Billy Sewell: "My daddy's potty-trained..."
Jan 6, 2008 11:18:45 GMT
Post by GreenEyesToo on Jan 6, 2008 11:18:45 GMT
I've just been a-googling, and came across this New York Times article that I don't believe I've read - I'm sure I'd remember the quote from Billy at the end! 
I've highlighted my favourite parts, sorry for that indulgence.... ;D
A Character Actor Is Hiding Behind Those Chiseled Features
By SARAH LYALL
Published: August 13, 2006
LONDON
UNFORTUNATELY for Rufus Sewell, who would have preferred to play the dogged, unprepossessing police inspector in the forthcoming film “The Illusionist,” it just wasn’t going to happen.
“I was like, ‘Rufus,’ ” the film’s director and writer, Neil Burger, said in an interview, affecting the voice of an indulgent parent explaining a rudimentary fact to a small stubborn child. (Mr. Sewell instead took the part Mr. Burger intended for him, that of Leopold, an impatient crown prince.)
The inspector — played by Paul Giamatti — “is more of a Claude Rains type,” Mr. Burger continued, speaking by telephone from New York. He then used the phrase that makes Mr. Sewell wince every time he hears it. “Rufus is more of a leading man.”
Everyone should have a problem like Mr. Sewell’s leading-manliness. What actor wouldn’t want those forceful good looks, those unruly dark curls, those large hazel-green eyes, so startling as to be almost frightening? But inside the alluring package lurks a misfit of a character actor longing to break free. It is Mr. Sewell’s stubbornness about his roles as much as anything else that has perhaps kept him from big stardom. Which is fine with him, usually.
“I think the only thing I’ve got going for me as an actor specifically is the fact that I can change,” Mr. Sewell said over lunch here recently. He described his career as a battle against a changing army of stereotypes. (“First I was seen as a brooding bloke on a horse, and then a baddie, and then a king,” he said.) His hunger for variety has lately led him to small, quirky films, Hollywood comedies, lavish television costume dramas and the West End stage.
In addition to “The Illusionist,” which opens on Aug. 18, he is appearing here in Tom Stoppard’s new hit play, “Rock ’n’ Roll,” playing Jan, a music-mad Czech graduate student in England whose return home in 1968, just after the Soviet tanks roll into Prague, sets in motion a spiral of disillusionment, loss and finally hope.
After “The Illusionist,” set in Vienna in the 19th century, as the city teetered between mysticism of the past and the rationality of the future, Mr. Sewell is to appear as the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in “Amazing Grace,” Michael Apted’s film about the slave trade in 19th-century England. (He wears a wig shaped into a gray bob, he said happily, “the thing that suits me the least in the world.”) He then plays what he describes as “a heel” — the comically mean-spirited ex-boyfriend of Kate Winslet — in Nancy Meyers’s romantic comedy “The Holiday,” set to open in December.
Now 38, Mr. Sewell says his work is exactly where it should be: all over the place. “My career has suddenly started to be the one that I’d always wanted, not in terms of level of success, but in terms of — and this is what I’ve been banging on about — playing different parts in different media,” he said. “I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn’t. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I’ve gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.”
Growing up in Twickenham, the son of a film animator who died young and a mother who struggled to make ends meet while working as, among other things, a barmaid and a door-to-door vegetable vendor, Mr. Sewell whiled away his youth dyeing his hair silly colors and being as weird and difficult as he could. “I was more a waster and a layabout than a hooligan, which sounds a little too overenergized,” he said.
A sharp-eyed teacher perceived his talent and lent him the money to apply to drama school. It was there, cast as a young aristocrat in a student production of “Camille,” that he learned how his looks affect others’ perceptions of him.
He has been the hot new thing several times now. The first time was in 1993, when he beat several better-known rivals to play Septimus, the future hermit in Tom Stoppard’s play “Arcadia.” When “Rock ’n’ Roll” came along, Sir Tom said, “Rufus was our first choice, and that was that.”
