Jamie Bell is talking to his groin. “Come on!” he says, head down and legs
apart, in a quiet corner room of a swish London hotel. “Are you not
committed 100 per cent here?”
The 21-year-old actor and former child star is performing a pantomime of
masculine impotence in a bid to explain the embarrassing physiological
conundrum at the heart of screen sex. “You have the fear, on set, of getting
an erection,” he says. “But you also have the fear of not getting an
erection – you know, is the girl going to be, like, freaked out if I don’t?”
Luckily for Bell, however, his first sex scene on his new movie, Hallam Foe,
was a cakewalk. He played opposite the lads’ mag favourite Claire Forlani,
all decked out in lingerie and oozing sexual aggression. “I’m sorry,” he
says, smirking proudly, “but if Forlani’s, like, rubbing your crotch and
kissing you, wearing bra and panties, well, that’s not exactly going to be a
physical challenge!”
Bell’s braggadocio somehow suits him. It lets you know, just in case you
didn’t already, that Billy Elliot is dead. The white bobby socks, the tiny
shorts and the jug-eared innocence of everyone’s favourite preteen prancer
have been replaced by the square-chinned certainty and furrowed masculinity
of a white-hot movie actor. It’s all there in Hallam Foe.
In this dark, comic romance, the culmination of Bell’s postBilly career, the
young star holds centre stage as a brooding oddball observer, estranged from
life and caught between two very different mother figures. The movie pitches
Bell’s eponymous Scottish loner against his glamorous yet possibly wicked
stepmother, played by Forlani. After a brief but frenzied fling, Hallam is
forced out into the world, aka Edinburgh, only to fall for a hotel manager,
played by Sophia Myles, who bears a striking resemblance to his own beloved
and tragically deceased mother.
Of course, the plot doesn’t do Hallam Foe justice. For this is one of
those films, probably the first and finest British film since Trainspotting,
where a deceptively simple storyline, irreverent mood and achingly
fashionable soundtrack (Franz Ferdinand and King Creosote) all combine in
one propulsive burst to give an adrenalised shot in the arm to the national
cinema. “It’s about voyeurism, and sleeping with the wrong people, and all
the things that we recognise about daily life,” says the film’s producer,
Peter Carlton. “But it shows these things unflinchingly and in a way that’s
witty, sexy and feel-good too. Which is no mean achievement.”
At the core of the film, and carrying the entire project on his
ever-broadening shoulders, is Bell. With a soft Scottish brogue and a tough
scowl that regularly flickers with moments of levity, he convinces and
compels as both a disaffected youth and then a man who has put away childish
things once and for all.
There have been projects in the past that signalled the maturing of the Billy
Elliot boy – David Gordon Green’s Undertow was one, and Thomas
Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy another. But though Bell was captivating,
and at times even mesmeric in both, the roles were undercooked and the films
undersold.
Foe, however, is different. “The film is quite a definitive statement for
Jamie in many ways,” says Carlton. “Because he literally grows up on screen,
and he shows that he’s a very fine grown-up actor with a rich and varied
career ahead of him.”
“Well, you can only play your age, can’t you?” says Bell, with an insouciant
shrug (courtesy of long stints in LA and a Manhattan apartment to call home,
his Teesside accent now holds enough American uplift to make it sound, at
times, a tad Welsh). He adds, tellingly: “I don’t think I look any older
than 21, but hopefully when people see this film they’ll be like, ‘This guy
isn’t a kid any more!’ ”
The people in question are the ones Bell later describes as “the people
wearing headsets in Hollywood studios”. They are the ones who landed him a
starring role in Doug Liman’s forthcoming sci-fi blockbuster Jumper,
about a troubled tearaway with the ability to teleport himself through time
and space. And they are also the ones who recently cast him opposite Daniel
Craig and Liev Schreiber in the high-profile Second World War drama Defiance.
The film, about three Jewish brothers (Bell, Craig and Schreiber) who escape
the Nazis in Poland and join the fight on the Russian front, is loaded with
Oscar kudos.
It’s possibly a feint, but Bell seems remarkably frank about the cold reality
of his ascent. He says that, fundamentally, he’s drawn to playing losers and
oddballs in esoteric, low-budget movies, and finds blockbusters painfully
limiting. His role, for instance, as a cabin boy in Peter Jackson’s King
Kong was: “Not really acting, but just saying lines.” Even worse, the time
he spent on Jumperwas “soul-sucking. It just destroys you. It’s terrible.
I didn’t learn anything about myself on that movie, about my technique or
anything.”
This ambivalence towards the limelight, though impressive, seems nonetheless
riven with contradictions. For, ever since the day he was plucked, at the
age of 14, from the National Youth Music Theatre and cast in the lead role
of Billy Elliot, Bell has always seemed, despite the slacker pose, to have
his eyes firmly on the prize.
In interviews at the time he spoke of growing up the hard way with his mother
and older sister (he never knew his father), and managed to dovetail his own
biography into the Elliot myth. In his Bafta acceptance speech (for Best
Actor) he sweetly mentioned fellow nominee Russell Crowe, who became a vocal
supporter of his career.
His role choices since then have been impeccable, cleverly avoiding British TV
drama, and instead heading westwards and popping up in American indies such
as Undertow and Dear Wendy. Even King Kong had its own cachet. “It got
my name associated with Peter Jackson,” he says. “You know: ‘Oh, you worked
with Peter Jackson! Oh, your movie grossed over $200 million!’ It’s
ridiculous and it’s superficial, but it matters to some people.”
Bell balks at the suggestion that he has some grand superstar career plan in
mind. “I’m still not even fully committed to this industry,” he says. “If I
was I’d be out in LA, whoring myself around for every studio movie I could
find.”
Instead, he says, he prefers to hang out in late-night restaurants near his
Chelsea flat, where he can meet his friends and play guitar. He split this
year from his girlfriend, the equally hot rising starlet Evan Rachel Wood (Thirteen).
He says that the pair avoided the tabloids by being low-key about their
relationship. And besides, he adds, “If you are not Brad and Angelina, who
really cares?”
He says that for now, although he would never complain about it, he is glad to
have laid the ghost of Billy Elliot to rest. His future is concerned only
with the search for knockout scripts from tyro directors such as Hallam Foe’s
David Mackenzie.
Yes, of course, but what about the allure of stardom, of Oscar glory, and of
the big paycheque? “Look, I’m only 21!” he says, with all the confidence and
charm of a man on the cusp of his own adventure. “I don’t need to be making
money. I’d just end up buying a car and crashing it, James Dean style. And
I’d rather not do that.”
Hallam Foe is released on Aug 31
