Evening Standard interview and photoshoot
Matt has been interviewed for the Lifestyle section of the Evening Standard:
Matt Smith wears jacket by Prada Shirt by Dolce& Gabbana at Matches and trousers by Gucci
Matt Smith probably had the best summer of anyone on the planet. He received rave reviews across the board for his zany, professorial performance as Doctor Who and then he took off on holiday with his new girlfriend, the model Daisy Lowe, hitting the Amalfi coast, Ibiza and California's Coachella music festival. Trapped in America by the volcanic ash cloud, the couple joined forces with Jaime Winstone, Alexa Chungand Arctic Monkey Alex Turner and went on a road trip to the Joshua Tree National Park and Las Vegas. Back in the UK, Matt went to Glastonbury, where he joined Orbital onstage as they played his theme tune. 'Not my theme tune,' corrects Smith scrupulously. 'The theme tune. The vista from the stage was amazing. I thought: "This isn't going to happen to me ever again," ' he says, glazing over briefly. 'Anyway, yes, my summer was good, thanks. How was yours?'
Writhing in the chair opposite me, plaiting and replaiting his long skinny legs, Matt Smith is a bundle of nervous tindersticks. Brought up in Northampton, he has a flat yet fruity voice, and he is given to elaborate sentence constructions, such as 'if it is indeed the case…' and 'I shall be sure to let you know'. He is, at 27, the youngest ever Doctor Who, but he looks, to be quite honest, more like a baddie. He'd make a wonderful Steerpike, if they ever do Gormenghast again. His deep-set eyes bore out of his skull like lasers, and his slightly pigeon-toed feet stick out sharply from a body that is all angles. In the dark you'd think he was a hatstand. He knows how sinister he can look because when I ask him if he'd like to play Shakespeare, he says, 'Yes, a really young, really evil Macbeth.'
His hands are like some mad alchemist's: thin fingers adorned with chunky silver rings set with dark cloudy stones. From his neck hangs a little antique compass on a long silver chain. This is off-duty, mind - Matt as Matt. He beams when I call him a dandy. 'I'll take that as a compliment.' (Later I overhear him telling our stylist that his girlfriend's sock drawer is 'an Aladdin's cave. Women's socks can come up trumps.') His rings, which he found 'in a wonderful little junk shop near the Paris Ritz, where you have to knock on the door', were inspired by Johnny Depp. 'Cos his hands always look so cool, don't they?' Next he shows me his favourite hat, a grey trilby with a bright partridge feather in it. 'It was really cheap, from New York. Actually it's a lady's hat. Look, it suits you better than me.' His Time Lord is equally dandyish, and wears an identical pair of Russell & Bromley boots to the ones Smith has on today; there is more than a little blurring of boundaries going on here.
He can speak fluent Doctor, bursting into a gabbled improvisation inspired by the glass of water in front of him: 'The molecular structure of this glass is basically something that Saturn can't understand, so when you put it on the table a pink elephant comes into the room and starts doing a dance. And then we get the deconfibrillator out…' As on TV, he does it with such complete conviction I almost expect an elephant to come in. Then he relaxes back into himself. 'You've got to spend a long time on the job to be able to speak that kind of gobbledegook.'
The show's trippiness seems to be permeating deeply. 'Playing this part has really encouraged my awe of the universe. It's a big strong powerful universe and it's been here a lot longer than I have. I'm open to it, I'm not dismissive of anything.' He is going through a Doctorish phase of loving theories. Does he draw the line at star signs? Clearly not: 'I'm a Scorpio. There's a sting in our tail. Don't mess with us!' He believes in everything, from football to the stones on his fingers. 'I believe inBlackburn Rovers as much as I believe that these stones have energy.' He also, surely, believes in luck.
