Natascha McElhone is talking about George Clooney’s bottom. She has been
acting for 10 years, in everything from repertory theatre to films with
Anthony Hopkins and Robert De Niro, but the scene from her new movie,
Solaris, in which she and George lie naked, cheek to cheek, has caused more
comment than anything else she’s done and is threatening to eclipse
Solaris’s remaining 100 minutes.
“George,” she says, “is an actor completely lacking in ego and vanity. He just
does not give a damn. He’s also the funniest actor I’ve ever worked with —
and that includes Jim Carrey. So I honestly forgot to look at anything other
than his face, because I felt so comfortable. It was only later, when test
audiences in America complained that there was too much sex — a lot of it
was cut out — that I realised how intimate it all must have seemed.”
The scenes, cut or not, have handed McElhone, a 31-year-old Brit, her first
flirtation with controversy. She has become a Hollywood star without the
personal upheavals of Kate Winslet or the self-publicity of Elizabeth
Hurley. Instead, she seems to have established herself with a mix of talent,
old-fashioned glamour and an ability to keep a low profile despite a
succession of big, well-paid projects. Her introduction to fame came five
years ago, when she played the elusive Lauren Garland, adored by Jim
Carrey’s Truman Burbank in The Truman Show. Although
she made her screen debut with Hopkins in 1996’s Surviving Picasso,
as the artist’s young mistress, Françoise Gilot, that film did not create
anything like the buzz of The Truman Show’s clever conceit of a
“real world” that is really a 24-hour soap opera, being broadcast live.
McElhone (pronounced mac-el-hone) decided not to pause or court publicity but
to move on to the next job. She had already played Irish lass Megan Doherty,
with Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt, in The Devil’s Own. Next up
was the female lead — Irish again — with De Niro in Ronin.
But with Solaris there is no ducking the spotlight. Its director,
Steven Soderbergh, fresh from Ocean’s Eleven, does not mince
words on why he and his friend Clooney hired her. “She reminded me of the
great European actresses of the 1960s and 1970s, like Jeanne Moreau and
Dominique Sanda,” he says. “They were smart, sexy, complicated women. Not
girls — real women.”
McElhone certainly looks all woman when we meet near the home in London she
shares with her surgeon husband, Martin Kelly, and their son, Theodore, who
is nearly three. She is five months pregnant and, with a cascade of long
brown hair, glowingly beautiful. She appears as glossy away from the cameras
as she appeared in front of them a couple of years ago in Kenneth Branagh’s
stylised 1940s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Think frocks and
long coats rather than jeans and leather jacket. She obviously cut an
instant dash with Soderbergh and Clooney. “I turned up, prepared to do a
screen test,” she reports. “I must have read the Solaris script 10 times
over. But when I walked into the room, here are these two well-known guys
sitting on chairs just drinking tea, and it was like: ‘Hey, come on in.’ We
sat chatting for an hour and a half, and I thought: ‘This is great. Even if
we don’t do anything, I have had a really good time.’ They were both telling
very funny stories, and George has this ability to make people feel at ease.
He does not want to unsettle you at all. And only then, when I was
completely relaxed, did they say: ‘Okay, let’s do some stuff.’ Steven just
put a camera on his shoulder and we improvised. I had to say why our
relationship was not working, as my character in the film. I love doing that
sort of thing.”
It clearly worked, even though Twentieth Century Fox needed some convincing
that McElhone was ready to step up a gear. “It took a little time to finally
hear,” she says. “I really did feel the audition had been worth travelling
to Montreal for (where Clooney was directing Confessions of a Dangerous
Mind) and spending time in their company.”
