She is disconcertingly doll-faced. Pale bow lips that look like they’re drawn
on. Cornflower-blue eyes like giant orbs. Red Crystal Tipps cartoon hair.
It’s a round face that manages to look wise and gormless at the same time.
It’s the face of a Marks & Spencer model who appeared controversially on the
cover of French Playboy, hair in bunches, cuddling a teddy, naked except for
little white socks. In the flesh, the look is more minx than exploited
girlie.
It was the same extraordinary face, both sweet and uncompromising, that
catapulted Lily Cole to fame after she was discovered by Storm model agency
while shopping with friends in London. How could she look so babyish and so
sophisticated? How could she earn so much when she was so young? (The Sunday
Times Rich List estimates that she is worth at least £4m.) How could she
miss so much school and earn a place at Cambridge, gaining a first this
summer in her first-year exams.
It was perhaps inevitable that, after a short period of catwalk adulation,
Cole would turn to acting. She had a small part in the 2007 remake of St
Trinian’s, but now she is poised for a meatier role as the female lead in a
film that has become memorable before it has even opened. It was an
experience both wonderful and blighted, because her co-star died in the
middle of filming.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has had a troubled genesis. Prior to
production, its iconoclastic director, Terry Gilliam, faced a series of
obstacles: the dithering of backers, the usual wrangling over money.
Gilliam took a risk on Cole, then just 19, who had never performed such a huge
and integral role. There was considerable stress over how exactly she had to
raise her game, but there was absolute devastation when her co-star Heath
Ledger was found dead by his housekeeper in his New York loft in January
2008. Most of her scenes were with him. She worked with him perhaps more
than any other member of the cast. She got to know his generous spirit. “He
definitely helped me. From the beginning he understood that I would be
overwhelmed and scared by the size of this project. He encouraged me and
said he was really proud of me, constantly fed me support.”
Ledger’s death has been talked about so much — was it self-destruction or an
accident with sleeping pills? He had chronic insomnia. He was in turmoil
that he might lose his daughter, Matilda, then two, from his broken-down
relationship with Michelle Williams, who he met on the rebound from Naomi
Watts on the set of Brokeback Mountain. When I met Ledger I found him
spiritual, wise beyond his years, a huge force of life, never someone who
would have taken his own. The conundrum of his death has become an
intellectual exercise.
When I saw the film I wasn’t prepared for the impact of seeing Ledger suddenly
alive, real, vibrant, filling the screen, spiky with charisma. “I felt
exactly the same,” says Cole. She has talked about this at length in private
but never in public, until now. All those I spoke to who are connected to
the film seem keen not to appear to be using the tragedy of Ledger as a
marketing tool for the film. Yet still the ghouls will swell the box office.
Cole plays Valentina, Parnassus’s 16-year-old daughter. Her father, played by
Christopher Plummer, has made a deal with the devil to seal her fate on her
16th birthday. She pouts when she says she is “sweet 16”, as if to say there
is nothing sweet about her. She is never a victim. In the film she falls for
Ledger’s rakish character. Their chemistry was real and they became very
close. How hard was it to carry on without him? “It was incredibly hard. He
became the driving force.” In death as in life, she means.
During the shoot, Ledger, along with many other cast members, including Lily,
got the flu. After his death it was even said he had been suffering from
pneumonia. He had certainly stopped drinking, and Cole recalls a consummate
professional who worked meticulously. Perhaps he wanted to expunge the pain
through his work. “He never told me he had pneumonia; there was no
whimpering, no ‘Can I take a break?’ ”
When news of Ledger’s death broke, the cast were completely undone. They were
deprived of a much-loved colleague and feared the film was unlikely to be
finished. Thanks to Gilliam’s own determination and guile, it was salvaged.
“Terry is the kind of person who has balls if he believes in something,”
Cole says.
Ironically, the replacements that Gilliam lined up for Ledger — Johnny Depp,
Colin Farrell and Jude Law — were arguably bigger names than Ledger himself.
“People who were close to Heath wanted to do it for Heath,” Cole says. It’s
as if, through them, he lived on. Her voice trails off; there is more than a
note of sadness. “Johnny slipped seamlessly into the role, but that didn’t
stop it being bizarre. I’m playing the same character; they are playing a
character that is familiar to me but not the same actor. But when you look
at the script, it could have been written that way. There are so many
references to death.”
