This interview first appeared in Wonderland Issue 13, April/May 2008.

Any way you slice it, this will be a year to remember for Dominic Cooper. Turning 30; buying a flat away from the southeast London neighbourhood where he’s laid tracks his entire life; and starring in three couldn’t-be-more-dissimilar films, any one of which could propel him to the big league of Brit stars currently occupied by James McAvoy and Jude Law. “The things that are coming out are exciting and I keep being told they’ll make a difference,” he hedges. “But who knows?”

Thus far, Cooper has displayed a two-pronged appeal: a brash sexuality he exploited as the ferally manipulative Dakin in The History Boys, and a puppyish demeanour that makes audiences want to shield him. This second quality is on show in spades in UK prison drama The Escapist, in which Cooper suffers plenty as Lacey, the naïve, new-boy convict let in on an escape plot because his wizened cellmate (Brian Cox) feels sorry for him.

“He just gets beaten up, raped and generally shat on,” says Cooper of his character, who makes a striking entrance into prison stripped to his briefs, smeared in white delousing powder and taunted by a cellblock’s worth of randy inmates. “That was one of the first scenes I shot and Rupert Wyatt the director made sure it was the first time I saw the prison. It was scary.”

There’s no doubt this vulnerability caught the eye of Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre svengali who Cooper can thank for his career. Plucking the actor straight from drama school, Hytner cast him in swift succession in Mother Clap’s Molly House, as Will in His Dark Materials and, of course, The History Boys. Before Hytner got his hands on him, Cooper had stumbled into acting haphazardly, following a brief detour in the employ of hip commercials outfit Academy. “It was exciting for a while but then I got a bit perturbed by people sat there talking about the colour and crispiness of a cornflake,” he grins.

Sitting in the photographer’s north London flat, Cooper is engaging, self-deprecating and sporting the aftermath of a head shaved for a BBC Two film with Stephen Dillane called God On Trial, about Auschwitz prisoners awaiting selection for the gas chamber. “Being in Glasgow, in January, that subject matter – it was kind of…” Depressing? “That might be the word… It was more intense than sitting on a jet ski, oiled up and singing ABBA.”

That would be Cooper’s next film, an adaptation of insanely popular stage musical, Mamma Mia!, which he didn’t want to audition for but “people forced me to do it”. He may have cringed while belting out Abba’s ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ at the meeting, but still convinced them he was the right heartthrob and spent what sounds suspiciously like a seven-week paid holiday hanging out on Greek islands with Colin Firth and Meryl Streep. “In the final number, we’re all wearing outrageous spandex suits – mine’s pink and opened down to there,” he says, motioning to his waistline. “It could be the end of my career but, you know, anything goes.”

His other major role comes opposite Keira Knightley in Saul Dibb’s The Duchess, playing aristocratic MP Earl Grey, who conducted a passionate affair with 18th-century scandal magnet the Duchess of Devonshire. According to Cooper, his sex scenes with Knightley were “damn good fun” but his behaviour during the shoot was “completely moronic… I just made a fool of myself the whole time. I was pretending to be more academic than I was, seeing as I was playing a politician, and came out with garbage that I knew nothing about. I just acted like a naughty schoolkid the whole time.”

Naughty boy or not, Cooper’s doe-eyed charisma has already seen him touted as the next Jude Law. Turning 30 this June, however, is one breakthrough he’s not looking forward to. “I’m dreading it,” he demurs. “I should be planning a big party but I might just pretend I’m not 30… Although isn’t 30 supposed to be good? Isn’t 30 me learning who I am and what I want to do with my life?”

Perhaps it’s about exerting more control over your own destiny… Cooper had been planning to head off after the shoot to the NME Awards with some of his History Boys cast-mates, but he has a big audition in the morning and “if I go, I won’t get to bed before 6am.” Instead he heads off, clutching his annotated script and i-Pod, to catch the Tube home and prepare for a role that might change his life all over again.

Words: Matt Mueller
Images: Toyin

The post Flashback Friday: Dominic Cooper appeared first on Wonderland.

