The son of two actors, Paul Bettany is living proof of Darwin's theory of evolution. The ever- affable Londoner tells DONALD CLARKEabout playing the pioneering scientist, keeping it in the family – his wife Jennifer Connelly plays Mrs Darwin – and why he's happiest with a machine gun in his hands
GIVEN THE recent efforts by evangelical slope-brows to portray Charles Darwin as a combination of Adolf Hitler and the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it was, perhaps, important that the makers of Creation find a likeable fellow to play the old naturalist.
Hello, Paul Bettany. A few years back, Richard Loncraine, who directed Paul in the ropey Wimbledon, told me that the legendarily amiable Michael Palin was the only actor who could compare with Bettany for all-round niceness.
Sure enough, after finishing work on Creation, a study of Darwin's lengthy procrastination before publication of On the Origin of Species, Mr Bettany did the decent think and visited the creationist heartland.
“Yes, after making the movie I went to Kentucky and spent a day at the Creation Museum,” he confirms. “Look, if I spent a day there, I think it’s fair to ask creationists to spend an hour and 45 minutes watching this film. Is that reasonable?”
It is reasonable. Then he is that sort of fellow. Fidgety, gangly, with spiky features, Paul Bettany, now 38, has been a significant figure in cinema since the beginning of the decade. He was hilarious as a version of Chaucer in A Knight's Tale. He was unreliable in Lars von Trier's Dogville. He was a mad monk in The Da Vinci Code. Yet, even when playing the most blood-curdling maniac, a strain of decency shows through.
Raised in London, the son of two actors, Bettany first had ambitions to be a rock singer. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t bear to sing my own songs,” he says.
He duly made his way to the Drama Centre where, as is expected at that famously exacting north London school, he adhered to the rigours of the theatrical method. He pretended to be a spider. He pretended to be a tree. And so on.
“All that was incredibly intense,” he remembers. “And lots of it stuck. If your imagination is not working, that helps you jump-start it. If you’re unlucky enough to be working with somebody who can’t direct you, then you can direct yourself. But I think I have shaken that desire to impress through intensity and a faux-commitment.”
Yes, whatever else you might say about Bettany, you wouldn’t call him pretentious. Fond of the odd swear word, keen on the odd drink, he apologises profusely when he drifts too far into pompous self-analysis.
“There is a lot of odd stuff in this job,” he says. “My dad always said: ‘Don’t let the audience see you in costume before the show’. That sort of thing. Talking about acting is like talking about sex. It’s nice to actually do behind closed doors, but when you talk about it, you can very easily sound like a complete tosser.”
Bettany does not seem to have spent a great deal of time out of work. After graduating, he took a major role in Stephen Daldry's hugely successful production of JB Priestley's An Inspector Callsand then spent some time at the Royal Shakespeare Company. His big break came in 2000 in Paul McGuigan's excellent Gangster No 1.
Since then he has found himself constantly in demand without ever quite becoming a major star. That is, you might argue, just the right place to be.
He gets to appear in big movies, but the tabloids aren't following his every move.Mind you, he is part of a proper celebrity couple. Since 2003, he has been married to Jennifer Connelly, his co-star in A Beautiful Mind, and the two now live in New York and Vermont.
“That’s a peculiar thing,” he muses. “It took a long time to get okay with living abroad. And I have learned to embrace contradictions. America has a foul foreign policy, but there are things I love. We have this house in Vermont and the roof began leaking in the middle of the night. I rang up this guy and he came round at two o’clock in the morning. Imagine that happening in London. ‘Put a bucket under it, mate!’”
The couple recently deserted Brooklyn – where every cool band and every suave actor now lives – for the busier streets of Manhattan. It seems their huge brownstone was unmanageable “without having bloody servants” and they now rattle around a huge loft in downtown pseudo-Bohemia. It sounds as if their two kids have a good life.
“I think they do,” he says. “They have beautiful houses. They go to amazing places. But every day they are taught to appreciate their privileges and I think they do appreciate them. Nobody will raise our children but us.”
Paul and Jennifer are back together on screen for Creation. Taking some liberties with chronology and motivation, the film addresses a question that has always troubled Darwin's biographers: what explains the 20-year gap between his first devising the theories of evolution and his writing of On the Origin of Species?Some critics – notably grumpy old Richard Dawkins – have suggested that the film makes too much of the conflict between Emma Darwin and her husband. Creation suggests that Emma, played rather flintily by Connelly, was the Christian moralist to her husband's tortured humanist.
