Even more if the said star has a widely publicised relationship with former High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens. But whatever that image might be, it doesn’t seem to apply to Austin Butler, the 22-year-old actor playing the role of Sebastian Kydd, Carrie Bradshaw’s brooding on-again-off-again boyfriend in the Sex and the City prequel television series set in the ’80s, The Carrie Diaries.

I meet Austin Butler in one of those ubiquitous cafes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with a chalkboard menu and bored, tattooed baristas. He’s living there as he films the second season of The Carrie Diaries. Six feet tall and thin, he wears well-fitted dark jeans and a slim black pea coat. Perfectly side swept blonde hair? Check. Piercing blue eyes? Absolutely. In looks, he is the quintessential Disney Channel commodity, carefully designed to get teenage hearts racing. But Butler doesn’t seem motivated much by attention or fame.

“I just want to follow whatever I love to do,” he answers when asked about his future career. “And I’ve thought about, what if I just move to Costa Rica and played [music] in tiny dive bars? And that sounds awesome. I think I could be happy doing that. I think I could find happiness no matter what I’m doing.” His happy-go-lucky outlook is the opposite of the bad boy character he plays on-screen, an angsty rich high-schooler with Porsche-sized family issues and a record of boarding school expulsions. It also lacks the jadedness that comes with growing up in Hollywood. At one point of the interview, he told me without a hint of irony that one of his favourite things to do was to watch magic shows–“It feels like believing in Santa Claus!”

Raised in California, Butler first got screen time as a background actor at the age of 13 on shows like Ned’s Declassified Survival Guide, before landing brief story arcs in Hannah Montana and Zoey 101. He then went on to star in the children’s adventure film Aliens in the Attic and the High School Musical spin-off television movie, Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure. Now, as a lead on The CW’s The Carrie Diaries and boyfriend of oft-covergirl Vanessa Hudgens, he’s getting more screen time and paparazzi shots than ever.

But despite the fame that comes with being part of H-wood’s post-Disney Kid generation, the most striking thing about Butler – in conversation at least, and minus the lips – is his introversion. Not so long ago, he was so shy he “could barely order food for myself at a restaurant,” he says. “I don’t know how it shattered, but acting kind of started chipping away at it. The more hours I spent on stage, I realised, I’m not going to get hurt. It might be embarrassing, but nobody’s going to hurt me.”

On a day-to-day basis, it’s still a bit of problem – nightclubs are his idea of hell, he says. Big groups? They terrify him. “I get anxiety – events or award shows, you have to drag me out of the house to attend.” So how does a 22-year-old star enjoy his success without popping bottles at clubs?  While most people his age – and in the small screen game – are busy wading through their social lives, he’s a certified spiritual type. “I love walking around the city just playing music. It’s like you’re in your own movie”. I laugh because, well, he has his own television show with a soundtrack, so that’s a strange thing to get excited about.

And life after The Carrie Diaries? “I want to try doing a play because it scares me so much. Lately, I’ve been trying to use fear as a compass toward where to go. Wherever you feel resistance, you almost have to force yourself to walk into.”

Words: Koun Bae

Fashion Editor: Lauren Blane

Photographer: Ben Rayner

The post AUSTIN BUTLER; AN EX-DISNEY KID FIGHTING HIS DEMONS appeared first on Wonderland.

This interview was published in Issue 16 of Wonderland, December/January 2009. 

It’s a year-and-a-half since Carice van Houten burned up screens in Paul Verhoeven’s brilliant Dutch-language WW2 epic, Black Book. And, better late than never, Hollywood has finally wised up and come a-knocking

“Honestly, I wished I’d been covered in real shit. I think it would’ve been preferable.” Carice van Houten isn’t joking. In fact, the most famous actress in Holland is decidedly grim-faced as she sits in the salt-white foyer of an Amsterdam hotel recalling her least favourite day on Black Book. Basic Instinct-director Paul Verhoeven’s mesmerising 2007 return-to-form made van Houten a megastar in Holland and put her squarely on the international radar. The scene in question saw van Houten’s character – a Jewish resistance fighter who dyes her pubic hair blonde and falls in love with a Nazi officer – stripped and sprayed with 200 litres of human excrement. “It got all tangled in my hair. It was revolting, humiliating,” she explains. “They used this weird mixture of potato powder and peanut butter and some sort of greasy cookie as a substitute, but it smelt so sweet, at the end of the day I was screaming for the real thing!”