This interview was first published in Wonderland Nov/Dec 2009.

Trailing his publicist across the outdoor terrace of a smart Toronto hotel, Ben Whishaw could easily be mistaken for the skinny, waifish frontman of a cool new indie band rather than one of Britain’s finest young actors. The city’s flashy film festival is in full swing and, with Whishaw embarking on the North American leg of his Bright Star tour (he plays celebrated 19th-century Romantic poet John Keats in Jane Campion’s film), it’s been established as our ideal meeting place.

The long-limbed actor greets me with a warm smile and light handshake, saying he just passed Terry Gilliam on his way in. Hair styled in dark, artful swoops, framing a face highlighted by intense, emotive eyes and near-flawless skin, Whishaw’s more strikingly handsome in person than he appears on screen, although since he’s usually portraying individuals locked in some degree of anguish, perhaps that’s to be expected. He’s wearing a dark leather jacket that tapers to stretchy rib-knit fabric around his wrists and neck, which he keeps zipped up to the very top during our hour-long conversation (it’s not cold) like a protective shield.

Ordering black coffee, he’s sedate and contained although he insists his life is ruled by nervous energy (and he does fiddle with a chocolate wrapping paper like a crinkly stress reliever). He’s also convivial, thoughtful, grins a lot… and more than once deflects a query that might penetrate too far into his privacy. (When asked about his twin brother James, Whishaw tells me he “does something with finance but he’s on his own journey which I can’t go into”.) I get the sense that everything Ben Whishaw wants to reveal about himself lies on screen in his intuitive and often remarkable performances – and he’d rather let them do all the talking.

The 28-year-old actor has already played several substantial and substantive roles. On stage, upon graduating from RADA in 2004, he waltzed straight into Trevor Nunn’s Old Vic production of Hamlet, sparking critical raptures for his haunting performance; on film, he stepped into the global limelight as scent-obsessed killer Grenouille in Perfume: The Story Of A Murderer, before delivering his incarnation of Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There and pouting aristocrat Sebastian Flyte in last year’s Brideshead Revisited.

As Keats, Whishaw is a fragile, bedridden hero forging a romantic (and ultimately tragic) bond with Abbie Cornish’s Fanny Brawne – literally the girl next door. It’s another role that draws deeply from the well of Whishaw’s sensual, compelling charisma – and although the actor admits he wanted more of the poet’s passionate anger to come through, he ultimately embraced Campion’s vision.

On the horizon he’s playing wayward sprite Ariel in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest and is waiting to hear whether Kill Your Darlings, a Beat-poets biopic (he’s due to play Lucien Carr), finds its money. Taymor also approached Ben about playing Peter Parker in her Spider-Man musical on Broadway, but he declined claiming his singing voice wasn’t strong enough – although you suspect it’s not the sort of role he’d ever relish playing. For now, though, there are several more Star turns to put in, as Whishaw prepares to head to New York and LA as soon as the Toronto gig finishes. “I’m doing a bit of a slog,” he proclaims. “But it’s all good…”

I’ve spoken to actors who say that Jane Campion really puts you through the ringer before deciding if you’re right for a role. Did she do that to you?

I’d heard that too, that she’d have to see you quite a few times before she’d make up her mind. But I did one audition that was an hour long. I actually didn’t think that I’d got the part. I thought that Jane was much more interested in the actress I was auditioning opposite. So I just thought, “Oh, I’m here really just to deliver lines.” I decided that that’s what was going on quite early on in the audition and then just relaxed because I thought, ‘Okay, this is not gonna happen.’ [Laughs] I was really surprised when it did…

So Abbie Cornish wasn’t the actress you auditioned with…

No, we got cast separately. You would have thought that Jane would want to see if there was the possibility of any chemistry between us. But she didn’t. I think that says a lot about Jane. She has intuitions about people that are uncanny. If anything, she seemed to take pains to keep us apart for a long time. We only met on the first day of rehearsal.

Did you immerse yourself in Keats?