“I think he was a social conservative who unfortunately had a revolutionary idea,” Bettany says. “Yes. Some people have said to me: ‘There should be more politics.’ But that’s a different movie. If you tried to get it all in you’d end up with something a bit like a student meal – a bit of everything thrown together. You have to pick your battles.”
Some viewers will feel that Bettany's performance is a little like an extension of the one he gave in Master and Commander.In Peter Weir's excellent adaptation of Patrick O'Brien's novels, he played the eccentric Dr Stephen Maturin who, like Darwin, paid close attention to the wildlife of the Galapagos Islands."I did use his journals as a touchstone in Master and Commander,but researching this film, I got to see actual fragments of the diary almost nobody had seen before."
The diaries helped Bettany get to grips with the complex relationship between Darwin and Emma (his first cousin, incidentally). Still, charting the dynamic of that marriage must have required a joint effort between Paul and Jennifer. I wonder if there are parallels between the two relationships.
Focusing closely on the aftermath of the death of the couple’s daughter, the picture portrays Emma as the bossy one and Charles as a daffier, more tortured figure.
“No. I don’t think the relationships are very similar,” he says. “This is not how we argue. This is not how we get on. But we do know how marriages in general function. A great deal of ignoring goes on and we use that. Being married was also useful in a practical way. We shot very long days and at night we’d put the children to bed, then go to bed ourselves and talk about what we were going to do tomorrow. That was very useful.”
If Creationhad been released, say, 30 years ago, few people would have worried about the film carrying any sort of controversial message. Yet, when the picture failed to secure US distribution at the recent Toronto Film Festival, Jeremy Thomas, the veteran producer, argued that this may have been a result of the resurgence in creationism. What on earth is going on?
“It is a strange situation. Look, America is a massive country. When you say 40 per cent of Americans don’t believe in evolution, that’s 40 per cent of 350 million people. There’s a lot that do. I can, however, say hand-on-heart that we have not set out to make an atheist film. I am an atheist, but Jeremy Thomas is a practising Jew. There are agnostics and Christians involved. There’s a danger of the film being misrepresented.”
Given that Bettany's next film concerns the archangel Michael, you could be forgiven for thinking that the actor is trying to make amends with the faithful. A glance at the poster for Legion, a pre-apocalyptic thriller, will, however, set you right. The extravagantly-winged Paul clutches a sub-machine gun in his angelic fist.
“Awesome, isn’t it?” he says. “People wonder if I am confused playing an archangel and Darwin. Not at all. If I was playing Odysseus, that wouldn’t mean I’d suddenly come to believe in Zeus.”
Is that sort of role as much fun as it looks? “Yeah. When I was a kid I used to read Shakespeare and Schiller just to impress girls. But when I got the cowboy hat on and got a gun-belt that’s when I felt really excited.”
He’s still that kid? “Oh yes, there’s still a bit of that lurking around.”
The appliance of science: geniuses in the movies
Two biopics on Abraham Lincoln - one by Robert Redford, one by Steven Spielberg - are currently undergoing gestation. Yet there has never been a serious cinematic study of Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton. It is enormously depressing to note how little interest mainstream cinema has in science.
Paul Muni won an Oscar playing the great French microbiologist in The Story of Louis Pasteur. But that was way back in 1937 and Pasteur's work had an easily explicable practical application.
The same could be said of Dr Paul Ehrlich, the man who found a cure for syphilis, played convincingly by Edward G Robinson in Dr Ehrlich's Magic Bullet(1940).
Thomas Edison - more an inventor than a research scientist - was deemed sufficiently grounded to be played by Spencer Tracy in Edison, The Man(1940). Greer Garson wasn't at all bad in 1943's Madame Curie. (What was it with science movies and the early 1940s?) However, later worthwhile theatrical releases focusing on the great paradigm-shifting theorists are shamefully rare. A Beautiful Mind(2001)? Give us a break. Barely a line of John Nash's work survives into that soppy film. Kinsey(2004)? Well, that's more like it, but Alfred Kinsey, sex researcher, is hardly one of the immortals.
John Huston's Freud (1962), starring Montgomery Clift, is a decent attempt to get at the Viennese master. It is, however, notable that, like Kinsey, a dose of sex was required to scare up studio interest.
Sadly, the movies' vision of the typical scientific genius remains a maniac with eccentric dress sense - Jeff Goldblum in The Fly(1986), Colin Clive in Frankenstein(1931) - cackling as he unwittingly brings catastrophe to the neighbourhood. What a disgrace.