When Smith first landed the job of Doctor Who last year, he made an offhand comment to a newspaper about Daisy Lowe, the face of Biba and former Agent Provocateur lingerie model, daughter of Primrose Hill den mother Pearl and rocker Gavin Rossdale. Asked who or what he was looking for in a woman, he said: 'Oh gosh! Daisy Lowe is taken, so that's out of the question.' Did he have an almighty crush before he even met her? 'That totally predated having ever met Daisy, yes,' he admits, before his mobile rings opportunely. 'Saved by the bell, no less!' By his secret grin I infer it is Daisy on the line.
He always meant to be a footballer, and all through his years at Northampton School for Boys he played centre-back for the youth team of his home town, then for Nottingham Forest and Leicester City. Then, at 16, a back injury put him out of action. His father, who is head of a plastics company, drove him to Leicester for treatment every day for a year, but he never recovered his form. The National Youth Theatre was, at first, a distraction. But performing is in his genes - his elder sister Laura Jayne is a dancer who recently toured with Take That - and he began to get good parts at the NYT, such as Thomas Becket in TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. He also shone in the NYT's The Master and Margarita, and by the time he was in his third year studying drama and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, he already had an agent and was appearing in plays including Fresh Kills with Christian Slater at The Royal Court. He graduated with a 2:2, and went straight into the run of The History Boys at the National Theatre playing Lockwood. Television roles such as a political aide in Party Animals (the BBC Two programme that also launched the career of Andrea Riseborough) followed - until, as a relative unknown ('Doctor Who?' asked headlines), he landed the biggest acting role on the BBC.
Since then he has completed a distinctly experimental-sounding film called Womb, which co-stars Eva Green as a mother who gives birth to the clone of her dead lover. He has also just shot another prestigious BBC drama, playing the novelist Christopher Isherwood in a play for television by Kevin Elyot called Christopher and His Kind. It co-stars Lindsay Duncan (who is playing his mother again, having already done it once to great acclaim in That Face, The Royal Court play by Polly Stenham) and Imogen Poots as Jean Ross, the girl who inspired the Cabaret character Sally Bowles. 'She makes her very tragic, very lonely,' says Matt. 'Which is quite unnerving to see in someone so young.' Shooting took place in the middle of Matt's summer of love, with Belfast passing for 1930s Berlin. 'I would have loved to be in Berlin in the 1930s,' says Matt powerfully, as if it might just happen if he says it loud enough (after all, he is accustomed to time-travel). 'Because it was such a mad, decadent place. It's interesting, isn't it, that a place that's gone through one of the most ardent, brutal periods of fascism the world has ever known is also one of the most liberal places. For Isherwood, living in England as a gay man in that age was, I imagine, very oppressive and then going to Berlin was suddenly to open this chocolate box of dreams…'
Like Colin Firth, who played Isherwood's creation Professor George Falconer in the film A Single Man, Smith is another example of a straight actor cast in an iconic gay role. Defensible? 'Well, not everyone's the Prince of enmark, are they? I think it's just pretend, I don't think it matters one note if someone who is playing a gay man isn't gay. If you're in Star Trek you aren't really an alien, but you do your research. Listen, I quizzed all my gay friends - fear not, they got a grilling!' The rest of his research involved visiting Don Bachardy, Isherwood's former partner, now 76, an artist living in Santa Monica in a house full of David Hockneys. 'He's a wonderful portraitist. He did lots of Christopher and he even flew out to Africa to paint Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. He said he would paint me one day, too. He was vastly younger than Christopher but they were very much in love, and Don is still in love with him today.'
Smith read the Isherwood oeuvre ('He's a great prose writer') and immersed himself in Isherwood's voice recordings, often repeating the clipped declaration: 'Ai am a wrrri-ter!' He loved wearing the 'glorious' 1930s suits, tie pins and waistcoats. 'We don't do craftsmanship like that any more.' Finally, he ended up kissing an actor pretending to be WH Auden for three hours. 'I was clean-shaven every day but I had to kiss somebody who wasn't and I finally understood the true folly, for a woman, of stubble rash. It's a very justified complaint from womankind. It really gets you red.'