I got interested even beyond the part. I read lots of things that were not of much relevance to the film but I just became very, very interested in him and in that period and how his work’s been perceived through the ages. I had a desk piled with Keats’ books of one kind or another.

Did you plough your way through his work?

Yes, and some of them are, uh… He wrote this very strange piece called The Cap And The Bells not long before he died, which is very difficult to read! [Laughs] He was really sporadic. He’d have a flash of some genius and then he’d write something eccentrically bad, in my opinion. His best work seemed to be the stuff he dismissed himself, not thinking it was worth very much, and the work that he toiled over is the stuff that’s sort of been forgotten.

What marked out the bad stuff?

You can tell that he’s trying to be a bit like Shakespeare. He’s not being true to himself. That’s my impression. But the amount he wrote in such a short life is utterly mind-boggling. He was living life at a real pitch. And he was surrounded by death. I’m sure in some sub-conscious place he knew he wasn’t going to live to be an old man.

What was your favourite Keats poem?

The one I love best is Ode To A Nightingale. I was just looking at it again this morning because when I was at Cannes I got asked to recite poetry on the spot and I crumbled under the pressure. So I was in the shower this morning and I thought, “I’d better refresh some poetry”. So I was re-reading Ode To A Nightingale and it seemed to be a different poem to the one I remember, you know? I think all great work does that – it changes as you change or you change with it, or whatever happens.

Do you always do heavy research into a character? Is it something you need to get under the skin of your character?

It depends on what it is. Sometimes I like to go on pure instinct for something. Sometimes it’s essential to get the facts right.

What roles have you played on instinct alone? The killer in Perfume, perhaps?

Yeah, I guess. It’s funny, research. People mean lots of different things by it. I started to do a part about fence builders [in Pawel Pawilkowski’s abandoned The Restraint Of Beast] and we all went and became fence builders. That’s one kind of research. But there’s another kind where you can draw on anything to help you, like a painting or a piece of music… You open yourself up to everything and it’s interesting what becomes useful to you in the portrayal.

Do you like directors to instruct you what to look at?

I love that. Todd Haynes gave everyone quite specific material to look at and listen to on I’m Not There. He gave me an audiotape of the San Francisco 65-66 interviews – God, Dylan was such a genius interviewee. But Todd’s beautiful also because then he just left us to get on with it. We didn’t rehearse at all; I just turned up and did it.

How was your experience of making Bright Star?

Jane spent a lot of time just encouraging me to relax… [laughs] sort of stroking me and just sitting with me. ‘Just nice and relaxed’ – that’s what she kept saying to me.

Did you feel on edge?

I have a fair amount of nervousness that sometimes is useful and sometimes is not. I don’t think he’s a nervous character – in the way that I’m nervous, anyway – so it was getting rid of something that was blocking us.

Did you and Abbie keep your distance once you met?

Yeah, we did. Not intentionally. We were very supportive of each other and we’d share cigarettes together. In rehearsal Jane wanted us to bring in a love offering every day, like a letter, a poem, a flower… we had to express our love for each other as often as we could through some sort of gift so that fostered an attitude between us. I’ve still got a CD Abbie made me. But we were also pretty private and I think that was good. It’s just the way it worked out but it wasn’t complicated by anything else.

Does it depend on the character you’re playing how close you get to your co-stars?

Yeah. It depends on the other actor too.

Didn’t you and Matthew Goode become good friends making Brideshead Revisited?

I’ve not seen Matthew for a long time but, yeah, I am good friends with him.

What were you like making that film?

I was pretty tense actually! [Laughs] It was one of those shoots where there seemed to be a lot against us. It was the wettest summer in England, ever. Then I was supposed to be in a motor car but they had to give the motor car back so that had to be cut. I remember it being quite fraught but not unhappy. Lots of fun with Emma Thompson. She’s a great bringer-together-er of people. She’s one of my strongest memories of making that film.

Brideshead got battered by the critics. Had you harboured any doubts before saying yes about playing a role as iconic as Sebastian Flyte?

Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t really. I loved the part and I thought I could bring something to it, which is all I ever go on. But it’s very hard to adapt things when your audience has a memory of something which they adore. They don’t want something to get in the way of that memory. Maybe it’s an interesting movie for another generation… I’ve noticed that a lot of teenage girls really love Sebastian. I’ve had quite a few 15/16 year olds stop me in the street.

Maybe they identify with Sebastian’s awkwardness…

I think so. And the feeling that he’s rebelling against his mother.

Your version made the gay relationship between Sebastian and Charles more overt than the book or the TV version. Was that a good idea?

Yes, I think it was good for the story. It’s so frustrating because the novel is so full of incident and can linger on things; it’s incredibly subtle and fine. Which of course you can achieve over 15 weeks of a television series quite beautifully. You need to make a strong decision about something in the condensing down so I thought it was a good thing to make it more overt. But maybe some of the ambiguity and the richness of the novel was lost in the process.

Did you and Matthew ever hold a Brideshead post-mortem?

No, we never have. Well, sort of… you always have a time of reflecting on what you’ve done and you’re never happy – at least I’m not happy with what I’ve done. I tend just to forget about it once it’s done and then you move onto the next thing knowing it was an utter failure. But there you go. [laughs] I think it’s a healthy thing. It keeps you moving on.

Is it coincidence that you’ve appeared in three films with Daniel Craig or are you friends? You made The Trench, your very first film, then Layer Cake and Enduring Love…

Oh God, I was so young. I don’t know Daniel Craig at all. It’s purely coincidence. I don’t think he would even remember me. We barely exchanged a conversation, particularly on the first film. I think I was about 17 and really, really timid, really shy. I don’t think I spoke to him. I was too frightened…

And by the time you got to Enduring Love?

A little bit, maybe. [laughs]

Many of the characters you play are intense types – passionate, tormented, a bit twitchy perhaps… Are they the roles you enjoy most?

Whishaw looks momentarily mortified and takes his time answering, gazing into the fixed distance over my shoulder with a slightly stricken look in his eyes… “Yeahhhh,” he drawls slowly. He starts laughing, but it’s laughter with an edge to it. It occurs to me that the word ‘twitchy’ hasn’t gone down well with an actor as palpably sensitive as Whishaw…

Um… Yeah, it’s funny… it’s very strange when people start saying, ‘You’re this.’ Because you don’t have any notion of what you are. You don’t have eyes outside of yourself, looking at yourself. So it’s not the way I view myself. And it’s not something that I’m trying to do… Dunno.

Yeah, definitely. You’re drawn to something that you feel like you can bring something of your experience of life to. You want to give some authentic thing of life, don’t you? That’s what I do, anyway. You wanna give something pure. I’m looking for roles where I feel like there can be a marriage between you and the part and you can reveal something. And, yeah, I s’pose they have been intense and ‘twitchy’.

Whishaw creases up in laughter, chortling harder and louder than any other moment in our conversation. I join in, relieved he’s seeing the humorous side but still anxious that I’ve hurt his feelings, or that he thinks I’ve just reduced his entire career down to one unflattering word. I fumble about explaining that what I meant is he’s so damn good at conveying pain and passion in characters who rarely seem comfortable in their own skin…

Are you annoyed?

No, not at all. I understand how these things come about.

So do you consider yourself to be a highly sensitive person?

Yes and no. I think I could be more sensitive and sometimes I think I’m too sensitive.

In what situations are you too sensitive?

Um… I don’t know. I guess it’s too difficult to go into that.

Does it ever make your job difficult?

I think the thing I’ve got to get better at is not so much the sensitive thing; I think I can use that well. But I have this kind of reaction if something’s gone badly to just wanna go, [puts on an angry, miserable voice] ‘Oh fuck it… it’s all going to shit and I’m a fucking failure.’ It’s something I’ve observed in myself recently, this kind of destructive thing. ‘Chuck it all away… Fuck it all’. [laughs] Which I think is not so good. I feel like it’s just energy I need to get rid of but I can quite quickly go into this negative space. And that’s not helpful for working.

Is it hard to lift yourself out of that mood?