This being Stoppard, the play is about many things, including music, love, betrayal and the corrosive effects of Communism on believers and dissenters alike. As Jan, who endures the gradual loss of much that he holds dear over the play’s 25-year span, Mr. Sewell has not only to grow into middle age but also to show the toll life has taken.
“In the last part of the play, when he’s about 50, he becomes rather fragile, which is really moving,” Sir Tom said. Of Mr. Sewell’s preparation, he said: “He just took possession of the role. He’s thought it all through in his quiet way. He doesn’t show up and say, ‘How about if I do this?’ or wait to be nudged in the wrong direction. He just sort of does it. It’s he who’s holding the flashlight, as it were, as the play goes forward.”
Mr. Sewell began his anti-romantic-hero campaign early in his career when, after his success onstage in “Arcadia,” he was cast as a succession of screen hunks. He played Will Ladislaw, the sexy, ultra-clever idealist in the British miniseries “Middlemarch” and Seth Starkadder, the smolderingly inarticulate rustic in “Cold Comfort Farm.” More recently he gave a pitch-perfect performance as the sensual and surprisingly kind-hearted monarch in the BBC miniseries “Charles II: The Power & the Passion.”
The title role of “The Illusionist” belongs to Edward Norton, who plays Eisenheim, an enigmatic magician and a formidable match, it turns out, for Mr. Sewell’s character. Mr. Sewell agreed to play the highly intelligent and ultimately fiendish Crown Prince Leopold because he was intrigued by the character, he said, though it peeved him to be thought of as the resident blackguard.
“And then we had the requisite discussion about how he wasn’t really a villain, blah blah blah,” Mr. Sewell said, speaking of Mr. Burger. “But I actually think Leopold is a very complex and sad character. I think he comes across as a person, not a type.” Employing a deliciously cold accent inspired by Anton Walbrook’s as the despotic ballet impresario in “The Red Shoes,” Mr. Sewell conveys Leopold as superior, funny and intermittently terrifying.
“When he came in and read for the part, he had just come off something and his hair was very short, and he looked so strong and handsome,” Mr. Burger said. “He was very contained and controlled, and then so startling and unsettling in his rage that I felt like I had been blown back against the wall.”
Hollywood has never really appealed to Mr. Sewell, who laughs as he recalls hearing an American pop star tell an interviewer how she remained normal because “I’ve got a great team that keep me so well grounded.” He did move to Los Angeles a few years ago with his wife (the two have since split up; they have a 4-year-old son, Billy), renting a house on Sunset Boulevard that supposedly once belonged to Rock Hudson.
“It may have been Rock Hudson’s old house,” Mr. Sewell said, “when Rock Hudson was a truck driver.”
Two weeks after he got there, he was cast in “Charles II,” and had to return to Europe for filming. He could neither break his lease nor sublet the house and, unfortunately, his rent was bigger than his paycheck.
“It ended up being a very expensive way of storing three CD’s and a scarf,” he said.
Not, he said, that he wouldn’t jump at the chance to take a great part in Hollywood, if the right one came along. “I reserve my own permission to change my mind at any given moment,” he said.
He described his ambitions. “I want to be able to do anything,” he said. “I know it’s probably not reasonable to expect, but that’s what I’d like to do.”
He doesn’t want to have to make compromises for success in Hollywood terms, he said, but would love the freedom to pick his parts. Or, as he put it: “I don’t want to be at that level. I just want the advantages of being at that level.”