If this were the 1940s, the fiendishly talented van Houten would have been on the payroll of MGM for a decade. The powers that be would have changed her name to Carrie and she’d be giving Marlene, Greta & co a run for their money. Verhoeven, for one, has described her as the most talented actress he’s ever worked with. Admittedly, many of Verhoeven’s leading ladies have not been renowned for their acting chops (Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls, anyone?). But still, it’s high praise indeed from the notoriously hard-to-please Dutchman. Since working with Verhoeven – who, when asked recently to compare her work with that of Sharon Stone, announced that “Carice can really act” – van Houten has made a string of high-profile movies. Her role in Leonardo DiCaprio-starrer Body Of Lies may have ended up on the cutting-room floor, but van Houten can still be seen in Dorothy Mills, an Irish child-killer thriller to be released in the new year; From Time to Time with Maggie Smith, directed by Julian Fellowes; and scifi suspense Repossession Mambo, in which she plays Jude Law’s wife. First out of the blocks, though, is her eye-catching turn as Tom Cruise’s wife Nina von Stauffenberg in Valkyrie, Bryan Singer’s Superman-follow-up, about the failed 1943 assassination attempt on the life of Adolf Hitler.

The 32-year-old was already well known on the Dutch stage before BlackBook changed everything. At the time, she claims, she didn’t dare to dream what working with Verhoeven might do for her career. “Maybe when we played the Venice film festival I thought, ‘Hey, wait, so it means that I can also touch or at least talk to other audiences,” she says. “But apart from that, I had no idea…So much has changed for me since we made that film. I didn’t believe anybody would be waiting for a little Dutch girl who’s already in her thirties.”

Whether they were waiting or not, Hollywood certainly has her in its sights now. “I think Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg and Bryan Singer saw Black Book at the same time in the same room and when they came to make their WW2 film they decided to ask me,” explains van Houten, with a smile that says she still doesn’t quite believe it herself. “I didn’t audition so that’s great; I could have really fucked it up!” So, what does she hope for from her highest profile role to date? “That people like it and that they also think, ‘This girl did a nice scene, I will go and see Black Book’.”

On screen, van Houten projects the smouldering screen confidence of a Katherine Hepburn or Joan Crawford. In person, with her slight frame wrapped in a stripey DVF cardigan, she seems far less robust. She grew up in the small town of Leiderdorp. Her father, a writer and broadcaster, instilled in his two daughters a deep love of the arts. “I remember him taking us to seeAbel Gance’s Napoleon, which was about five hours long,” she laughs. “Oh, and a lot of Laurel and Hardy. And Charlie Chaplin. He also took us to big classical concerts and would give us cassette tapes of Shostakovich. We probably wanted New Kids On The Block at the time, but I am grateful now. The silent film industry’s really dying away and I like to keep it alive. Go onto YouTube and watch W. C. Fields doing a scene called Honest John! It was such genius.”

Van Houten likes to share her passions. She also suggests checking out Dutch artist Jumbah (“For me he’s the best cartoonist around, really funny and rude”). Unlike the majority of her peers, she is also surprisingly candid when it comes to her personal life. She’s been dating The Lives Of Others star Sebastian Koch since he played her on-screen lover in Black Book. “I spend a lot of time on planes flying to Berlin,” she grins. “It’s really embarrassing but I googled him when he got the part. And I think I completely fell in love with him immediately. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. But he said that when we first met, I played very hard to get. It was if I didn’t care at all, so that it made it really obvious. He’s really intuitive – he has almost female radar in that sense! And of course it could be a little awkward on set. We had to shoot a number of sex scenes, and that can be a little weird when you’ve just started dating.”