I always get out of it… I’m trying to write a film about the church and I’ve been reading the Bible and there’s a line in the Bible about, ‘Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.’ And I think about that. Like, you can be angry or frustrated with yourself but try and let it go. I just go with the feeling but try not to cling on to it for too long.

That’s a weighty topic to take on, a film about the church.

[Laughs] Yeah. I don’t really know what it’s gonna be yet. I don’t think of myself as a writer… I can’t really write at all actually. But there’s a story I would quite like to tell, but I think I probably need help in the writing of it.

Fame seems to have usurped religion in modern life. What’s your attitude towards it?

I don’t even think about it. And I’m fairly certain it’s not something that’s gonna ever happen to me.

That’s what most actors say…

Oh really? Well, it’s just not a part of my life. It’s not a concern. If people stop you, that’s a really gratifying thing, because they’ve been touched in some way or you’ve had some impact upon them which is lovely. But nothing beyond that ever happens to me.

What made you want to become an actor?

I don’t know. I’ve always dressed up and created little characters and little stories and performances. And I’ve just carried on doing that, really. I thought I’d go to art school and I started an art course but then I gave it up after a couple of weeks and went to drama school instead. It was quite clear to me.

You’d already made a couple of films before you went to RADA…

I had, but I really wanted to do theatre. As a teenager, that’s what I loved watching most. I didn’t really watch many films and I wasn’t especially interested in them. I loved going to the theatre and I loved watching theatre actors. That was what I wanted to do so it’s been a surprise to me to be involved in making films and finding that I really love it. In the last couple of years I’ve been trying to educate myself about films. I have this American agent and when she came to London, she asked me what films I liked and I couldn’t name anything. She said, ‘You’ve got to educate yourself’ and I took her on her word. Now I really love film.

What did you educate yourself with? Not Michael Bay movies, I trust…

No! I love Tarkovsky, I love Bergman. Jane introduced me to Bresson and Cassavetes. And I’m just discovering Jim Jarmusch. There seems to be a lack of daring in some of the films that are being made now and I’m just so intrigued as to how artists like Tarkovsky made their films.

When you came out of RADA, you played Hamlet straight off the bat. It’s the role that every actor wants to play at some point in their life and you’ve already crossed it off the list…

It was about eight months after I’d left college. I was doing a play at the National Theatre where I was playing a bear and a witch. And then I got Hamlet.

You were in His Dark Materials at the National!? Playing a bear?

[laughs] Yeah, I was a few parts. One of them was bear and one of them was a witch. There was a gaggle of witches, all played by women, and because they were a bit short on women in the cast and I was very skinny – and still am – they dragged me in to being a witch.

Did you enjoy it?

It was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. I still can’t believe that I did it. There were several other guys who were dragged into being witches as well but they were too masculine-looking and were jettisoned. Whereas I was kept on for the entire run.

IMDB lists one of your credits as the Al Pacino version of The Merchant Of Venice but I have to confess I couldn’t spot you in it...

I don’t know what that’s about. I’m not in The Merchant Of Venice. I got a fan letter once saying, ‘We loved your performances in Perfume and The Merchant Of Venice.’ Haha! I promise you I’m not in it!

But you are playing Ariel in Julie Taymor’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, right?

Yes. Julie’s an interesting task-master. She’ll throw anything at you and expect you to rise to it. Ariel transforms into a harpy so I was naked, apart from a little jockstrap, and painted black; I had my eyebrows shaved off; I was given breasts; I had these enormous wings. And I had to recite this speech which Julie said, ‘Can you do it in double-time cos we’re gonna slow it down?’ So I was flapping about doing this double speed speech-afying. I can understand that some people might find that kind of stuff hard. But I loved it. I love that feeling of, ‘Come on, we can do everything. We can do anything…’

Words: Matt Mueller
Images: Toyin
Styling: Luke Day

The post Flashback Friday: Ben Whishaw appeared first on Wonderland.