He's a quirky, entertaining conversationalist. 'I'm a great collector of things I don't need. I'm getting quite interested in antique furniture at the moment. Does that make me really uncool?' (No, but it will stoke speculation that he's moving in with Daisy Lowe.) 'I'm into beds and drawers and old chairs, from the 1970s and the 1920s respectively. I like low tables with funny little legs.'
He loves chess, which comes in handy at Doctor Who conventions, where he has been spotted playing chess, in character, with three little boys at once. 'Chess is brilliant, it's a war of minds. When I play I take it very seriously and I will not take my eyes off the board.' He plays with Daisy. Are they well-matched? 'Yes.'
Smith enjoys the array of guest stars who appear on Doctor Who, and is angling for an appearance for his friend Florence Welch. Michael Gambon has just filmed a part in the Christmas special. 'I've got a total man-crush on him. He's cool. He's fun. I was talking to him about Olivier and Gielgud and what made them so brilliant and he said that the one communality they had was that they were all naughty.' Smith likes this. 'Gambon's quite a naughty man, and I'm mischievous, too. Of course they all worked really hard but that naughtiness was what separated them from the others.'
How mischievous is Smith really? Wasn't he head boy at school? 'Yes, that was mainly about getting out of triple maths... To me, naughtiness means playfulness and hopefully inventiveness, giving a different performance each take and challenging what everyone in the room thinks I'm going to do next.' Such as, in this instance, starting another riff on the hugeness of the universe: 'I read up a lot on Albert Einstein when I started playing the Doctor and he mentions how seismic the universe is, the sheer scale of it. Last night I was in Somerset' - Babington House, to be precise - 'and the starscape was so amazing, it was like I was in the outback in Australia.' He throws his long hands wide in wonder and tips his head back. 'It's like going on holiday, it does the same thing for me, gives me a sense of perspective.' And that's how we shall leave the man of the moment: lying on the grass, gazing at the stars and feeling small.
Matt Smith wears Jacket and Trousers by Gucci Shirt by Dolce and Gabbana at Matches
Matt Smith wears Shirt by Balmain at Matches Sunglasses by Ray-Ban at David Clulow
(As ever, discussion about Matt and Daisy's relationship in comments, is considered very much off limits).
Matt Smith wears jacket by Prada Shirt by Dolce& Gabbana at Matches and trousers by Gucci
Matt Smith probably had the best summer of anyone on the planet. He received rave reviews across the board for his zany, professorial performance as Doctor Who and then he took off on holiday with his new girlfriend, the model Daisy Lowe, hitting the Amalfi coast, Ibiza and California's Coachella music festival. Trapped in America by the volcanic ash cloud, the couple joined forces with Jaime Winstone, Alexa Chungand Arctic Monkey Alex Turner and went on a road trip to the Joshua Tree National Park and Las Vegas. Back in the UK, Matt went to Glastonbury, where he joined Orbital onstage as they played his theme tune. 'Not my theme tune,' corrects Smith scrupulously. 'The theme tune. The vista from the stage was amazing. I thought: "This isn't going to happen to me ever again," ' he says, glazing over briefly. 'Anyway, yes, my summer was good, thanks. How was yours?'
Writhing in the chair opposite me, plaiting and replaiting his long skinny legs, Matt Smith is a bundle of nervous tindersticks. Brought up in Northampton, he has a flat yet fruity voice, and he is given to elaborate sentence constructions, such as 'if it is indeed the case…' and 'I shall be sure to let you know'. He is, at 27, the youngest ever Doctor Who, but he looks, to be quite honest, more like a baddie. He'd make a wonderful Steerpike, if they ever do Gormenghast again. His deep-set eyes bore out of his skull like lasers, and his slightly pigeon-toed feet stick out sharply from a body that is all angles. In the dark you'd think he was a hatstand. He knows how sinister he can look because when I ask him if he'd like to play Shakespeare, he says, 'Yes, a really young, really evil Macbeth.'
