By Baz Bamigboye
Last updated at 12:26 AM on 28th January 2011
A real charmer: Felicity Jones has a glittering career ahead of her but remains grounded
Felicity Jones took a gamble. She wanted the role in a movie that was being chased by several other actresses. What to do? She had an outline of the plot and noticed there was a shower scene.
‘I had to differentiate myself in some way,’ she told me as we sipped hot tea (Americans use lukewarm water, but I managed to get ours piping hot), adding that she made a video tape at her flat in East London.
‘There’s a scene in the shower with no words, but it conveys so much and I felt it would get the director’s attention, so I clambered into my shower and shot the moment. I had a handy assistant to hold the camera and that was it,’ she told me.
The video was soon sent to director Drake Doremus in Los Angeles and, after a flurry of transatlantic telephone chats, the lead role of Anna in the film Like Crazy was hers.
Following Like Crazy’s world premiere here at Sundance, Felicity has been pursued by legions of film-makers, studio heads and all the usual suspects.
Our conversation — in a quietish corner of the busy lobby of the Eccles Centre in Park City, where most of the big Sundance Film Festival galas are held — was interrrupted by movie people wanting to set up meetings.
They included Jason Reitman, who made the Oscar-nominated films Juno and Up In The Air. He was particularly keen and took her contact details, while one of Harvey Weinstein’s key lieutenants arranged a meeting back in London.
But Felicity is the least showy actress I know. She’s certainly excited by the noise level her movie is generating, but it’s for the film’s sake, not her own. In any case, she has been turning out high quality work for several years.
Getting in a lather: Felicity Jones in 'Like Crazy' which has made her the darling of Hollywood
Michael Grandage, the director of the Donmar, has long been a fan. He directed her in The Chalk Garden and more recently when the play was adapted for Radio 3. In April, she begins rehearsing the title role of Schiller’s revenge drama Luise Miller, with Grandage directing. It runs at the Donmar from June 8.
She also stars in an utterly charming romantic comedy called Chalet Girl due out soon and she rushed back from Sundance so that yesterday she could complete filming her scenes for David Hare’s BBC TV film Page Eight, in which she plays Bill Nighy’s artist daughter.
Felicity has starred in a couple of high-profile television dramas, but many of you will have heard her voice during the ten years she played Emma Grundy (nee Carter) in The Archers.
It seemed somewhat incongruous that we should talk about the popular tale of Borsetshire country folk 5,000 miles away from home, but she knows I’m a closet fan of the Radio 4 soap.
‘I miss Emma. She was a big part of my life. She was mute and I gave her life,’ Felicity told me.
But there was ground-breaking news. ‘There’s a possibility that I could come back, reincarnated as another character,’ she revealed. But it’s not something that’s going to happen any time soon.
Back to Like Crazy, the 27-year-old actress found herself the It Girl of the Festival thanks to a beautifully realised performance playing Anna, a British student studying in California who falls in love with an American student — but their affair is complicated by visa red-tape.
Paramount Pictures swiftly acquired the movie this week and it will be released later in the year.
The film was made without frills. Felicity drove herself to the set, did a lot of her own hair and make-up, and there was no fancy star trailer.
‘We had a chair, if we were lucky,’ she told me. ‘It was very rough and ready, and that’s why it worked.’
Whatever it was, Hollywood loves her like crazy.
Why Helena's just kidding
Following the rule book: Helena fells calmer after applying the rules child-rearing guide to her life
Helena Bonham Carter is applying child-rearing lessons to help her get through the Oscar awards.
‘Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting is the answer to almost everything,’ the actress tells me.
‘It helped me tremendously with the kiddies — Billy Ray and Nell — and I also found it invaluble in dealing with Tim. It’s terrific, he’s a changed man,’ she tells me, referring to her partner, film director Tim Burton.
‘What it does is make people think for themselves instead of me, the mother, doing everything for them,’ says Helena. ‘Tim used to say “Where’s such and such?” and I would scurry around looking for it.
‘Now, I make him do it — and the same with the kiddies. It just stops you running around doing every single thing for them.’
Helena is nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her acclaimed portrait of the Queen Mother opposite Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech.
She even applies the Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting to me. When I ask her who designed her gown, she turns the question back on me. ‘No, I won’t tell you,’ she says. ‘You think about it and tell me the answer.’ And, of course, the answer is Vivienne Westwood.
Helena took a course with Janice Norton, who created Calmer, Easier, Happier Parenting.
