intense flashing eyes. Was it easy to turn into psychopathic rage and then just leave it alone, or did he become a slightly difficult person for a while ? "I'd come home - I was staying with friends - and they'd say what did you do today ? Well, I actually spent 12 hours stabbing someone in the neck with a corkscrew and calling them a dirty cunt. If you repeated that for 12 hours, it would make you feel quite odd. Do you know what I mean ?" For another scene, the model-turned-actress Saffron Burrows has to spit right in his face. "It was a shock when she did it the first time. She just did it, right off the cuff. She said she'd had tuberculosis when she was a kid and then she spat in my face about 20 times to get it right." Bettany grew up in Harlesden, northwest London, the son of two teachers. Although his father taught acting, he never went to drama school or anything like that. "I was a busker for a couple of years, then worked in a training centre for the mentally handicapped. I moved to Turnpike Lane and lived with the two smallest lesbians and about a quarter of a million cockroaches, all above a Greek restaurant. Busking is a very dull job. I sang things like Money (That's What I Want) by the Beatles. It requires no skill. You just have to have a strong voice and shout loudly. I love playing my guitar though. I don't travel anywhere without it and I still believe it's true that the world can be divided into those people who would rather have a drink with John Lennon and those who would rather drink with Paul McCartney." He says that he doesn't think he has any friends who want to have drinks with Paul McCartney. The busking years were a kind of mourning period for his younger brother, who, when Bettany was still a teenager, was killed in a fall, aged only eight. "He died and it tore me apart. You suddenly realise every day how much imagined memory you have. I have memories of taking him with his girlfriend to the cinema for the first time, moving him into this student flat. I have memories that never actually happened. You realise how much into the future you do imagine. It's a daily heartbreak. I know people who are 40 and just working out that the world is unsafe. If this happens when you're 16, it's really alienating." He says his brother's death has made him obsessed with children."It's my fixation. I want to have endless babies. I'd like to set up a factory. I'd just like enormously fat ones and to have lots of grandchildren." He talks about how on Gangster he was made sane all the quicker by jumping out of his darkness and running around with a little kid who was a driver's son. "I'd adore to be a father right now, but my girlfriend can't be messing around taking nine months out of her career." The girlfriend is the actress Laure Fraser. They met six months ago on an audition for a job that neither of them got. "We went out to dinner and haven't been apart since. She's 24, raring to live. It was enormous love at first sight on my part. She was slightly reticent. Much cooler than I was. I was bumbling and desperate." But would you have been bumbling and desperate if she'd been keen ? "God, that's one of the most depressing questions there is in life. It fills me with dread. The answer is, you're right, no." Coincidentally, Fraser was cast in his next film, where he plays Chaucer in A Knight's Tale. She plays a blacksmith. Bettany has four movies coming out in quick succession: Gangster No 1, which opens this week; Dead Babies; a dark comedy called Kiss Kiss Bang Bang; A Knight's Tale; and then Morality Play next year. This is bound to turn him into a household name. But although he wants to perfect his art and succeed at something he's good at, he is none too comfortable getting into the mode of photo shoots and interviews. Despite his obvious charm, Bettany claims he's been dumped more times than he's dumped. "Or maybe you just remember the ones that dump you. It always feels like those are the huge relationships. I suppose I've done my share of behaving badly." I remind him that the last time we met, he was despairing over a girl that got away. Are they friends now ? "We are phone friends as opposed to firm friends. She rings up if she's got trouble, which is kind of gratifying." Then a panic comes into his voice when he recalls a women's magazine recently citing him as the new heartbreaker and misquoting him. "I said, 'Where women are concerned, I usually like to bring a little dullness into their otherwise colourful lives.' Not greatly funny, but they then changed it to, 'Where women are concerned, I like to bring a little colour into their lives.' How embarassing is that?"