The couple have plans to make another film together. Smoke and Ochre, a biopic of Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker, will also star Rutger Hauer. But what’s next on the agenda? “You know, I don’t really think particularly about the future,” admits van Houten. “I don’t see strategy. I never planned my career. Anyway in my experience you can never foresee what is going to happen. And I do think things happen for reason. I don’t feel that I have to surrender to everything. There is always choice. But usually I just think, ‘Oh fuck it! Go with the flow, for God’s sake!’” She has no plans to up sticks permanently and go west to seek her fortune, then? “I love living here. The Dutch are a little different, I don’t get hassled or anything. I can’t see any drawbacks…” She smiles; a sweet smile. “Well, maybe one: it’s probably not the very best place in the world for fashion.”

Words: Will Lawrence
Images: John Lindquist
Styling: Lauren Blane

The post Flashback Friday: Carice van Houten appeared first on Wonderland.

Plucked from their first year of drama school to star in a haunting mockumentary about conjoined punk-rockers, Luke and Harry Treadaway became overnight indie stars. Any young actor would kill for such a launchpad, and the twins, now 24, got stuck into Brothers Of The Head with relish, spending the entire shoot sewn together in a wetsuit and even sharing a bed.

“Since then, though, we’ve been off doing our own things,” chirps Harry, the younger by twenty minutes, at London’s Holborn Studios. Harry has boosted his film CV with the likes of Joy Division biopic Control and Tim Robbins-starrer City Of Ember. Luke, meanwhile, has made a name for himself as one of the Bright Young Things of British theatre, with star turns in the National Theatre’s War Horse and Philip Ridley’s Piranha at the Soho.

Spend five minutes in their company and it’s clear that Harry, eerily reminiscent of a cocky young Malcolm McDowell, is the more confident of the two. He’s also more restless, eternally making roll-ups or fiddling with his new iPhone. By contrast, Luke seems softer-edged, sweeter, perhaps – and happy to let his brother take the lead.

Four years since their startling debut, the Treadaways are coming together for their second joint professional outing, this time on stage. Mark Shopping and Fucking Ravenhill’s two-hander Over There is part of the Royal Court’s new season Off The Wall, marking twenty years since the Berlin Wall was smashed into tiny, tourist-pocket-sized chunks. Luke and Harry play Franz and Karl, identical twins separated as infants when their mother escapes to the West, taking one son with her and leaving the other behind. “It’s a great idea, I can’t wait to get stuck in,” Harry grins.

But while Ravenhill’s piece probes at the nature of twinhood and the brothers have consented to being interviewed together, their genetic relationship turns out to be a topic neither Luke nor Harry seem keen to discuss…

Wonderland: I see you’ve succumbed to the lure of the iPhone, Harry.

HARRY: I just got it a couple of weeks ago.

LUKE: I’ve hardly spoken to him since. I’m very jealous.

HARRY: I’ve realised that it’s like the temptation of man – it’s like taking a bite of the apple in the Garden of Eden. It’s as close to an identity card as we can have because it’s saying exactly what I’m doing on the internet, what music I’m listening to, and in the Book of Revelations there’s a bit that says when there’s a chip in the eye of man, mankind will fall. This is a chip – a computer chip – and it’s got the apple with a bite mark.

LUKE: It’s weird how you were saying that you can type in where you want to go and it will direct you there.

HARRY: Yeah, it makes you lazy. If you lose a signal, it’s like, ‘What the hell do I do now?’

Wonderland: Are you looking forward to the Royal Court play?

HARRY: Yeah, we haven’t done a play together since college. /I/ haven’t done a play since coming out of college. You’ll have to teach me the ropes.

LUKE: I’ll show you how it’s done. It’s funny how it can go from us having not worked together for three years to suddenly something cropping up on the Wednesday and by Friday we’re doing it together… although we know that we won’t do many things together in our lives. We’re not going to make a habit of it. But I’m deeply excited about this.

HARRY: It’s like a complete extension into the adult world of playing in your living room with your brother.

LUKE: Which is what you do anyway on any job with other, non-genetically similar people.

Wonderland: Who’s playing which role?

HARRY: We might just decide before we go on every night. Alternate.

LUKE: It would keep it fresh.

HARRY: We haven’t decided yet. I’ve been saying to people that we’re doing it and people go, ‘Did Mark write it for you?’ And what’s weird is that he didn’t at all. It says on the first page that it’s up to every production whether they do it with real twins or not.

