Interview with Jeremy
...cause I'm still trying to keep the newer ones - few as there are - in one place for research purposes. You may skim over this post. This one has a few good points and some "new" information.
Source
Case for the Accused
By Aidan Smith
Jeremy Northam values his privacy but, as he tells Aidan Smith, he's happy to shed that quiet dignity when it comes to the right role
THE discerning film fan's favourite suave English scoundrel is shuffling agitatedly from foot to foot, ciggie in a downturned mouth, when I arrive at his Soho club. Jeremy Northam curses the modern world for the smoking ban. But does he also curse it for cigarette cases falling out of fashion?
Northam excels at cigarette case movies. He's a genius at snapping shut a slim gilt box with a terrible finality, confirming that your every exit has been barricaded, that all available options have been closed off. Maybe, though, he wouldn't take that as a compliment. I decide not to mention it.
He signs me into the club, buys me a beer and - without prompting - proceeds to send up the great chunk of his fine career that has been devoted to period drama. "Sometimes I'll ask myself: 'How come I've appeared in wing collars so many times?'" he says. "Or I'll go: 'Enough! No more breeches!' And I'll worry that when they come to write my obituary it'll simply say: 'He wore assorted hats from the past.'" He laughs and fiddles with his fag packet to illustrate its shocking lack of case-like qualities. This is going well.
Better than I expected, in fact. He took some persuading to do this interview. I was warned not to ask any personal questions because he wouldn't answer them. For protection, it seems, a press officer sits in on our conversation. Truly, one of the least asked questions in showbiz is: "Did you read about that Jeremy Northam in Heat?"
But he's not awkward or difficult or evasive - far from it. Don't believe all you don't read in Heat. It's true, he has difficulty spitting out the word "celebrity". But he explains his private nature like this: "Other actors embrace their - if we must use the term - celebrity with great energy and dedication. That's their choice. But I've always worked on the principle that the less you know about the man you see on screen, the better you're able to understand what he's trying to do with the role he's playing."
A photo-shoot in Hello! would only complicate matters, he says - adding that this is probably the only time "Hello!" and "complicate" have ever appeared in the same sentence.
Let's establish what we do know about Jeremy Northam. He's 46 years old. Back when he willingly supplied personal information to journalists, they'd write up his age wrongly. Then there was the time, interviewed on location in Saffron Burrows' caravan, that an enthusiasm for over-groomed pop fools the Backstreet Boys was attributed to him, merely because one of their albums happened to be lying around. That sort of scurrilous untruth can be damaging for a man.
His film roles (wing collars) include Emma as Mr Knightly, plus Carrington, An Ideal Husband, The Winslow Boy, Enigma, Possession and Gosford Park, in which he played the matinee idol Ivor Novello. But he's not sporting wing collars today, being dressed in blazer and jeans with a three-day growth roughening his own matinee good looks, and his newest work and the reason we're talking is contemporary - terrifyingly so.
Fiona's Story is a BBC Scotland drama about a father of three young girls arrested for downloading images of sexually abused children. At first his wife stands by him. "Right," she says, "I've drawn up two columns: one for the people we'll tell when you go to court - if you go; one for the people we'll tell now." But as the case drags, cracks appear in his story, and in the Farrow & Ball artifice of their happy home. As Fiona and Simon, Gina McKee and Northam are brilliant, with our man delivering a bravura performance full of delusion, selfishness and cynical manipulation. He's a "miserable little creep," according to his wife, who demands to know: "What kind of man are you? Why are you doing this to us - why?"
The drama was filmed in Glasgow although the family and their world had to be made English because, according to Beeb Scotland, the law north of the border wouldn't have allowed for as much re- bailing of Northam's character. The shoot was short and intense.
"I didn't like Simon," Northam says, "and I was relieved when it was all over."
So what attracts an actor to the part of a man potentially involved in child porn? The model-plane painter precision required in finely drawing the character, being careful to avoid big clumsy strokes. Northam, you will have gathered, is an actor who takes his job very seriously.
"I didn't like Simon, but I made it the brief to myself not to condemn him," he adds. "You never really know what it is he's done. So that was the challenge of playing him."