In 2007’s Bigga Than Ben, Ben Barnes played an immoral Muscovite named Cobakka, who descends on modern-day London with his Russian pal to make a fortune from scams and deceit. Not a film to set the world alight, but a sly comedy none the less, and one that featured an edgy, whip-smart turn from Barnes – his hair is sheared short, not a frock coat or broadsword in sight… It’s a shame that hardly a soul witnessed Barnes’s debut starring role, otherwise he might have avoided the floppy-haired romantic typecasting that trailed his anointment as the swoony royal at the heart of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and its follow-up, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

“I still get lots of offers to play royalty and [for] films with swords in them,” sighs the lifetime Londoner. “The industry loves to pigeonhole you, and most actors do everything they can to not have that happen, so I say, ‘No, I want to do something with a gun …’”

Barnes’ latest, Killing Bono was just the ticket. It may be the project that finally shatters the “period-stud” glass ceiling looming over Barnes’s newly-shorn head. Adapted from Daily Telegraph music critic Neil McCormick’s autobiographical tome I Was Bono’s Doppleganger, the film is a knockabout comedy about what it’s like watching your school mate launch the world-conquering, anthem-belting band U2 while trying to become a rock star yourself – and failing abysmally.
“I like to pretend to people that I’m cool even if I’m not,” chuckles Barnes, tucking into a plate of spaghetti bolognese in a quiet corner of Rankin’s Kentish Town studio before getting down to the Wonderland photo shoot. “In Killing Bono, you’ll realise what an idiot I truly am.” He says this with such gusto, you can tell it’s sweet music to Barnes’s ears that movie audiences will finally get to experience him in another light – as a “complete fuck-up who can’t get out of his own way”.
The actor felt well suited to the role. McCormick’s book was adapted by Dick Clement and Ian Le Frenais, who also scripted one of his favourite films, The Commitments, “about white boys trying to sing soul, which was completely me when I was growing up. I wanted to be Stevie Wonder when I was 16 and it clearly was never going to happen.” Like McCormick, it didn’t stop him trying and served him in good stead when it came to portraying a desperate wannabe who hops aboard every musical trend of the era trying to crack open fame’s door, with Barnes mimicking the on-stage styles of Bowie, Jagger (“intense eyes and flappy arms”) and the “weird dancing” of the New Romantics.

“He basically gets more and more irritating,” says the actor, who went directly from Dawn Treader’s Australian set into Killing Bono and admits that segueing from a mega-fantasy franchise into someone’s real-life story was “weird … but brilliant.

“I was so ready to do the opposite of what I’d just been doing. It’s just a change of mood you want … After Bono, I was clearly looking for something heavy because I spent six months in the West End doing Birdsong – grim, depressing World War One… After that I weighed nothing, I was grey – it ripped me apart.”

The son of a psychotherapist mother and psychiatrist professor father, the raven-haired actor grew up in Wimbledon and fell in love with music, acting, singing and playing drums in various jazz, rock and soul bands in his teens before taking a brief, ignominious stab at pop stardom. His stint in the short-lived band Hyrise, longlisted as the UK’s Eurovision entry in 2004, still raises a grimace. “That definitely put me off [pursuing a music career],” Barnes groans. “Not so much at the time – I’ just saw it as something fun to take part in. It was very short – literally, we performed that song two or three times and it was over.” Thanks to YouTube and Barnes’s burgeoning film career, however, it’s seeped permanently into the pop-culture ether. “I don’t resent that but I’m not too proud of it because boy bands will never be cool.”

With his 30th birthday looming, Barnes still shares a flat with his brother in south-west London, just round the corner from their parents. “When I come back from other countries, I want to be around things that feel like home,” he explains. One thing that never changes is how he keeps most of his personal life very private.
The Narnia franchise might be over for Barnes (Caspian doesn’t appear as a young man in further adventures), and he’s currently hanging out in LA. What comes next, however, is unpredictable. And that’s fine for Barnes.“I rely on this job to give me spontaneity in my life. I’m not an adventurer. I rely on this job to make me cool …”

Photography: Rankin
Words: Matt Mueller

This article first appeared in Wonderland #26, April/May 2011

The post Ben Barnes appeared first on Wonderland.

