Jamie in the Sunday Times - and we get a mention!
Monday, March 21st, 2011
I have copied this article from `The Sunday Times` online 19th March 2011
The Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell is all grown up and living in Hollywood, but his feet are firmly on the ground
It’s always disappointing to see a local hero kowtowing to the cultural imperialists. For British actors, however talented, the process seems all but inevitable. After a few years, or mere months, in Hollywood, their figures and eyebrows dwindle, their hair gets blonder and their opinions blander.
There’s no reason why Jamie Bell, the sweet-faced Tyneside kid who made it big as Billy Elliot in 2000, should be any different. When we meet at a trendy London hotel, it seems clear at first that this process is well under way.
Bell slides into the room, slight, sandy and pale, unobtrusively clad in dark blue but perched on the end of his freckled nose is a pretentiously enormous pair of Woody Allen specs. “Well, there are worse people to look like,” he says, defensively, pocketing them.
The voice is another shock. His trademark Geordie accent has been overlaid with a weird, unplaceable mélange of Received Pronounciation and West Hollywood. And then there’s the matter of his newly buff physique, on display in his latest film The Eagle, which comes as something of a shock for those of us who last saw him in a tutu.
“Hahahahah!” he sniggers when I ask how he achieved the impressive abs. “I’m not delusional, you know. I know I’m 5ft 7in with slightly jug ears. They asked me if I’d do a page on my routine in Men’s Health, but there was nothing to say. I’m not going to pretend I did chicken and broccoli and protein shakes. Not me! I’m the one with the bag of crisps.” So perhaps the Hollywoodisation is only cosmetic, after all.
In The Eagle, an adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic teen novel Eagle of the Ninth, Jamie is Esca, a British slave to the Roman commander Marcus Aquila, played by Channing Tatum, who sets off with him on an apparently hopeless quest, climbing vast hills, fording ice-cold rivers, to recapture the standard of the Ninth Legion, a golden eagle, from the savage tribes who lurk the other side of Hadrian’s Wall.
“Chan’s great,” Bell says. “We were very competitive with each other about who had the fastest horse, who could stay in the water longer, which obviously was him. We’ll definitely stay friends.” He cracks his trademark heartbreaking grin. (He gets to smile only once in The Eagle and it is, quite honestly, the high point of the film.) Bell, who was 25 last week, shot to global fame when he was plucked at the age of 12 from a stage school in Stockton-on-Tees to play the ballet-dancing hero in Billy Elliot. His own story is even more unlikely and Cinderella-ish than Billy’s. He was brought up in Billingham, an industrial town near Middlesbrough.
His father, a toolmaker, abandoned the family before Jamie’s birth and his mother, Eileen, struggled to support Jamie and his elder sister Kathryn on her wages as a doctor’s receptionist.
Ironically, it was Kathryn who wanted to dance; Jamie had to tag along to the lessons because there was nobody else around to look after him and he decided to join in. He became a keen tap dancer, carrying off the North of England tap-dance championships in 1998 and winning a scholarship to the Stagecoach school in Stockton-on-Tees.
Just as in the film, he was bullied at school for his arty ambitions and had to hide his tap shoes down his trousers. But it was all worth it.
The director Stephen Daldry auditioned 2,000 boys for the Billy Elliot role. He was so impressed when he found Bell that he appointed himself his surrogate father. Bell moved in to his Hertfordshire home for a while after the film and he still sees Daldry as a mentor.
Daldry oversaw Bell’s early career, which encompassed roles in obscure but well-received indie flicks such as Undertow, Dear Wendy and Hallam Foe, along with a cameo in King Kong. “He’s still incredibly supportive,” Bell says gratefully. “He saw that he could really help someone out, and he did. He’s incredibly talented and he’s such a sweet man.”
Does Bell still ask his advice? “Oh yes. He’s lived a mad life, he’s done it all and he’s achieved so much that it would be silly not to use that well of knowledge.”
For a brief, head-spinning period Bell shuttled between Hollywood and Billingham. One week he was at the Oscars, hearing his name mentioned by Russell Crowe in his acceptance speech for Gladiator, the next he was back in his maths class at Northfields Comprehensive, an experience that he described as “a bit weird”. Eventually, after his GCSEs, he packed his bags and moved to America for good.
Now he leases a house in the Beachwood Canyon area of Hollywood and feels rooted enough to have acquired a white Jack Russell terrier, Cal, named after James Dean’s character in East of Eden, although not a girlfriend. (His last known squeeze was The Wrestler actress Evan Rachel Wood, whom he dated for about a year after they met making a music video for the American punk rock band Green Day in 2005.) “I would like to meet someone, but it’s difficult right now because I’m going backwards and forwards.”
Any homesickness has been somewhat allayed, he declares bizarrely, because Billingham (in one of the most deprived areas in the UK) and Los Angeles are not dissimilar. “They’re both industry towns. The main difference was that in Billingham it was coal, or gas, or paint, and in LA it’s entertainment. But the community sense is there. Everyone that you meet is working on a TV show or is part of Warner Bros’ sound department. I find some solace in that; I do enjoy the industrial mentality.”
Isn`t Hollywood a little more glamorous? “I don’t find it particularly glamorous,” Bell says. “Your mates are just your mates.” Even if they’re Russell Crowe and Anne Hathaway.
All the same, Bell says that LA doesn’t feel like home. “It’s the place I come back to to drop my bags and wait for the next thing. I still feel like a stranger there, for sure.”
He loves the Californian coast but laughs out loud when I ask if he surfs. “That’s ridiculous! You should see the colour of my legs; they’re like alabaster.” And he cringes at the freebie culture of the A-list. “Why should we get things for free? It’s not even out of generosity that people are giving it to you, it’s so you’ll be photographed in it. It’s all a business. That side of things really makes me feel uncomfortable. My mum had to work for everything we had, and that’s important to me, the sense of ‘I earned that’.” His ultimate dream is to live deep in the English countryside. “There’s something about it that evokes comfort for me.”
However, the demands of his career mean that he will probably have to put that ambition on hold for some time to come - 2011 is set to be a big year. Aside from The Eagle, he is appearing in a new film of Jane Eyre as St John Rivers, the charismatic but repressed preacher, opposite Mia Wasikowska, and is starring as the boy reporter Tintin in Stephen Spielberg’s motioncapture version of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, a role that seems as naturally his as did Billy Elliot.
“I used to love Tintin as a kid,” he says in the wondering tones of someone who can’t quite believe his luck. “I could project everything I wanted to be on him. He doesn’t come with baggage, so you can throw all of your own on to him. Tintin is a beacon of excellence and opportunity. And he’s even got a white dog, for God’s sake.”
On top of these he has another two films in post-production: a thriller, Man on a Ledge, with Sam Worthington, and a smaller film, The Retreat, with Cillian Murphy.
So does he feel that he has made it? Bell wriggles uncomfortably. “I always think it can be better,” he says eventually. Then his characteristic honesty impels him to add: “But now I can say to myself: ‘You know what, mate? You decided to have dancing lessons above a launderette in Middlesbrough and you’ve kept going. It’s all right. You’ve done well’.”
As he lopes out of the room, his specs light up in a blaze of glory.
