Billy Elliot star back on the dance floor
Jamie Bell just can’t escape the boogie.
His breakout role in the 2000 British smash “Billy Elliot” saw the 14-year-old newcomer doing some spirited footwork to T. Rex’s “I Love to Boogie” alongside Julie Walters as the dance teacher who encourages his dream to be a ballet dancer. (Bell reunites with Walters in “Film Stars,” but there’s no dancing this time out; she plays his warm-hearted, no-nonsense mum who helps nurse the dying Grahame.)
In 1970s-set “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool” Bell and Annette Bening spin their characters’ first meeting into a sexy exploration of each other via some sinewy dance moves to disco hit “Boogie Oogie Oogie.”
Bell, now 31, was in Toronto last September for the film’s screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, and said he knew as soon as he read the script he wanted to play the reallife role of Peter Turner.
The struggling English actor fell in love with glamorous Hollywood star Gloria Grahame when she arrived in England, trying to revive her career with theatre work.
“I thought, I wonder if it’s come to me just for this (dance) scene?” Bell joked of the script based on Turner’s 1986 memoir.
Grahame, who won an Oscar for “The Bad and the Beautiful” and is best known among TV audiences today as bad-girl Violet in “It’s A Wonderful Life,” was in her 50s when she met 25-yearold Turner.
Their affair didn’t last but their closeness was undeniable — and the onscreen chemistry between Bening, who was nominated for a Best Actress Golden Globe for the role, and Bell gives off sparks.
Years after their dramatic breakup, when Grahame was nearing the end of her battle with breast cancer in 1981, she came to Liverpool, convinced Turner’s family could help her regain her health in his childhood home.
Bell said the dance between Peter and Gloria is crucial to the storytelling. Shot in just four takes and without any rehearsal, it replaces a half-dozen scenes with one, he said, with only a few words of dialogue required.
“All that anxiousness, the clear kind of sexual gravitation they have to one another, is all said in that one scene, “said Bell.
Although he loves “disco-era music” and praised the “killer” bass line of the “Taste of Honey” hit, Bell needed some dance-floor homework.
“Beforehand, I actually was looking at some clips of ‘Saturday Night Fever,’ just to get three or four moves down so that I had something to do that was eraappropriate,” he said.
“But we had a blast. And by the way, Annette is always dancing. She has her headphones in before takes and she has her shoulders moving.”
Their age difference doesn’t matter to Turner, although it did to Grahame.
“I knew that Peter Turner loved this woman. He didn’t see the actress, he didn’t see the age, he didn’t see anything other than the being in front of him and he loved (her) absolutely 100 per cent,” Bell said.
Their romance is a flip on the more common older man/younger woman relationships often seen onscreen. Bell says he finds the unscripted age gap between some leading men and muchyounger female co-stars “bizarre” and “something that happens with too much frequency for me in movies.”
Bell has done plenty of varied roles since his “Billy Elliot” dancing days, including “King Kong,” “Snowpiercer,” “The Adventures of Tintin” and TV series “Turn.”
It was while playing Ben Grimm/The Thing in “Fantastic Four” in 2015 that met his wife, actress Kate Mara.
Bell said making “Film Stars” let him work “amid such titans of the industry,” including Bening and Vanessa Redgrave, who has a small role as Grahame’s sharptongued mother.
He said reteaming with Walters was “a beautiful reunion.”
“It just kind of makes you step everything up a little bit, “Bell said of working with Bening, which he likened to taking an acting master class.
“I was very intimidated, very much so,” Bell added. “But it makes you work that bit harder.”