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.

I’m just a worker. I am an entertainer. Don’t say that what I am doing is art.

My mother is an actress and that always made me a little suspicious of acting. She’s been working for fifty years, and when I was young I saw everything. I saw years and years of unemployment with three kids. The profession is so fucking hard. People read about the actors that work but that’s only five per cent of them.

The whole Oscar thing is surreal: you spend months and months doing promotion and then come back to reality with this golden thing in your hands. You put it in the office and then you just have to look at it sitting on the shelf. And, after about two weeks, you go, ‘What is that doing there?’ It would be stupid to believe that they give it to you because you are a better man. I was just lucky.

I think that those who don’t believe in God try to believe in fate because you have to have something you believe in, otherwise life can be too random. When things go really wrong I wish I could pray to someone. But I think hope comes from yourself. When you rely on yourself, in a profound way, I call that grace.

I remember the moment when my father died. I wasn’t a very committed Catholic beforehand, and when that happened it suddenly all felt so obvious: I now believe religion is our attempt to find an explanation, for us to feel more protected. My truth — what I believe — is that there are no answers here, and, if you are looking for answers, you’d better choose the question carefully.

My parents divorced when I was young, but I don’t remember it being particularly bad at the time. I guess when you grow up you understand much better how it affects you in your unconscious. A lot of therapists make a living out of it.

I don’t need to like the characters that I play. There is this great actress in Spain called Victoria Abril, who said a line that I love which is: ‘We, the actors, are the defending lawyers of the characters we play.’ It’s true. You are a lawyer. You have to defend your character. If I was defending Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, I’d say he’s a man with a broken soul, a broken mind, but I would prefer not to see him at a bar; I wouldn’t call him to have a drink!

When you want to create a good performance, the key is not to make an exhibition of your skills. It’s about being honest; but it’s also about creating behaviours. We see people and we bring those people into our work. We construct people.

Growing up I wanted to become a painter. But after that thing with my sister, I realised that I was pretending. It is funny that in Vicky Cristina Barcelona my character is a painter. I could never be as confident as my character in this movie, either as a painter or with the way he is with women… When I painted alongside the professional, we’d do the same things but his would look amazing and mine would look like a piece of crap! You go, ‘Why? Why him?’ Well, the answer is very clear: You don’t have it. You just don’t have it. It’s something about the fingers… I belong to acting now.

I listen to a lot of music, and I am a huge, huge Pearl Jam fan. The early stuff, Ten, in particular was very important to me: the music, the sound, the fury, the instincts, the thoughts, the energy, the words. I’ve seen them playing four or five times now. I can’t stop jumping for about three hours when they hit hard, man. I go nuts, I’m in pieces and then the next time they put me together again. It’s like ‘Wallop! What a journey!’

My other big passion in life is rugby. Playing rugby in Spain is like being a bullfighter in Japan. I loved to play rugby — I have many scars — but you have to quit if you want to work as an actor. I did Jamón, Jamón for Pedro Almodóvar, and it was a great success and I kept on playing but the other players were always going, ‘He is the guy from ‘Jamón, Jamón’, let’s go for him.’ I was like, ‘Don’t give me the ball, don’t give me the ball!’

Being famous in your own country is fun at first because you’re twenty years old and everyone is giving you all this attention, but after a very brief while – I would say maybe a couple of months – I remember thinking, ‘This is bad, there is nothing good in this’, and I still think the same. I mean I’m doing this job, so it’s a contradiction, but there’s always a moment where you go, ‘Enough. It’s only a movie, for Christ’s sake!’

I hope for change with the election of Obama. In this modern world there has been a sheriff called George Bush who wants to kill the bad guys, like in a bad Western, but not everybody is bad. He made it into this the war between evil and good. What the fuck is that? Life is a little bit more complicated.

Sometimes I say to myself, ‘What are you doing in this absurd job? Why don’t you go to Africa and help people?’ But I cannot help people, because I am a hypochondriac and I don’t know how to drive a car. The only thing I can do is act, and it’s not something I even feel comfortable doing. It costs me a lot, because I’m a shy person, even if I don’t look it. But I don’t know how to do anything else.

Words: Will Lawrence

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

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