Wonderland: Did you avoid working together again after Brothers Of The Head?

LUKE: Yes, there were some things which were proffered but we just felt…

HARRY: …It would have been stupid if we’d gone and done another brother thing straight after drama school.

LUKE: But we haven’t consciously tried to do anything ever. There’s no weird planning. We’ve just gone up for things and either got them or not.

HARRY: We go up for the same stuff sometimes. Sometimes one gets them, sometimes the other one gets them, sometimes neither of us get them. But we never both get them – that’s impossible. So there’s no conscious plan.

Wonderland: Is it awkward when you know you’re going up for the same role?

HARRY: Don’t think about it. Because you have mates who are going up for the same stuff as well. If you start thinking about who else is going up for something, your head is in the wrong place. Whether it’s your twin brother or not.

LUKE: It’s quite funny though when you’re the next one in as you walk out the door. Sometimes they’ll say something: ‘Coming back in for a second go?’

HARRY: Then you have to laugh, as if it’s funny and you’ve never heard it before.

Wonderland: How did you find drama school?

HARRY: It’s good training for theatre but you have to forget a lot of what you learnt to do any film. It’s hard to take on all this shit about identity and the psychologies of other characters when you’re still 18. You’re going, ‘What the fuck, I don’t even know what the Tube does yet.’ I found that quite hard. But I’m getting happier the more time that I’m away from it.

LUKE: I don’t regret having gone through it but I’m glad I’m not going through it now.

Wonderland: What was it like growing up as twins in a tiny village in Devon?

HARRY: I have nothing to compare it to, not having grown up anywhere else as a twin…

LUKE: It was very good for me, I enjoyed it.

HARRY: I loved the countryside. I can’t imagine not having had that. People are happy who grew up in cities and that’s cool but for me I need occasionally to go and walk by the sea or be in the countryside. It keeps me happy; it keeps me sane, I think.

Wonderland: Did your parents encourage you to be individuals?

LUKE: As with any siblings, I think. We were never dressed in the same way.

Wonderland: Some twins are…

HARRY: Some sisters are.

LUKE: I think that’s akin to child abuse, when parents dress their kids identically…

HARRY: They do it because they think it’s cute… and child abuse is never cute.

LUKE: No, but I just think it’s so sad because you think, ‘They’re obviously going to have a harder time than other siblings having an identity anyway. Why the /fuck/ would you want to put them in matching jumpers?’

Wonderland: How close are you now?

LUKE: I’d challenge anyone to spend 98 percent of their life with someone, pretty much in proximity…

HARRY: Well, up to 18.

LUKE: Up to 18… The first few years of our life we probably weren’t apart for more than a day. That’s a lot of days to spend with someone so you’re either going to feel pretty close, or hate or kill that person. It’s hard for there to be a middle ground in that and luckily we haven’t murdered each other and we don’t hate each other so I guess that’s a sign of being close.

HARRY: But the last two and a half years, we’ve seen each other maybe half a year because we’ve both been working so much.

LUKE: Like now, you’ve just come back to London –

HARRY: I’ve been in Nottingham doing a film.

LUKE: And it’s quite nice. It’s kind of like, ‘Yeah, this is fun.’ We’re living together at the moment. We went to the theatre last night together for the first time in years.

Wonderland: In what ways are you different?

LUKE: [sighs] I’m trying to think of the equivalent question if we weren’t twins, which would be, ‘How do you think you’re different from everyone else in the world?’ Which I guess would be highly impossible to answer. I can’t even think of anything specific at all, only inasmuch as we’re as different as…

HARRY: …any brothers are different.

LUKE: Yeah. [gets a text message alert]

Wonderland: You used to have a band – do you still play music together?

HARRY: We just play with mates. We had a great jam the other night with our mate. One of us was on the guitar, one was on the violin and one was on the xylophone. What a blend. We just get drunk and play with musical instruments that we’ve procured throughout the world.

LUKE: My friend just texted me saying, ‘I’m gonna give you a hot, oil-filled body massage tonight.’

HARRY: [unimpressed] That’s bizarre…

LUKE: That’s bizarre, isn’t it. Sorry.