‘It has changed my life,’ she says. ‘I think because it has taken the stress out of parenting, or some of it at least, I’ll probably live ten years longer.’
She says she was surprised she was nominated because the film, directed by Tom Hooper, is a ‘bromance’ between Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush.
‘It’s about holding somebody’s hand and that everybody can be helped by somebody else,’ she says, adding that it was George VI’s great fortune that he found Lionel Logue to help him deal with his crippling stammer.
When I point out that in the movie it’s Elizabeth, her character, who is instrumental in finding Logue, Helena laughs and tells me: ‘Well, on the set it was really about the two boys, Colin and Geoffrey.
‘As long as Geoffrey was there Colin didn’t even notice me, not until Geoffrey finally finished his scenes and went off.
‘I said to Colin when he realised I was there: “Well, I have been playing your wife, love.” ’
She adds that while it’s always great to be nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta, she does feel that she’s ‘flying on the coattails’ of her two leading men.
She adds: ‘But it is good for me to be seen as vaguely normal in a film instead of being dressed as a witch or some strange character.’
And Helena says that as much as she loves working with Tim Burton: ‘I am available for work other than with the boyfriend. And I will certainly make it a Calmer, Easier, Happier set to work on.’
Playing Saddam's son turned Dominic into a real-life monster
Getting into character: Dominic Cooper admits he found himself picking up traits of the part he was playing - and not in a good way
It’s a measure of how brilliantly Dominic Cooper, right, portrayed Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein’s sadistic son, that I felt a tad uncomfortable when — less than an hour after watching the film — we were chatting away in a nightclub.
Uday was a psychopath, a sicko who would pick up schoolgirls on the street and then do unspeakable things to them. He was a bully who would torture and maim anyone who got in his way. He was a sexual predator who raped a bride on her wedding day. Dominic — who was in The History Boys, both on stage and on screen, and in the movie Mamma Mia! — gives the performances of his career in The Devil’s Double, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Festival.
When I say ‘performances’ . . . that’s not a mistake. Dominic not only plays Uday, but also Latif Yahia, who worked as Uday’s double and survived several assassination attempts.
Lee Tamahori directs The Devil’s Double like a gangster movie. The drugs, the fast cars, the excess made me think of Brian De Palma’s Scarface.
Though Uday’s behaviour in The Devil’s Double is far more repugnant than anything Al Pacino’s character did in De Palma’s movie, it is riveting and fascinating. Even so, some of the scenes were gory and I wonder if they will all survive the censor.
Latif gives the film its moral centre. He was the antithesis of Uday and it’s clear he had little choice in carrying out the duties he did.
Dominic, who has done his best work on the National Theatre stage and in movies such as An Education, The Duchess and The History Boys, is at the top of his game in this picture. It’s only January, but I think it will emerge as one of the year’s best performances.
He told me how he had to keep a check on himself during filming, saying that when he was in The History Boys he noticed he started to take on small aspects of his character’s behaviour. He said: ‘With this, I didn’t go around murdering people, but I was a bit more bolshie and more difficult to be around. You’re doing scenes each and every day of this maniac who was getting everything he wants, never accepting no for an answer. Thank God there was the other, more sympathetic role.’
He used to worry that movie audiences thought all he’d done was sing on a beach in Mamma Mia! Not any more!
Olivia - battered wife to battleaxe
Olivia Colman was terrified of disappointing in brutal film 'Tyrannosaur' but pulls it off with aplomb
Olivia Colman is preparing to play Carol Thatcher, with Meryl Streep as her mother, Margaret Thatcher. Her look in The Iron Lady, which starts filming next week, will be very different from how we see her in Paddy Considine’s scorching new film Tyrannosaur, in which she plays a battered wife.
Initially, we assume Hannah lives a cosy lifestyle in a detached home on a private estate, with a husband who adores her. We know that life is a lie as soon as we meet her husband, played by Eddie Marsan, who does something disgusting to her while she’s asleep.
Later on, her face is battered black and blue. Olivia told me: ‘Paddy gave me the script and his wife asked me: “Have you seen it? I’m so sorry about what he’s going to make you do.” ’ But Olivia, who recently appeared opposite Tom Hollander in Rev on TV and in movies such as Hot Fuzz, was more worried about whether she’d let her director and writer down.
‘I was terrified that I wouldn’t do it well enough. I was concerned that Paddy had entrusted me with the part when he could have got a bigger name to play her. But he wanted me,’ Olivia told me as we drank tea and ate a sandwich and chips at a cafe in Park City where the festival is held.