Although he claims to be “just three compliments away at any given moment ” from being a bona fide big-headed star, Mr. Sewell seems refreshingly unegotistical, at least by the warped standards of the acting world. If he ever forgets himself, he can remember what Billy said when asked exactly what his father did for a living. This was while Mr. Sewell was filming “The Legend of Zorro.” “My daddy’s potty-trained, and he has a friend called Zorro,” Billy said.
www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/movies/13lyal.html
I've highlighted my favourite parts, sorry for that indulgence.... ;D
A Character Actor Is Hiding Behind Those Chiseled Features
By SARAH LYALL
Published: August 13, 2006
LONDON
UNFORTUNATELY for Rufus Sewell, who would have preferred to play the dogged, unprepossessing police inspector in the forthcoming film “The Illusionist,” it just wasn’t going to happen.
“I was like, ‘Rufus,’ ” the film’s director and writer, Neil Burger, said in an interview, affecting the voice of an indulgent parent explaining a rudimentary fact to a small stubborn child. (Mr. Sewell instead took the part Mr. Burger intended for him, that of Leopold, an impatient crown prince.)
The inspector — played by Paul Giamatti — “is more of a Claude Rains type,” Mr. Burger continued, speaking by telephone from New York. He then used the phrase that makes Mr. Sewell wince every time he hears it. “Rufus is more of a leading man.”
Everyone should have a problem like Mr. Sewell’s leading-manliness. What actor wouldn’t want those forceful good looks, those unruly dark curls, those large hazel-green eyes, so startling as to be almost frightening? But inside the alluring package lurks a misfit of a character actor longing to break free. It is Mr. Sewell’s stubbornness about his roles as much as anything else that has perhaps kept him from big stardom. Which is fine with him, usually.
“I think the only thing I’ve got going for me as an actor specifically is the fact that I can change,” Mr. Sewell said over lunch here recently. He described his career as a battle against a changing army of stereotypes. (“First I was seen as a brooding bloke on a horse, and then a baddie, and then a king,” he said.) His hunger for variety has lately led him to small, quirky films, Hollywood comedies, lavish television costume dramas and the West End stage.
In addition to “The Illusionist,” which opens on Aug. 18, he is appearing here in Tom Stoppard’s new hit play, “Rock ’n’ Roll,” playing Jan, a music-mad Czech graduate student in England whose return home in 1968, just after the Soviet tanks roll into Prague, sets in motion a spiral of disillusionment, loss and finally hope.
After “The Illusionist,” set in Vienna in the 19th century, as the city teetered between mysticism of the past and the rationality of the future, Mr. Sewell is to appear as the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson in “Amazing Grace,” Michael Apted’s film about the slave trade in 19th-century England. (He wears a wig shaped into a gray bob, he said happily, “the thing that suits me the least in the world.”) He then plays what he describes as “a heel” — the comically mean-spirited ex-boyfriend of Kate Winslet — in Nancy Meyers’s romantic comedy “The Holiday,” set to open in December.
Now 38, Mr. Sewell says his work is exactly where it should be: all over the place. “My career has suddenly started to be the one that I’d always wanted, not in terms of level of success, but in terms of — and this is what I’ve been banging on about — playing different parts in different media,” he said. “I was very frustrated, in a physical sense, by people seeing me in a way that I wasn’t. And I was beginning to find myself boxed into a corner. Hopefully things have loosed up a bit, and I’ve gotten better and become more relaxed as an actor.”
Growing up in Twickenham, the son of a film animator who died young and a mother who struggled to make ends meet while working as, among other things, a barmaid and a door-to-door vegetable vendor, Mr. Sewell whiled away his youth dyeing his hair silly colors and being as weird and difficult as he could. “I was more a waster and a layabout than a hooligan, which sounds a little too overenergized,” he said.
A sharp-eyed teacher perceived his talent and lent him the money to apply to drama school. It was there, cast as a young aristocrat in a student production of “Camille,” that he learned how his looks affect others’ perceptions of him.
He has been the hot new thing several times now. The first time was in 1993, when he beat several better-known rivals to play Septimus, the future hermit in Tom Stoppard’s play “Arcadia.” When “Rock ’n’ Roll” came along, Sir Tom said, “Rufus was our first choice, and that was that.”
