Think of the Gore Vidal maxim: “Every time a friend of mine succeeds, a little part of me dies.” Then spare a kind thought for Dan Stevens’s university contemporaries. This time two years ago, the floppy-haired, foppish-looking, blue-eyed 23- year-old was sitting his finals. On Wednesday, BBC2 begins its three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel The Line of Beauty. As the protagonist, the prophetically named Nick Guest, Stevens appears in almost every frame. Tatler has already predicted it will do for his career what Brideshead Revisited did for Jeremy Irons’s.
Stevens won’t, of course, be at home to watch. Instead, he’ll be on the West End stage. In the Theatre Royal Haymarket’s critically feted production of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, he plays Simon Bliss. The little-known character actress Dame Judi Dench stars as his mother. Peter Bowles plays his father. The director is Sir Peter Hall, who has mentored Stevens since he played Macbeth opposite the director’s daughter, Rebecca, in a student production. During Stevens’s finals term at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Hall asked him to audition for a production of As You Like It that went on to wow Broadway and Los Angeles.
Were professional auditions during his finals term detrimental to his studies, I venture, feigning concern, but quietly hoping for tell of an honourable second? “Well, I was one mark off the first,” says Stevens, voicing a tiny note of regret. “But, you know, I did all right. I wasn’t particularly worried about my degree.”
So the impression is of a young man whom fortune first smiled on, then installed as her lover. Even before he left university, Stevens was working professionally. Not for him the student staples of bar work and waiting on tables in the long vacations. Instead, in one holiday, he made a television drama, Frankenstein, for the American channel Hallmark. His co-stars were William Hurt, Donald Sutherland and Julie Delpy. Didn’t he feel fraudulent, passing himself off as an actor when it was his holiday job? “They didn’t treat me like a charlatan,” he says, looking fleetingly alarmed.
You can see how you might find Stevens’s success insufferable if you’d, say, been the chap playing Banquo to his Macbeth the night Sir Peter popped in. For my part, however, I find it impossible not to take kindly to a youth who, having been assured he doesn’t have to eat off a set menu, orders giant grilled tiger prawns, a rump of organic lamb and a “chocolate plate” of three different puddings.
This is clearly Stevens’s first full-length newspaper interview, but it is a workaday event in a life of glittering firsts (even if he did fall one mark short at Cambridge). What is endearingly funny for an observer is where life as a rising star jars with that of a 23-year-old recent graduate. It is obviously thrilling for Stevens to have made his West End debut alongside the country’s greatest actress, not least because it was a video at school of Dench and Ian McKellen in Trevor Nunn’s Macbeth that inspired him to become a classical actor. Unfortunately, however, few of his friends can afford to come and see him in Hay Fever.
Likewise, Stevens has been bigged up on Broadway, done the hanging-out-in-LA thing and got himself representation on both sides of the Atlantic. But the down side of this glamorously peripatetic existence has been a lack of domestic fixity. Two years after arriving in London, he has only just made the transition from sleeping on friends’ sofas and in temporarily spare rooms to having a place of his own. “Just a month ago, I signed my first London tenancy agreement for a house-share in Crouch End,” he says proudly.
His starring role in The Line of Beauty was secured in what now sounds like typical Stevens style. He had read the novel at the time of its publication on the recommendation of his Cambridge tutor, the author Robert Macfarlane, who had judged the 2004 Booker.
When word went out that the director Saul Dibb was looking to cast fresh talent for the Andrew Davies adaptation, Stevens got in touch. He was recalled to audition half a dozen times. After being assured that the lead part of Nick “was almost in the bag”, he took himself off to the Edinburgh Festival for a weekend. He was “living it large at a comedy marathon” when his agent got hold of him in the drunken wee hours of an Edinburgh dawn. “‘I have good news and bad news,’ he began. ‘The good news is that they want to see you one last time. The bad news is, it’s tomorrow.’” By the time Stevens got off the train in London, he had clocked up less than five hours’ sleep in two days. “I was almost delirious with tiredness,” he recalls. “When I arrived at the audition, I was almost in tears. I just blurted out, ‘What more can I give you that you haven’t seen already?’” Apparently, Dibb was rather taken aback. “He implied politely that it wasn’t what more he wanted to see, but what he actually didn’t want to see. I’d just been doing Shakespeare on stage. Saul said that he wanted me to whittle down my performance to a more subtle mode.”
Hollinghurst’s Nick Guest is a gay postgraduate who, in the summer of 1983, after leaving Oxford, goes to stay in the Notting Hill family home of a wealthy up-and-coming Tory MP. Guest’s bed and board is in lieu of keeping an eye on the family’s troubled daughter during her parents’ absence in France. On their return, he stays on. The Notting Hill home is the focal point of a shifting landscape that brings in Thatcherism, Aids and drugs culture. It is also a Jamesian Bildungsroman. The story unfolds from Nick’s perspective, but his reliability as a witness is questioned. Is he a guest or a parasite? Is he exploited or another 1980s arriviste on the make? Stevens is not gay, but robustly heterosexual characters do not feature on his CV. “If you look the way I do — not extremely masculine, with floppy hair — then you’re more likely to get sexually ambiguous roles than swarthy, square-jawed, body-of-iron kind of roles. And I’m fine with that,” he says. “I mean, it’s not like The Line of Beauty is about gay sex. It’s not Queer as Folk, though it might be edgy for the BBC. I was nervous before the first snog, but then it just became like another day in the office.”
He could more easily empathise with Nick Guest’s role as an outsider. The son of teachers, he was a full-scholarship boy at Tonbridge school, where he felt like a misfit. “I didn’t really get on very well with a lot of the boys there,” he says. “A lot of them were very rich and very arrogant, and there was a kind of vogue of stupidity in my year that I couldn’t abide. It made me quite antisocial. I had great teachers who mentored me to do things like apply for Cambridge, but off stage and outside the English classroom, I was wayward.”
Arriving at Cambridge felt like a release. He has had little cause to look back since. The future holds promise, too. This week, he is scheduled to meet Stephen Daldry to discuss a movie project. He ducks from revealing what that is, but tucked under his arm is Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer- winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which happens to be Daldry’s next scheduled film. Are there stage roles he would like to play? “Richard II,” he says, without hesitation. Another job he’ll have to camp up for, I say helpfully. “Well, I guess the most important thing I’ve learnt so far is to know my limitations,” he laughs.
The Line of Beauty, BBC2, Wednesday, 9pm; Hay Fever, Theatre Royal Haymarket, SW1