I hope Meryl gets to see Tyrannosaur. I think she’ll be very proud of her screen daughter.
Franco a 'man' about the house
Versatile: Manly James Franco donned a wig for a comedy but was so keen on it he wore it to a party
That James Franco is a smart, multi-tasking dude. Well, at least I think he’s a dude — because he was dressed up as actress Suzanne Somers in a video art installation shown as part of a sidebar of the Sundance Film Festival.
I’m kidding, of course. He and some pals had just shot some spoof scenes of the American TV comedy Three’s Company, which was based on Britain’s Man About The House.
James wore a deliberately ill-fitting blonde wig in the take-off and then turned up for the after-party sporting the same hairpiece.
He explained he just wanted to pay homage to a classic TV comedy, still popular in re-runs on TV over here, while at the same time he wanted to ‘play around with gender specifics’. He certainly has good comic timing, which will come in useful when he co-hosts the Oscars with Anne Hathaway.
James has also been nominated for his powerful performance in Danny Boyle’s film 127 Hours, which features some extraordinary cinematography. The film has six Oscar nominations, including best picture, but I’m surprised Anthony Dod Mantle wasn’t cited for his camera work.
On another note, there’s chatter about the possibility of a Broadway musical based on Three’s Company, although I’ve been told it’s a couple of years away (if it’s going to happen at all). Maybe James could don that blonde wig again.
Watch out for...
• Juno Temple and Kay Panabaker, who star as two teens living on the coast of California’s Salton Sea. Lily (Juno) can’t wait to grow up, while Alison (Kay) is less impetuous. They steal away one night to join a small gang of boys in a rough part of Los Angeles.
You sense that Alison will always keep her head on her shoulders and do well in life, while Lily’s soul is beyond repair. The film marks the directorial debut of Elgin James, a former street kid. So much in the film, which premiered at Sundance, has that smack of authenticity. Both actresses are good and I was impressed with Juno, who appeared in Atonement and the St Trinian movies (she went to posh schools in England).
Interestingly, director James said one film that influenced him was The Great Rock And Roll Swindle — directed by one Julien Temple long before his daughter Juno was born.
Making it his own: Brendan Gleeson is the star
• Brendan Gleeson who is great in the very black, Tarantino-esque (ish) comedy The Guard. He plays an unconventional Garda officer in Connemara who likes his morning latte and a romp on his day off with scantily clad lasses.
Daft as he might sound, he’s not to be underestimated. Director and screenwriter John Michael McDonagh has come up with some nicely drawn characters. Don Cheadle plays an FBI agent sent over to try to bust a big drug outfit and I’m not certain he makes the most of his opportunities here. Anyway, it’s Gleeson’s picture and he puts it in his pocket and walks away with it.
• Elizabeth Olsen, who stars with Hugh Dancy, John Hawkes, Sarah Paulson and Brady Corbet in Martha Marcy May Marlene. I went to see this film, about a young woman who escapes from a cult, with no expectation whatsoever.
I unfairly took the view that because Ms Olsen has two nitwit sisters who, among other things, can’t act for toffee, she too must suffer from whatever it is that ails her siblings. Not a bit of it. She’s terrific, she knows when to be quiet and still, and can act without waving her arms all over the place.
• Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Zachary Quinto and Demi Moore, who lead the ensemble of J.C. Chandor’s film Margin Call, set in Wall Street in 2008. Irons is terrific — a master-class in effortless ruthlessness. And, surprise, Ms Moore is good here.
• The King’s Speech is heading towards £25million in box-office takings in the UK this weekend. Amazing, especially as the people behind it would have been delighted with just £6million.
Interestingly, both Film4 and BBC Films turned the project down. That it got made at all was, initially, down to Geoffrey Rush who had been sent a stage version of David Seidler’s script. The actor, who plays Lionel Logue, recognised that it would be better as a film, rather than a play.
The other person who pushed it was Sally Caplan, former head of the UK Film Council, who supported producers Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin. Now it’s leading the Oscar race with 12 nominations.
Explore more:
- People:
- Demi Moore,
- Harvey Weinstein,
- Margaret Thatcher,
- Dominic Cooper,
- Colin Firth,
- Helena Bonham Carter,
- Kevin Spacey,
- Vivienne Westwood,
- Saddam Hussein,
- Al Pacino,
- Anne Hathaway,
- Paul Bettany,
- Jeremy Irons
- Places:
- London,
- Los Angeles,
- United Kingdom
- Organisations:
- Federal Bureau of Investigation,
- Uk Film Council
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