He’ll bring “a piece of memorabilia” to set, like his sibling’s old sweater, and bundle it up somewhere near the camera, so that it’s in his eyeline but out of the shot. “I had a real psychological break there.” Now, when he needs to summon sadness he’ll think of Matthew. “It exploded our family,” he says, turning expectedly grave. When Bettany was 16, living with his family in Hertfordshire on the campus of an all-girl boarding school where his father taught drama, his eight-year-old brother Matthew died. But he admits to one method that sounds more torturous than any radical body transformation. Unlike Day-Lewis, he wouldn’t call himself a method actor. “Anyway, life is curly,” Bettany smiles, “and I got very lucky.” “You just don’t know what’s going to happen next so just f****** relax about it.” Words to live by. And I’m a bit more relaxed,” Bettany says. “It’s made me not take work for granted so much. But this kind of career upheaval had its benefits, too. In 2013, when a big-time producer told Bettany he’d never work again, he was disheartened enough to believe him. He realises now that some of these choices “denigrated the brand” and made it that much harder to get work. The rest of us, he chuckles, mostly take the next project on offer. “Daniel Day-Lewis is one and Meryl Streep is another”. Bettany, however, would like to point out that there are only perhaps 10 actors in the world who get to choose their films.
#Paul bettany forspoken trial
At the Duke’s goading, Foy’s Duchess is hounded by the British press who unpick the sinews of her private life with demonic glee.Īccess unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign upīettany doesn’t specify exactly what these decisions were, but a scroll through his IMDb during this period throws up credits in poorly received films including Broken Lines, The Secret Life of Bees, Inkheart, Creation, The Tourist and Legion. And when those qualities curdle into cruelty, he plays it with teeth. Bettany gives a brilliant performance as the Duke, whose arrogance and charm he captures with the right mix of subtlety and cunning. In the Boxing Day BBC drama A Very British Scandal, he plays the Duke of Argyll opposite Claire Foy’s Duchess, whose notorious divorce trial made sensationalist headlines in the Sixties. Vision was initially a voice role in 2008’s Iron Man before Bettany parlayed it into an Emmy-nominated performance in the studio’s first TV series, WandaVision, this year.īut sweet, kind-hearted Vision is the exception on Bettany’s CV and his next role is “a bit of a palate cleanser”, he says. More recently, though, he has split from scripture to play a character that does away with eyebrows altogether, caked as they are in layers of red paint when he is portraying a lovable Marvel android. A year later, A Knight’s Tale and A Beautiful Mind introduced the Harlesden-born actor to international audiences. A lead part in the 2000 British film Gangster No 1 was the diving board for Bettany’s plunge into Hollywood. It felt very revealing and I didn’t like it.” He soon realised that with acting, there was a desirable buffer between himself and the truth, and enrolled in drama school. “But I hated singing my own songs in front of people. “You just knew he was a star.” On the other hand, he says half-laughing, custard-coloured beanie on his head, “I’m still filled with absolute self-doubt all the time.”īettany didn’t actually set out to become an actor.
#Paul bettany forspoken full
“So much has been spoken about Heath’s darkness but I only saw this person who was so full of light and had this confidence in himself that was magnetic but never felt obnoxious,” he recalls, ruefully. Yet Bettany says this with so much of that jammy English charm that it’s hard to truly believe him. The actor insists that he has always lacked self-belief compared to, say, his late A Knight’s Tale co-star Heath Ledger, who possessed it in such joyful abundance.
Some actors know they’re destined for great things, but Paul Bettany was never so sure.
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