With an attitude like that, it is perhaps no surprise that McElhone got the
final nod over an impressive short list of American stars. It is a film that
needs her brand of womanly depth and intelligence. Based on a novel by the
Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, which had been filmed previously in 1972 by
Andrei Tarkovsky, it is set on board a space station some time in the
future, yet is far from the normal sci-fi fare. The station, Prometheus, is
near the watery planet of Solaris, which is having a strange effect on the
crew. They appear to be given the chance to relive and reshape moments of
their past lives. Clooney’s psychologist character, Dr Chris Kelvin, is sent
to the station to bring some sense to what is going on, but by the time he
arrives, the mission’s leader has committed suicide and two remaining crew
members are under stress. Before he has a chance to put things right, he,
too, begins to feel the pull of Solaris. He starts to revisit his own past
and confront the most painful episode of all: the suicide of his wife, Rheya
(McElhone). Their tragic love story, and the chance to put right some of the
wrongs, becomes the central theme. This reliving of the relationship
apparently had a mixed effect on American critics. Some were moved to tears
with the emotion; others were so numb-bummed with the tedium, they were
crying to get out.
McElhone is typically frank about her own reaction. “I had no idea what we
were going to eventually see on screen,” she says. “I do not know what my
reaction would be now if I did not have the advantage of knowing the story.
You can just go off somewhere for an hour and a half into a world of your
own. There is a feeling of reflection and sadness about how love can go
wrong.”
She has lived through a fairly dramatic love story of her own. She first met
her husband, now 37, when she was 15. He was just a friend who lived around
the corner. They did not see each other for 10 years, but he suddenly phoned
after returning from a long-running job in New York. He had never forgotten
her, he said. They met again, fell in love and married. Just like that.
“When I first met him, I was dating his flatmate,” she reports. “He was a
medical student and out of my league. He was good-looking, played in a band
and was totally cool. I thought he was a god, honestly. I had no idea he was
remotely interested in me. I was also terrible at that age — all over the
place and with a concentration span of about five minutes. But he kept track
of me through someone who knew us both. He always knew where I was and what
I was up to. He got in touch with me on his return from America. Thank God
he did. We married a year later.”
McElhone’s husband is half-French (he eschews the name Hirigoyen in favour of
Kelly), and the wedding was held in a small village in Provence, where she
arranged for an accordionist to play as they walked along cobbled streets
after the ceremony. “It was in a church overlooking a hill, with lavender
and sunflowers everywhere,” she says. “There was no electricity, and it was
candle-lit. There was a harpist, plus an amazing choir. It was beautiful —
and so is he.”
He’s also unconventional for a surgeon, by the sound of it. His speciality is
reconstructive surgery — rebuilding faces after birth defects or hideous
accidents — but he is so laid-back, others can’t believe what he does for a
living. “He’s 6ft 3in and mostly wears jeans, T-shirt and trainers. When
people expect to meet a fuddy-duddy, they are always in for a shock. He was
on a plane journey during which a passenger suffered a heart attack,” she
says. “They put a call out for a doctor, but when he stepped forward they
said: ‘No, we are serious.’ He’s very loyal towards my acting and is always
supportive.” You get the feeling McElhone could talk up her husband for the
remainder of the afternoon.
She could equally well talk up her own career. She has come far since doing
plays at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, after leaving the London Academy of
Music and Dramatic Art. She even appeared in an episode of Absolutely
Fabulous while at drama school. “I was asked to be a shopkeeper on a
film set and did not even know what it was for,” she says. “I turned up, and
there was Jennifer Saunders. It was the highlight of my early career,
because I was such a big fan of Ab Fab.” She was brought up in
Brighton and London by journalist parents — which might explain why she’s
cleverly avoided too much publicity — and has built a stellar reputation
since being talent-spotted by the film director James Ivory in a production
of Richard III in London’s Regent’s Park.
McElhone isn’t just a glamour girl. She has also established notoriety as a
willing she-devil. She tried to kill Heather Graham in Killing Me Softly and
lures Christian Bale away from his wife (Kate Beckinsale) in the forthcoming Laurel
Canyon.
She insists: “I’m trying to lead a balanced life, being happily married and
having children. I’m not really built for fame.” She’d do well to remember
that the last time Clooney handpicked a female co-star was for 1998’s Out
of Sight. It was Jennifer Lopez — and just look what happened to her.
Solaris opens in London on Friday, nationwide on February 28
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