The minute Andrea Riseborough graduated from RADA in 2005, she was anointed “One to watch”, landing her first three TV jobs while still a student. Since then, she’s done her alma mater proud, winning the 2006 Ian Charleson Award (for exceptional performances by British actors under 30) for her epic double-bill turn in Sir Peter Hall’s productions of Measure For Measure and Miss Julie, and making an unforgettable impression with her acutely clever take on the young Margaret Thatcher in BBC Four’s 2008 TV biopic The Long Walk to Finchley.

Blessed with an uncanny facility for sharp-eyed character detail, Riseborough is now getting to flaunt it on the big screen. She is following up smallish parts in the Brit-star-studded adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian novel Never Let Me Go and real-life crowd-pleaser Made in Dagenham with the two biggest film roles of her career: waitress Rose in a 1960s updating of Graham Greene’s classic Brighton Rock and British royal family scourge Wallace Simpson in Madonna’s second directorial outing, W.E.

When Wonderland meets her at London’s Groucho club, the petite, bird-like actress looks in danger of being swallowed whole by her winter wardrobe, bedecked as she is with thrift-shop jewellery, vintage fashions and a shimmering green Aquascutum raincoat. She would appear frail if it weren’t for her astute, voracious intellect (she’s always got five books on the go). Riseborough, it transpires, knows her mind and isn’t afraid to speak it.

You seem to move around a lot. Weren’t you in LA for a while?
For the past two years, yeah, but I haven’t really been there. I lived in New York this year, too [doing off-Broadway play The Pride]. And I spend a lot of the time of the year in Idaho, which is where my partner Joe’s [Appel, American street artist] family are from. But I am moving to Paris.

How come?
It is purely fuelled by wanting a home. You mustn’t let life slip by because you’re available for everyone all the time. The thing that I love doing is reflecting on life – if I can’t enjoy it myself, then I’m fucked. I’m not sure what Paris will hold for me. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll move somewhere else.

Rose in Brighton Rock is a wallflower, but also strong and tenacious. Was she tricky to play?
This is always a difficult question to answer. Because what you’re asking me is, is what I do easy? With Rose, I just had an immediate response. She is not the centre of her own world and the importance of her happiness isn’t particularly pivotal in terms of her existence. But nor is she a victim. She’s the strength. She has all the bravery of someone who’s in love for the first time.

Have your parents always been supportive of your path?
Totally. My parents aren’t people who have fear of not succeeding. I suppose I only realise that by saying it to you now. There were times when we had a lot and times when we didn’t but they wouldn’t let that impede them and didn’t pass that on to me.

That must help in an insecure profession.
Is it more than any other? I’ve never worried about it because I don’t feel like I can’t survive if I don’t have nice things.

You seem to like nice things … you’re dressed very fashionably today.
Thanks, although it’s slightly different when I tell you where everything’s from. This top is my best friend’s grandma’s from 1960. We’ve had it for years – most of our clothes are recycled. I think my fashion sense is just a case of putting lots of colours that don’t go together together and then people thinking it’s quite chic afterwards. [Laughs] I like my clothes to be old friends.

Talking of dressing up, how was it playing Wallace Simpson?
It’s funny, I know she was such a style icon but that’s probably the furthest away thing in my mind. To me, the clothes and jewellery were just an outlet for her perfectionism … I did get to wear her jewels in the film. I had six bodyguards following me all the time, even when I had a wee. And Galliano did the costumes. I wear 72 different dresses – the aesthetic is insane. But for me the interesting thing is, Who the hell was she behind all of that? She was so demonised, thought to be ugly, called a man …

You really vanish into your characters so we can’t wait to see what you do with Wallace. Do you ever get fed up being called a chameleon, though?
All I can say is that it fulfils me to really explore people. I would get quite bored otherwise.

Photography: AJ Numan
Fashion: Julia Sarr-Jamois
Words: Matt Mueller

This article first appeared in Wonderland #25, February/March 2011

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Moviestar, poet, painter photographer…Is there nothing Viggo Mortensen can’t do?