Wonderland: How do you look back on Brothers Of The Head now?

HARRY: It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. But since then, there’s been a lot of stuff so… we could talk about that if you want.
Wonderland: Not keen to talk about Brothers?

HARRY: Think about it: it was our first audition, we went in there with no idea about anything. We went in there smoking and drinking Stella, not in a self-conscious, isn’t-this-clever way, just thinking, ‘They’re punks so they smoke and drink Stella.’ There was such a naïve quality about it. And it was an amazing psychological experiment being strapped to someone – we didn’t want to fake any physicality or work with some choreographer. Why give up the opportunity to actually see what it would be like? For me it’s going to make my career far more interesting if I don’t try and fake it each time. I got into birdwatching for a film I’ve just done called Pelican Blood, in the same way that I learned to take drugs for Control. It’s more interesting if you actually do it.

LUKE: I’d say exactly the same.

Wonderland: Did you learn anything about each other that you didn’t already know?

LUKE: I gained only more respect and more love for you through doing that.

HARRY: Jesus. Right, okay.

LUKE: No. Fuck it. Nothing.

HARRY: Right. Not really.

Wonderland: So, Luke, you starred in your second film, Dogging: A Love Story, recently…

LUKE: Not recently. It seems a while ago. It seemed to be delayed and delayed and I hear now that it’s being released. So, yeah, we’ll see… I’m still yet to see it so I can’t really give it a good mention apart from, ‘Newcastle is very cold in December.’ That’s really all I have to offer on that one.

Wonderland: Doesn’t seem like it’s going to factor in your all-time great experiences…

LUKE: Uh, no… I did kind of enjoy it. Sometimes.

HARRY: [sharply] Leave it there, Luke, just leave it there.

LUKE: Yeah, I know, I’ve left it there.

Wonderland: What are the differences for you between doing film and theatre?

HARRY: Film’s like making an album and theatre’s like doing a live gig. I can’t wait to do a live gig.

LUKE: Are you going to be my roadie?

HARRY: I’m not going to be your roadie, mate, I’m going to be the frontman. And the Royal Court – what an amazing theatre. It’s done so much amazing work over the last fifty years: Never Look Back In Anger…

LUKE: Look Back In Anger.

HARRY: Look Back In Anger, yeah.

LUKE: Never Look Back In Anger – never less than a companion piece.

HARRY: [sarcastically] Thank you. I’m glad you’re here mate.

Wonderland: Do you ever envy the other’s career?

HARRY: I want all of it. In abundance. I’d be unhappy if it was one or the other. Wouldn’t you?

LUKE: Yeah, man. I’ve only just dipped my toe in what this game is, and there’s just plenty more to come of both hopefully.

Wonderland: Together and apart…

LUKE: Working together every five years would be enough. That would be a few things in our lifetime.

Leaving the studio and walking to the Tube, the Treadaways are visibly more relaxed and bantery. As Harry mock-swoons over a buxom fake-blonde taking a fag break from her own photo shoot, Luke admonishes him: “Get real. Going out with someone like that in real life must be an absolute nightmare. It would be like going out with a doll.” “No, the thing is, Luke,” Harry retorts, “it’s no worse than if your girlfriend was an actress or a dancer.”

Harry’s off to finish his Christmas shopping before flying to St. Lucia for two weeks. Luke’s on his way to audition for the big-budget remake of 70s campfest Clash Of The Titans. Little brother gives him some advice: “Be passionate – don’t do that arched-eyebrow thing. Just go for it…” The bristly reactions have vanished, although when I tell them I’m heading straight off to interview Rupert Friend – who happens to be Keira Knightley’s boyfriend but, I’ve been told, doesn’t take kindly to questions about their relationship – Harry play-slaps me on the shoulder: “See? We could have said we didn’t want to talk about being twins.”

“There’s nothing I have less to say about in the world than being a twin,” chimes in Luke. “In a few years time, I think we’re just going to stop talking about it…”

Photographer: Ben Rayner
Fashion: Lauren Blane
Words: Matt Mueller

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #17, Feb/Mar 2009

The post Treadaway Twins appeared first on Wonderland.