The sofa is vibrating. Brrrr . . . brrrr. It feels as if an extremely large,
extremely low-frequency mobile phone is hiding under the cushions. Except
it’s not. It’s Ben Whishaw’s leg. The 27-year-old actor twists and wriggles,
turns and writhes, as we discuss his latest film: an adaptation of Brideshead
Revisited in which he plays the louche, affected, teddy bear-carrying
Sebastian Flyte.
The sexually ambiguous lord is just his latest role in a career stocked with
doomed, tragic youths, from Hamlet at the Old Vic in 2004 to a man accused
of murder in the BBC drama Criminal Justice this summer. For Hamlet,
Whishaw was fêted as one of the greats of the stage. For Criminal
Justice, he was praised for his “haunting, wraith-like aura”. But the
Brideshead film has invigorated another sort of critic: the sort who
considers messing with Evelyn Waugh to be messing with English literature
itself.
“I guess it has offended some purists,” Whishaw says suddenly, unprompted, and
apparently unperturbed by the idea. The new adaptation plays with
chronology, losing some themes, accentuating others, and seems guaranteed to
bait those who expect their classics to remain unviolated.
Critics in America, where the film is on general release, have already
deployed their thesauruses. The New York Times called it “tedious,
confused and banal . . . a lazy, complacent film which takes the novel’s
name in vain”, attacking it not just for missing the subtlety of the book
but also that of the 1981 drama starring Jeremy Irons. “You know what, I’m
happy to have a fight about this,” Whishaw says, cheerfully. “It needn’t be
a bad thing that we had to compress it: that can work in your favour — I
don’t think it’s necessarily a loss to have to lose things. I think the
screenwriters very skilfully joined the two halves of the book.”
The attacks do seem unfair: whatever the screenwriters had produced, anything
short of a word-for-word facsimile of the novel was likely to offend. Taken
on its own terms, though, this is a fun, intelligent and spectacularly
beautiful film. But there is a more existential difficulty. “I have been
thinking a lot recently about the question ‘why do it at all?’, particularly
since it has been done well before,” Whishaw says, referring to the ITV
adaptation. “I guess that what is interesting about these period films is
that they are not really period at all. They completely speak of the time
they made it. The mini-series of Brideshead probably tells us a lot
about 1980s Britain.”
And this latest adaptation? What does it tell us about today? Hunched over his
coffee cup, Whishaw makes rare eye contact and says: “Oh God, I don’t know.
Maybe I should watch the film.” But that’s another problem: he doesn’t like
seeing himself on the screen, and generally avoids his own movies.
“I don’t get anything from it,” he explains later, twiddling his hair. “I see
all sorts of horrible elements of myself, like vanity, come to the fore.” He
claims still not to have watched I’m Not There, the 2007 film
in which he played one of seven Bob Dylans (the screenplay was, he says
“totally f***ing bonkers. Mind you, Bob Dylan is bonkers, too, so he can get
away with it.”).
There is so much Whishaw says that should sound affected. He says his “only
ambition is to get better at acting;” he “never wanted to be a star, or a
personality”. He describes Hamlet as “such a work of genius
that no one can do it justice”. This sounds like the gushings of a thesp,
but he is sitting on a sofa, wriggling and fiddling, moving his head
sparrow-like.
If this is affectation then he is, well, a very good actor. Whishaw grew up in
Clifton, Bedfordshire, in a family with no acting pedigree. His parents
were, he says, “slightly bemused, but extremely supportive” of his childhood
acting dream, helping him to work his way through the local drama groups. He
now says that the hardest part of playing Sebastian was not the apparent
homosexuality but the Catholicism and the aristocratic elements. “They are
totally alien to me,” he says. “And the concept of things like sin,
damnation and Hell? My family was not at all religious.”
As a teenager he actually played Hamlet twice before his breakthrough casting.
An early role was starring, at 15, in a production on the Edinburgh Fringe
of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. But still acting did not seem
a viable goal until he had almost achieved it. “I am lucky, very lucky,” he
says. “I didn’t even think I’d get into drama school; I thought ‘maybe I’ll
be an actor if they accept me’. Eventually I found other people who were
actors. But as a kid it wasn’t something you could see a path towards.”
This is where the conventional narrative begins. Whishaw won a place at RADA
and, a year out of college, was signed up to play the Old Vic’s youngest
Hamlet. He may claim never to read his reviews, but parents are immune from
such high-minded scruples. After the first night his mum rang him up to tell
him that he was on the front page of a national paper. The performance was
spectacular: the critics declared him one of the immortals, Whishaw had
finally arrived.
But the critics were far from unanimous. Some considered him wonderful, some
hit-and-miss, others merely competent. There was enough praise for the
offers to start coming, but his career was far from assured.
He has been working hard ever since – perhaps too hard. “I’m not feeling
driven and excited by work: suddenly I find I’m slightly indifferent to it,
which is alarming,” he says, blaming it on tiredness. But later he says he
might one day leave acting altogether. “I still think I’ll do something else
at some point,” he says. “I don’t like the feeling of my life not being
mine, and of other people having the power to make decisions about my
future. Because once you start building a career a lot of people want to
tell you what to do.” His future plans don’t include work at all but a trip
to Australia.
Interviewing Whishaw is hard. It’s not that he is impolite or uppity; he is
charming and casual. It’s not that he is cagey. But he quite obviously (and
by his own admission) hates the whole process.
Later, playing back my recording, it sounds like a parody of an awkward dinner
party. The clinking of a teaspoon, silences and long pauses. Midway through
a sentence Whishaw might stop for ten seconds to consider his answer. Then
there’s the wriggling. Previous interviewers have searched for meaning in
his twitching. Is it the nervous energy that feeds his acting ability? Or
the restlessness that drives him to new characters? Or maybe it’s just what
he does.
A clip on
YouTube shows Whishaw appearing on Richard & Judy. He sits on
the sofa, visibly and increasingly uncomfortable, as Richard Madeley
launches into a rising (if endearing) crescendo of praise for Whishaw’s
talents, before asking him what makes him “very simply, very good”. “Is it
self-belief?” Madeley asks. “Is it total belief that you are that person?”
Eventually Whishaw murmurs something about acting being cathartic, before
adding: “It’s not something I would ponder too much really”.
At the mention of the clip, Whishaw gurns – sticking out his tongue and
holding his head at an awkward angle. “You can’t really get into these
questions. ‘What drives you?’ Jesus, I don’t know.” He looks at me. Pause.
One, two, three, four seconds. “I need a wee,” he says, and dashes out.
Leaving the hotel together, we talk about other things: about things other
than Ben Whishaw. And suddenly conversation is easy.
Brideshead Revisited is released on Oct 3 2008