Sometimes Cole doesn’t say anything. Sometimes she gives a strange,
all-knowing, echoey laugh. “In the film, everyone was part of one unit.
That’s what helped us carry on. On top of that, everyone loved Heath… For
everyone who knew him, it was devastating. The practicalities of continuing
the production were difficult, but it seemed irrelevant. If you lose
somebody you love, whether it’s at the beginning of shooting or at the end —
it didn’t really matter. We were creatively challenged, yes. It was a
bizarre experience. Heath was such a lovable human being. I thought I was in
at the deep end at the beginning, and then look what happened.” I’m
not sure if she realises what the film will do for her. It shows her as
feisty and strong, with a poise and a face that could carry a film.
We’re talking after a photoshoot in LA, where she spends a lot of time. She’s
wearing denim cut-offs, sandals with a big white flower between the toes, a
rose-gold ring that matches her hair, and a black sweater. She’s tall, very
tall, around 6ft. She’s got big breasts and there’s nothing about her that
looks waif-like, frail or modellish. But maybe she has redefined what is
modellish. She seems super-confident in her own skin. I say her performance
as Valentina seems natural and feisty, and she giggles: “That works!” I ask
if Gilliam might have been inspired by her naughty schoolgirl role in St
Trinian’s. “No,” she says. “He hadn’t seen it. It came about after I’d been
asked to do Rage with Sally Potter.”
Rage is a behind-the-scenes look at the modelling industry: mini-monologues,
documentary-style but scripted by Potter. It features Jude Law’s alarming
portrayal of a transvestite (I didn’t realise it was him until I read the
credits) and Cole playing a model called Lettuce Leaf. Her delivery is drily
perfect, full of irony. I recognise her special ironic laugh as one from her
performance as Lettuce Leaf.
I wondered if she’d improvised a lot around the original script of Rage.
“Everyone asks that, but the script didn’t change that much from when I
first read it.” In Rage, she didn’t work with any of the other actors. Each
performance is made up of monologues, so she too was shocked when she saw
Jude Law take on a role as a transvestite. “Lots of people couldn’t believe
it was him.”
Her performance as Lettuce Leaf is freshly observed, measured and shows an
ability to send herself up — or at least her model self. Discussing another
model becoming undone by anorexia, Lettuce Leaf says: “The way to be big is
to be little.” Does that still sum up modelling? Was she ever asked to be
smaller? “There’s definitely still a fascination with being thin and skinny
in the modelling world. I also think there’s a celebration of curves. I have
breasts. I love my breasts. There are models now who have more curves, and
that’s seen as a good thing. I’ve never studied the correlation between the
decades of plenty and the size of models, but it’s interesting, for sure. I
was never asked to lose weight. I’m assuming people who are less successful
are the ones who are told they need to be teeny to be so.”
One imagines that Cole was always instilled with confidence and cleverness. At
the same time she is fresh, funny and doesn’t take herself seriously. In
2003, Steven Meisel photographed her for Italian Vogue. By 2004 she was
British model of the year, and by 2007 she was making tabloid headlines —
“Model Risks Career for Learning” — after deciding to start at King’s
College, Cambridge. She is bemused that people find it strange that you can
be gorgeous and clever. She isn’t at Cambridge to have her intelligence
validated, nor does she think it will lead to a specific career.
“People change direction all the time; there’s a lot of value in that. I fell
into modelling. It wasn’t a choice; not that I was forced into it. I just
got asked one day to do it, and I believe in taking opportunities.”
When she arrived at Cambridge there was already a sense of her separateness.
She had deferred her place for two years, and had done Gilliam’s film.
Cambridge was not a means to an end; she just wanted to learn things. She
doesn’t yet know where she will live next term, maybe in a flat, maybe a
hall. As much as she can, she pursues a normal student life. Does she find
it hard to make friends? She must be far richer and more accomplished than
most girls her age. Doesn’t she find girls spiteful and jealous?
“I know what you mean about girls being like that, having gone to a girls’
school, but I wouldn’t want to attract those kind of people as friends and
they wouldn’t attract me. I’ve been blessed with friends who are just happy
for me.”
Is she expected to buy all the rounds of drinks? “No, a lot of my friends are
working. A lot of them are doing well. None of us spend money extravagantly,
so there’s not a huge disparity. So that’s never an issue,” she sighs,
irritated.