Northam "made it the brief" to himself. He's very careful in his use of language, thinking for a while before deciding he's "sanguine" about always being offered period roles - then using words like "whilst", which perhaps tells you why they come his way. Finally, he admits that unlike Simon and the rest of the western world he doesn't own a computer. "I'm uncomfortable with the notion that there's this parallel universe - a virtual world where people are free to say or be whatever they want." And do his friends slag him off for this old-world viewpoint? "Of course."
Northam has played a lot of men who only communicated by quill pen: Sir Robert Morton, Sir Robert Chiltern, Randolph Henry Ash and Beacus Penrose. Grand names, all of them. But he's also played a man called Lane Woolwrap and another called Dean Martin (the Dino). Hollywood affords him the scope to impersonate gangsters and gay convicts; here, the assumption is he's posh.
I'm very proud of the fact I didn't go to public school," he says. "My parents began their family in the 1950s when there was rationing. We never had a lot of money or a decent car or fancy holidays but our home was solid, affectionate and hard-working and there was always music around."
Northam talks with great pride about his parents, who were both professors at Cambridge University. Again without prompting, he mentions the death of his mother and a story I knew, about how he soldiered on in a play. Then comes one I didn't know: the next time he was due to open on the stage, his father died. He says he's never previously admitted to an unfortunate incident with a photographer trying to take his picture while he was rushing to his mother's bedside. When his father passed away, and his first-night reviews said he was "too angry", he decided that the show-must-go-on maxim was bunk.
Though he doesn't phrase it like this, both deaths probably held back his career. His mother's stopped him moving to Hollywood; his father's caused him to withdraw from the running to play James Bond. But there are no regrets, not even about missing out on 007.
"Daniel [Craig] is a fantastic Bond," he says. "I always saw him as a dangerous man, someone who'd enjoy all the sex and killing." Can't he do that? "Yes, but I'd come across as creepy. Good luck to Daniel, although I do wonder: can he walk down the street anymore?"
Clearly Northam values his privacy. In his career, leading ladies have included Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone and Cate Blanchett. In real life... well, that's another story, and one that Northam isn't keen to share. So now is the time to close the lid and clasp it shut like a cigarette case. To say any more would, as he says, detract from the mystique.
Source
Case for the Accused
By Aidan Smith
Jeremy Northam values his privacy but, as he tells Aidan Smith, he's happy to shed that quiet dignity when it comes to the right role
THE discerning film fan's favourite suave English scoundrel is shuffling agitatedly from foot to foot, ciggie in a downturned mouth, when I arrive at his Soho club. Jeremy Northam curses the modern world for the smoking ban. But does he also curse it for cigarette cases falling out of fashion?
Northam excels at cigarette case movies. He's a genius at snapping shut a slim gilt box with a terrible finality, confirming that your every exit has been barricaded, that all available options have been closed off. Maybe, though, he wouldn't take that as a compliment. I decide not to mention it.
He signs me into the club, buys me a beer and - without prompting - proceeds to send up the great chunk of his fine career that has been devoted to period drama. "Sometimes I'll ask myself: 'How come I've appeared in wing collars so many times?'" he says. "Or I'll go: 'Enough! No more breeches!' And I'll worry that when they come to write my obituary it'll simply say: 'He wore assorted hats from the past.'" He laughs and fiddles with his fag packet to illustrate its shocking lack of case-like qualities. This is going well.
Better than I expected, in fact. He took some persuading to do this interview. I was warned not to ask any personal questions because he wouldn't answer them. For protection, it seems, a press officer sits in on our conversation. Truly, one of the least asked questions in showbiz is: "Did you read about that Jeremy Northam in Heat?"
But he's not awkward or difficult or evasive - far from it. Don't believe all you don't read in Heat. It's true, he has difficulty spitting out the word "celebrity". But he explains his private nature like this: "Other actors embrace their - if we must use the term - celebrity with great energy and dedication. That's their choice. But I've always worked on the principle that the less you know about the man you see on screen, the better you're able to understand what he's trying to do with the role he's playing."
A photo-shoot in Hello! would only complicate matters, he says - adding that this is probably the only time "Hello!" and "complicate" have ever appeared in the same sentence.