His hands are like some mad alchemist's: thin fingers adorned with chunky silver rings set with dark cloudy stones. From his neck hangs a little antique compass on a long silver chain. This is off-duty, mind - Matt as Matt. He beams when I call him a dandy. 'I'll take that as a compliment.' (Later I overhear him telling our stylist that his girlfriend's sock drawer is 'an Aladdin's cave. Women's socks can come up trumps.') His rings, which he found 'in a wonderful little junk shop near the Paris Ritz, where you have to knock on the door', were inspired by Johnny Depp. 'Cos his hands always look so cool, don't they?' Next he shows me his favourite hat, a grey trilby with a bright partridge feather in it. 'It was really cheap, from New York. Actually it's a lady's hat. Look, it suits you better than me.' His Time Lord is equally dandyish, and wears an identical pair of Russell & Bromley boots to the ones Smith has on today; there is more than a little blurring of boundaries going on here.
He can speak fluent Doctor, bursting into a gabbled improvisation inspired by the glass of water in front of him: 'The molecular structure of this glass is basically something that Saturn can't understand, so when you put it on the table a pink elephant comes into the room and starts doing a dance. And then we get the deconfibrillator out…' As on TV, he does it with such complete conviction I almost expect an elephant to come in. Then he relaxes back into himself. 'You've got to spend a long time on the job to be able to speak that kind of gobbledegook.'
The show's trippiness seems to be permeating deeply. 'Playing this part has really encouraged my awe of the universe. It's a big strong powerful universe and it's been here a lot longer than I have. I'm open to it, I'm not dismissive of anything.' He is going through a Doctorish phase of loving theories. Does he draw the line at star signs? Clearly not: 'I'm a Scorpio. There's a sting in our tail. Don't mess with us!' He believes in everything, from football to the stones on his fingers. 'I believe inBlackburn Rovers as much as I believe that these stones have energy.' He also, surely, believes in luck.
When Smith first landed the job of Doctor Who last year, he made an offhand comment to a newspaper about Daisy Lowe, the face of Biba and former Agent Provocateur lingerie model, daughter of Primrose Hill den mother Pearl and rocker Gavin Rossdale. Asked who or what he was looking for in a woman, he said: 'Oh gosh! Daisy Lowe is taken, so that's out of the question.' Did he have an almighty crush before he even met her? 'That totally predated having ever met Daisy, yes,' he admits, before his mobile rings opportunely. 'Saved by the bell, no less!' By his secret grin I infer it is Daisy on the line.
He always meant to be a footballer, and all through his years at Northampton School for Boys he played centre-back for the youth team of his home town, then for Nottingham Forest and Leicester City. Then, at 16, a back injury put him out of action. His father, who is head of a plastics company, drove him to Leicester for treatment every day for a year, but he never recovered his form. The National Youth Theatre was, at first, a distraction. But performing is in his genes - his elder sister Laura Jayne is a dancer who recently toured with Take That - and he began to get good parts at the NYT, such as Thomas Becket in TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. He also shone in the NYT's The Master and Margarita, and by the time he was in his third year studying drama and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, he already had an agent and was appearing in plays including Fresh Kills with Christian Slater at The Royal Court. He graduated with a 2:2, and went straight into the run of The History Boys at the National Theatre playing Lockwood. Television roles such as a political aide in Party Animals (the BBC Two programme that also launched the career of Andrea Riseborough) followed - until, as a relative unknown ('Doctor Who?' asked headlines), he landed the biggest acting role on the BBC.