This being Stoppard, the play is about many things, including music, love, betrayal and the corrosive effects of Communism on believers and dissenters alike. As Jan, who endures the gradual loss of much that he holds dear over the play’s 25-year span, Mr. Sewell has not only to grow into middle age but also to show the toll life has taken.
“In the last part of the play, when he’s about 50, he becomes rather fragile, which is really moving,” Sir Tom said. Of Mr. Sewell’s preparation, he said: “He just took possession of the role. He’s thought it all through in his quiet way. He doesn’t show up and say, ‘How about if I do this?’ or wait to be nudged in the wrong direction. He just sort of does it. It’s he who’s holding the flashlight, as it were, as the play goes forward.”
Mr. Sewell began his anti-romantic-hero campaign early in his career when, after his success onstage in “Arcadia,” he was cast as a succession of screen hunks. He played Will Ladislaw, the sexy, ultra-clever idealist in the British miniseries “Middlemarch” and Seth Starkadder, the smolderingly inarticulate rustic in “Cold Comfort Farm.” More recently he gave a pitch-perfect performance as the sensual and surprisingly kind-hearted monarch in the BBC miniseries “Charles II: The Power & the Passion.”
The title role of “The Illusionist” belongs to Edward Norton, who plays Eisenheim, an enigmatic magician and a formidable match, it turns out, for Mr. Sewell’s character. Mr. Sewell agreed to play the highly intelligent and ultimately fiendish Crown Prince Leopold because he was intrigued by the character, he said, though it peeved him to be thought of as the resident blackguard.
“And then we had the requisite discussion about how he wasn’t really a villain, blah blah blah,” Mr. Sewell said, speaking of Mr. Burger. “But I actually think Leopold is a very complex and sad character. I think he comes across as a person, not a type.” Employing a deliciously cold accent inspired by Anton Walbrook’s as the despotic ballet impresario in “The Red Shoes,” Mr. Sewell conveys Leopold as superior, funny and intermittently terrifying.
“When he came in and read for the part, he had just come off something and his hair was very short, and he looked so strong and handsome,” Mr. Burger said. “He was very contained and controlled, and then so startling and unsettling in his rage that I felt like I had been blown back against the wall.”
Hollywood has never really appealed to Mr. Sewell, who laughs as he recalls hearing an American pop star tell an interviewer how she remained normal because “I’ve got a great team that keep me so well grounded.” He did move to Los Angeles a few years ago with his wife (the two have since split up; they have a 4-year-old son, Billy), renting a house on Sunset Boulevard that supposedly once belonged to Rock Hudson.
“It may have been Rock Hudson’s old house,” Mr. Sewell said, “when Rock Hudson was a truck driver.”
Two weeks after he got there, he was cast in “Charles II,” and had to return to Europe for filming. He could neither break his lease nor sublet the house and, unfortunately, his rent was bigger than his paycheck.
“It ended up being a very expensive way of storing three CD’s and a scarf,” he said.
Not, he said, that he wouldn’t jump at the chance to take a great part in Hollywood, if the right one came along. “I reserve my own permission to change my mind at any given moment,” he said.
He described his ambitions. “I want to be able to do anything,” he said. “I know it’s probably not reasonable to expect, but that’s what I’d like to do.”
He doesn’t want to have to make compromises for success in Hollywood terms, he said, but would love the freedom to pick his parts. Or, as he put it: “I don’t want to be at that level. I just want the advantages of being at that level.”
Although he claims to be “just three compliments away at any given moment ” from being a bona fide big-headed star, Mr. Sewell seems refreshingly unegotistical, at least by the warped standards of the acting world. If he ever forgets himself, he can remember what Billy said when asked exactly what his father did for a living. This was while Mr. Sewell was filming “The Legend of Zorro.” “My daddy’s potty-trained, and he has a friend called Zorro,” Billy said.
www.nytimes.com/2006/08/13/movies/13lyal.html