Viggo Mortensen’s always getting it out. His camera, that is. He takes his trusty Leica wherever he goes (although he’s just as happy using single-use disposables), snapping away on his travels. It’s a useful way to focus the mind, apparently. “A lot of times I don’t take the picture,” he explains, “but the fact that I have it and I’m considering that I could take one means that I’m looking at things a little more closely than I would if I wasn’t.”

Sipping a toxic-looking brew of green tea, Mortensen is the picture of exhaustion, having touched down in seven countries in the space of a week while promoting his new film, Good, based on the CP Taylor stageplay about a literature professor who falls into the embrace of the Nazi party. “I’m in a sort of dream state. Everything seems a little bit unreal,” he confesses.

Happily, chatting about his artistic endeavours gradually puts the colour back in his cheeks. Taking photographs, it transpires, has been a crucial element of Mortensen’s movie-role preparation for a few years now. On most projects, he undertakes his own personal journey before filming begins, in order to slip into the skin of his character. He travelled through Russia for Eastern Promises and camped out in the New Zealand wilderness on The Lord Of The Rings. The images here are those that the immersive, just-turned-50-year-old shot on his odyssey through Germany and Poland prior to Good’s 2007 shoot in Budapest.

“I wasn’t just looking at old WW2 documentary footage or photographs in museums, I was going into it because I was looking for myself,” says Mortensen, who clocked up 2000km on his tour across Europe, which took in several death camps. “It was interesting because it was nice weather,” he continues. “It gave me a different perspective because we’re used to having this grim picture, but in reality… I’m lying on the grass in Auschwitz or Treblinka and the sun’s out, it’s blue skies, birds in the air – and they saw that too. It’s kind of strange. Perfectly nice people – carpenters, professors, whatever – built these places and ran them and had their lunch breaks there. That’s what’s terrifying: how normal and mundane it is.”

For Mortensen, who’s published volumes of poetry, recorded jazz albums, and exhibited paintings and photography from Iceland to Japan, the creative drive is often concerned with pinning down his own memories. “I think the impulse to express yourself has to do with wanting to record your feelings at that moment. I know my feelings may change and what I painted or wrote or how I performed, I may look on later as quaint or odd. It’s like this story that keeps evolving and surprising me… It’s certainly a way to not get bored.”

His camera has proved the most powerful preservation tool because he can ferry it everywhere. The painting, however, has had to take a back seat. Between 1998’s A Perfect Murder – when he convinced the producers to let him create his artist character’s abstract murals – and the multi-year Lord Of The Rings, Mortensen immersed himself in mixed-media composites. Only now, though, is he ready to get stuck in again. “For the last three years I haven’t been able to finish paintings properly,” says the actor, who’s been turning down film offers so he can use 2009 to “get on some kind of regular sleeping pattern and be in more contact with friends and family” as well as complete “all these half-finished paintings”.

He’ll also be compiling another book for his own publishing label Perceval Press, which will include a raft of the sketches that he never stops doing of “landscapes, strangers, passengers, things I see out the window of trains and buses and cars and planes”. “The world is a bewildering assortment of images,” he smiles wearily, “and certainly at the pace I’ve been going now for the last seven, eight years, it’s all a record of a journey that just seems to be going faster and faster. I’m trying to slow that journey down…”

Words: Matt Mueller

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

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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.

Hyperactive pop sprite Lykke Li talks to Wonderland about unrequited love, sounding like a little girl and wishing she was Tom Waits.

Lykke Li (pronounced ‘Lookki Lee’) is such a mess of contrasting emotions – from brash confidence to alarming fragility and back in a single sentence and back – you have to wonder if she has what it takes to cope with the soul-flying highs and crushing lows of your average music career. “I was confident, like I knew I was going to get my music out there and I’m going to be a legend,” claims the Nordic pop-starlet. “At the same time, I was like, ‘What the fuck if I don’t? What if I’m not a star? Then I’m gonna die.’”