Since then he has completed a distinctly experimental-sounding film called Womb, which co-stars Eva Green as a mother who gives birth to the clone of her dead lover. He has also just shot another prestigious BBC drama, playing the novelist Christopher Isherwood in a play for television by Kevin Elyot called Christopher and His Kind. It co-stars Lindsay Duncan (who is playing his mother again, having already done it once to great acclaim in That Face, The Royal Court play by Polly Stenham) and Imogen Poots as Jean Ross, the girl who inspired the Cabaret character Sally Bowles. 'She makes her very tragic, very lonely,' says Matt. 'Which is quite unnerving to see in someone so young.' Shooting took place in the middle of Matt's summer of love, with Belfast passing for 1930s Berlin. 'I would have loved to be in Berlin in the 1930s,' says Matt powerfully, as if it might just happen if he says it loud enough (after all, he is accustomed to time-travel). 'Because it was such a mad, decadent place. It's interesting, isn't it, that a place that's gone through one of the most ardent, brutal periods of fascism the world has ever known is also one of the most liberal places. For Isherwood, living in England as a gay man in that age was, I imagine, very oppressive and then going to Berlin was suddenly to open this chocolate box of dreams…'
Like Colin Firth, who played Isherwood's creation Professor George Falconer in the film A Single Man, Smith is another example of a straight actor cast in an iconic gay role. Defensible? 'Well, not everyone's the Prince of enmark, are they? I think it's just pretend, I don't think it matters one note if someone who is playing a gay man isn't gay. If you're in Star Trek you aren't really an alien, but you do your research. Listen, I quizzed all my gay friends - fear not, they got a grilling!' The rest of his research involved visiting Don Bachardy, Isherwood's former partner, now 76, an artist living in Santa Monica in a house full of David Hockneys. 'He's a wonderful portraitist. He did lots of Christopher and he even flew out to Africa to paint Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. He said he would paint me one day, too. He was vastly younger than Christopher but they were very much in love, and Don is still in love with him today.'
Smith read the Isherwood oeuvre ('He's a great prose writer') and immersed himself in Isherwood's voice recordings, often repeating the clipped declaration: 'Ai am a wrrri-ter!' He loved wearing the 'glorious' 1930s suits, tie pins and waistcoats. 'We don't do craftsmanship like that any more.' Finally, he ended up kissing an actor pretending to be WH Auden for three hours. 'I was clean-shaven every day but I had to kiss somebody who wasn't and I finally understood the true folly, for a woman, of stubble rash. It's a very justified complaint from womankind. It really gets you red.'
He's a quirky, entertaining conversationalist. 'I'm a great collector of things I don't need. I'm getting quite interested in antique furniture at the moment. Does that make me really uncool?' (No, but it will stoke speculation that he's moving in with Daisy Lowe.) 'I'm into beds and drawers and old chairs, from the 1970s and the 1920s respectively. I like low tables with funny little legs.'
He loves chess, which comes in handy at Doctor Who conventions, where he has been spotted playing chess, in character, with three little boys at once. 'Chess is brilliant, it's a war of minds. When I play I take it very seriously and I will not take my eyes off the board.' He plays with Daisy. Are they well-matched? 'Yes.'
Smith enjoys the array of guest stars who appear on Doctor Who, and is angling for an appearance for his friend Florence Welch. Michael Gambon has just filmed a part in the Christmas special. 'I've got a total man-crush on him. He's cool. He's fun. I was talking to him about Olivier and Gielgud and what made them so brilliant and he said that the one communality they had was that they were all naughty.' Smith likes this. 'Gambon's quite a naughty man, and I'm mischievous, too. Of course they all worked really hard but that naughtiness was what separated them from the others.'
How mischievous is Smith really? Wasn't he head boy at school? 'Yes, that was mainly about getting out of triple maths... To me, naughtiness means playfulness and hopefully inventiveness, giving a different performance each take and challenging what everyone in the room thinks I'm going to do next.' Such as, in this instance, starting another riff on the hugeness of the universe: 'I read up a lot on Albert Einstein when I started playing the Doctor and he mentions how seismic the universe is, the sheer scale of it. Last night I was in Somerset' - Babington House, to be precise - 'and the starscape was so amazing, it was like I was in the outback in Australia.' He throws his long hands wide in wonder and tips his head back. 'It's like going on holiday, it does the same thing for me, gives me a sense of perspective.' And that's how we shall leave the man of the moment: lying on the grass, gazing at the stars and feeling small.
Matt Smith wears Jacket and Trousers by Gucci Shirt by Dolce and Gabbana at Matches
Matt Smith wears Shirt by Balmain at Matches Sunglasses by Ray-Ban at David Clulow
(As ever, discussion about Matt and Daisy's relationship in comments, is considered very much off limits).