“I was with my sister just last week. I know she really loves me. Within that
love there’s no jealousy. There’s an acceptance of her life and my life and
their differences. I don’t think she’d want my life, running around all the
time, being recognised, all those things that come with it.” She pauses,
then laughs: “But I’m sure she’d like to make as much money as I’m making!”
Cole grew up in a bohemian family that moved from Torquay to London when she
was a baby. Her mother, an artist and a writer, was left on her own with two
small daughters. I ask if she is more like her mother or father. She says
her mother thinks she’s very much like her father, and Cole is not sure if
that is meant as a compliment. He went to live in Spain about 15 years ago.
She doesn’t really know why. “I guess he just preferred it there. He likes
to make things. He built a boat, a 64ft yacht, because he wanted to sail
around the world. He’d already built that by himself when he met my mum on
the Bayswater Road. He was selling jewellery that he’d made and she was
selling paintings.
“I don’t know him that well. I lived with my mum growing up in London. I take
after my mum as well, because she’s an unusual, free-spirited person. She’s
often said I take after my dad, his wild personality. Perhaps she’s just
assigning the bad things to him. She thinks my stubbornness and my being
quite smart comes from him.”
Does she see him at all? “Every year, every few years.” There is no hint of
sadness, instead a hint of intrigue: intrigued by the father she doesn’t
really know, intrigued by the maleness missing in her upbringing. There was
no stepdad. And her mother still doesn’t have a boyfriend. At home there
were just three 6ft redheaded females. Was that as fiery as it sounds?
“Sure. I don’t think we clashed. Mum is a very peaceful woman. But me and my
sister... What can I say? I’m calm now, but as a child I was very
passionate. Either very happy or very loving or very raging. I was quite
sure about things. Me and my sister fought a lot.” They get on well now, and
her sister teaches at the primary school that she used to attend.
When she was a little girl she had a spell at the Sylvia Young Theatre School,
which she hated.
“I went to a state school which did a lot of performing arts. I acted a lot
there. I had a scholarship. Then I went to Latymer [in Hammersmith], and
they had an amazing theatre department, but I was always away modelling so
much, it didn’t make sense for me to do drama, because you have to rehearse
with the whole group. But acting was the thing I always loved.”
Cole excelled at both arts and sciences. She did her maths GCSE a year early.
“The logical part of me loved the idea of maths. I found the creative aspect
of English harder because the marking is so ambiguous, whereas maths stuff
is either right or wrong.” Her love of maths strikes me as odd. Everything
else about her seems so spontaneous, fluid, ambiguous. Perhaps it partly
explains why university is so important to her. Maybe it’s the intellectual
challenge of maths that appeals to her.
Will she finish her degree? She deliberates. “I’m going to see. I
would like to. I like learning. I was going to do social and political
science, then I switched to history of art, but I could have done either. I
can get impassioned about politics, but I find studying it can lead to a
boxy way of looking at the world, so I was put off studying it.”
And her own personal politics? “I don’t think there’s one political system
that’s watertight. I believe in freedom, personal liberty.”
She doesn’t want to be pinned down about this. She admires Obama, doesn’t
commit her thoughts on Brown, and we go into a brief if vague discussion
about the nature of freedom. She would make a great politician. She gives
something of herself in every answer, but never necessarily answers the
question you ask her.
Cole is not sure how her future will play out, but a bad boy, a yacht and a
beach in the south of France would never be enough for her. Would she say
she was conventional in any way? “What is the implication of that question?
You don’t ask a person who you think is conventional that question. So the
implication is you don’t think I’m very conventional.” She’s laughing rather
than irritated. “My family is important, and my close friends are important,
and believing in love is important. I haven’t got a lot of stability,
because I’m running around, but I’m seeking stability in relationships with
friends, family and lovers. So in those ways I am quite conventional. And I
want to get married and have children. That’s quite conventional. It’s human
nature.”
I wonder if she plans to marry her boyfriend, the LA-based 36-year-old
American actor Enrique Murciano, who starred in the long-running detective
series Without a Trace and who she’s been with for a year.
“Who knows?” she says, with a look that suggests she might really like that.
“Yes,” she concedes. “I love him and he knows that. And he loves me. So
we’ll see.”
I am sure she will mostly get what she wants. Parnassus, with all its dramatic
background, is an incredible showcase. She went into it a model and has
emerged as a rare talent who will one day be a draw in her own right.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnussus is out in the UK on October 16. Rage is
out on September 24
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