Let's establish what we do know about Jeremy Northam. He's 46 years old. Back when he willingly supplied personal information to journalists, they'd write up his age wrongly. Then there was the time, interviewed on location in Saffron Burrows' caravan, that an enthusiasm for over-groomed pop fools the Backstreet Boys was attributed to him, merely because one of their albums happened to be lying around. That sort of scurrilous untruth can be damaging for a man.
His film roles (wing collars) include Emma as Mr Knightly, plus Carrington, An Ideal Husband, The Winslow Boy, Enigma, Possession and Gosford Park, in which he played the matinee idol Ivor Novello. But he's not sporting wing collars today, being dressed in blazer and jeans with a three-day growth roughening his own matinee good looks, and his newest work and the reason we're talking is contemporary - terrifyingly so.
Fiona's Story is a BBC Scotland drama about a father of three young girls arrested for downloading images of sexually abused children. At first his wife stands by him. "Right," she says, "I've drawn up two columns: one for the people we'll tell when you go to court - if you go; one for the people we'll tell now." But as the case drags, cracks appear in his story, and in the Farrow & Ball artifice of their happy home. As Fiona and Simon, Gina McKee and Northam are brilliant, with our man delivering a bravura performance full of delusion, selfishness and cynical manipulation. He's a "miserable little creep," according to his wife, who demands to know: "What kind of man are you? Why are you doing this to us - why?"
The drama was filmed in Glasgow although the family and their world had to be made English because, according to Beeb Scotland, the law north of the border wouldn't have allowed for as much re- bailing of Northam's character. The shoot was short and intense.
"I didn't like Simon," Northam says, "and I was relieved when it was all over."
So what attracts an actor to the part of a man potentially involved in child porn? The model-plane painter precision required in finely drawing the character, being careful to avoid big clumsy strokes. Northam, you will have gathered, is an actor who takes his job very seriously.
"I didn't like Simon, but I made it the brief to myself not to condemn him," he adds. "You never really know what it is he's done. So that was the challenge of playing him."
Northam "made it the brief" to himself. He's very careful in his use of language, thinking for a while before deciding he's "sanguine" about always being offered period roles - then using words like "whilst", which perhaps tells you why they come his way. Finally, he admits that unlike Simon and the rest of the western world he doesn't own a computer. "I'm uncomfortable with the notion that there's this parallel universe - a virtual world where people are free to say or be whatever they want." And do his friends slag him off for this old-world viewpoint? "Of course."
Northam has played a lot of men who only communicated by quill pen: Sir Robert Morton, Sir Robert Chiltern, Randolph Henry Ash and Beacus Penrose. Grand names, all of them. But he's also played a man called Lane Woolwrap and another called Dean Martin (the Dino). Hollywood affords him the scope to impersonate gangsters and gay convicts; here, the assumption is he's posh.
I'm very proud of the fact I didn't go to public school," he says. "My parents began their family in the 1950s when there was rationing. We never had a lot of money or a decent car or fancy holidays but our home was solid, affectionate and hard-working and there was always music around."
Northam talks with great pride about his parents, who were both professors at Cambridge University. Again without prompting, he mentions the death of his mother and a story I knew, about how he soldiered on in a play. Then comes one I didn't know: the next time he was due to open on the stage, his father died. He says he's never previously admitted to an unfortunate incident with a photographer trying to take his picture while he was rushing to his mother's bedside. When his father passed away, and his first-night reviews said he was "too angry", he decided that the show-must-go-on maxim was bunk.
Though he doesn't phrase it like this, both deaths probably held back his career. His mother's stopped him moving to Hollywood; his father's caused him to withdraw from the running to play James Bond. But there are no regrets, not even about missing out on 007.
"Daniel [Craig] is a fantastic Bond," he says. "I always saw him as a dangerous man, someone who'd enjoy all the sex and killing." Can't he do that? "Yes, but I'd come across as creepy. Good luck to Daniel, although I do wonder: can he walk down the street anymore?"
Clearly Northam values his privacy. In his career, leading ladies have included Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman, Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone and Cate Blanchett. In real life... well, that's another story, and one that Northam isn't keen to share. So now is the time to close the lid and clasp it shut like a cigarette case. To say any more would, as he says, detract from the mystique.