Jamie Bell's latest role as a voyeuristic teenager in Hallam Foeis a breakthrough for the former child star whose career kicked off in Billy Elliot. He talks to Michael Dwyerabout turning 21
Making the transition from child star to adult actor is a daunting challenge that has defeated many a juvenile discovery. One notable exception has been Jamie Bell. He was 13 and living with his mother and sister in Billingham, Stockton-on-Tees, when he was chosen from more than 2,000 contenders to play the young ballet-dancing working-class hero of Billy Elliot.
Bell, who turned 21 in March, has been working consistently in movies since that eye-catching screen debut, demonstrating his range through different genres, and in his most impressive performance to date he plays a disturbed teenager in Hallam Foe, capturing the young man in all his conflicts and complexity.
Directed by David Mackenzie, who made Young Adam, and based on a novel by Scottish writer Peter Jinks, Hallam Foefeatures Bell in the title role, as a lonely 17-year-old traumatised by his mother's drowning and convinced that the new partner (Claire Forlani) of his father (Ciarán Hinds) was responsible for her death.
Moving to Edinburgh, he gets work in the kitchens of a hotel, where he becomes obsessed with the personnel manager, Kate (Sophia Myles), who eerily resembles his mother. His voyeuristic tendencies established at the outset, Hallam goes to extremes, scaling precarious heights to observe Kate's domestic and sexual life in Mackenzie's intriguing, unpredictable drama laced with dark humour.
Hallam Foewas the opening presentation at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last week, and when we met over breakfast at his hotel, Bell nostalgically recalled performing in the city when he was 11. It was during the 1997 Fringe festival, when he was in a show with the National Youth Music Theatre at the Assembly Rooms.
"We did a play called Tin Pan Alley, a free take on Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves," he says enthusiastically. "I played a gangster and I sang and danced as well. It was a fantastic experience, especially for kids like me from regional towns."
Bell says it was "incredibly flattering" to know that David Mackenzie and co-writer Ed Whitmore scripted their screen adaptation of Hallam Foespecifically with him in mind. "I'm glad it worked out," he adds. "I knew David's earlier work, and I especially liked Young Adam. There aren't many people like David in this country - a director who sticks close to his roots and doesn't go for really conventional material. He's also in touch with music, which is fantastic, and he put together a great soundtrack from Domino Records for Hallam Foe."
They first met at the Berlin Film Festival in 2005, when Mackenzie was there with Asylum and Bell was promoting Dear Wendy. "It was very hard to focus when I first met David," he says. "Because we were in this Japanese bar in Berlin where they had all this pornographic animation on the screens. It's never easy to pitch a movie to somebody, but David was trying to do it while there was all this hard porn going on."
AS PLAYED BYBell, Hallam seems very vulnerable and intense at first, but gradually becomes self-sufficient and turns unexpectedly charming.
"With this character you're always walking a tightrope," he says. "In the beginning he isn't that likable. He's rude to his parents, and he's an outsider and a peeping tom. But he is entirely innocent. He is a disaffected youth, but I liked the idea that this is a movie about a teenager who doesn't have to look perfect. It was great to get such an original character at a time when there are so many remakes and rehashes of older movies."
Hallam Foepresented Bell with his most physically demanding role since Billy Elliot, and it involved spending hours in a freezing cold lake, having rats crawling over him and climbing up and across the rooftops of Edinburgh.
"And on top of that, we shot it in six-day weeks and I was in nearly every scene in the movie," he says. "That was all pretty daunting, but I got quite passionate about it. I actually got sick the first week we were in production.
"I think I went in too hard and I realised I had to pace myself for the rest of the shoot. Anyhow, the schedule was so tight I didn't have time to get sick again. I didn't have a stuntman for any of the rooftop scenes. For some of them, we had to close off part of the rooftops and put barriers around them for safety, so there was no risk of me falling off. I used to have a moderate fear of heights, but I got over that on this film."
Maybe Jamie Bell could be the next movie action hero? "Oh, I would love to do something like those Bourne movies," he says with an eager boyish grin. "I love the fact that they have such great action scenes but don't use any gadgetry. I just can't wait to get the time to see the new one."
He seems less comfortable, briefly twitching at the reminder that he triumphed over four Oscar winners - Tom Hanks, Russell Crowe, Michael Douglas and Geoffrey Rush - to win the best actor award at the 2001 Bafta ceremony.
"That was very weird," he says modestly. "At my 21st birthday party in New York this year, these friends of mine pulled down a clip from that and played it. It was awful. I was cringing. It still feels a bit strange after all these years."
On surviving in the acting profession after that early childhood fame, he says: "For me, it's just been a gradual process. That's fine. I know it doesn't happen overnight and I'm happy to delay it. You're constantly learning, especially if, like me, you haven't been classically trained, so you're always picking things up from other people. It's a process of evolving, I think. And I've had the chance to work with really interesting people."
He cites David Gordon Green, who directed Undertow, the US thriller in which Bell persuasively played a southern boy standing up to his homicidal uncle. "I love immersing myself in other characters," he says. "That one was like Hallam Foe, an ambitious film made by people who loved what they were doing. We went to Savannah for about eight weeks and got really down and dirty in the swamps."
BELL GOT THEexperience of working on an epic when Peter Jackson cast him in his lavish remake of King Kong.
"That was a huge movie," Bell says, "so I thought there would be an awful lot of waiting around between scenes because of all the effects - but, surprisingly, there wasn't. That's due to Peter. He was very much on top of all the technology. I felt slightly out of my depth on that one, and I think the other actors felt the same, because Peter had just won 11 Oscars for The Return of the Kingand here we all were in his next venture. Like David Mackenzie, he sticks to his roots, he's removed from Hollywood, he works with the same crew all the time and he just gets on with it."
There was the thrill of being chosen by Clint Eastwood for a supporting role in Flags of Our Fathers. "I read the script and I thought it was absolutely beautiful," Bell says. "And to be working with Clint, who is such an icon, was just amazing. He was 75 when he made it and he could have killed all of us younger guys in the movie. He hits the gym maybe three times a day. When we were shooting in the landing crafts on the beach, Clint was jumping from one boat to another and carrying a camera at the same time. I could see the look on the faces on the producers as if they were just dreading something would go wrong.
"Clint's the dude. Everyone respects him. He's incredibly precise on the set. He knows when he sees something that he likes and he's not afraid to just go ahead and do it. I don't believe he ever doubts himself. He's been directing for over 30 years and he is so self-assured. I love him."
Bell recently finished a six-month shoot on Doug Limon's thriller, Jumper, with Hayden Christensen, Samuel L Jackson and Diane Lane, and last Sunday he flew to Lithuania to join Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in the leading roles of Edward Zwick's wartime drama, Defiance.
"It's the true story of these Jewish brothers played by Daniel, Liev and me," Bell says. "There have been so many movies about people who met a tragic end in the war, but this is one about people who actually stood up to the Nazis. The brothers resisted and joined this army of partisans who lived in the forest. They saved 1,200 people. It's an incredible story, but all true."
HAVING GONE FROMone film set to another for the past few years, Bell says he needs to take a break after he finishes Defiance. "I've been offered a lot of work, especially this year, and I've been faced with some very hard decisions. It's like trying to dodge all these bullets they are throwing at me. It's like a firing squad every day with all these scripts they are sending me.
"I'm going to buy some property somewhere and just start getting used to the idea of living an adult life, which is increasingly getting more exciting. I got really nervous when I celebrated my 21st birthday this year and I felt a sense of responsibility kicking in. Now I'm looking forward to the prospect of adult life and an adult career - and a lot more opportunities."
• Hallam Foeis released next Friday