Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
FUN ON THE RUN!
Hollywood star Rosie Perez and comedian Jack Whitehall on the blast they had making new comedy-thriller Bounty Hunters
Looking at them side by side, they make the most unlikely double act. He’s a softly spoken, self- effacing Englishman – away from the cameras at least – while she’s a sassy, plain-speaking New Yorker of Puer to- Rican descent. On top of that, Jack Whitehall towers almost a foot over actress Rosie Perez, star of White Men Can’t Jump, Do The Right Thing and the
1993 thriller Fearless with Jeff Bridges, for which she received an Oscar nomination.
But the odd couple have been thrown together as the two leads in Bounty Hunters, a new comedy-thriller series co-written by actor and comedian Jack with Freddy Syborn. Rosie plays Nina, a tough, gun-toting bounty hunter from Brooklyn forced to go on the run after shooting a member of a Mexican drugs cartel, while Jack is the naive, bookish Barnaby who takes time out from studying to run a struggling London antiques shop owned by his father ( Robert Lindsay) after a mysterious accident puts him in hospital.
Barnaby soon finds himself £ 50,000 out of pocket thanks to a dodgy deal done by his dad for some treasure, which turns out to have been looted from Syria by ISIS militants. When Nina flees New York for London, she’s introduced to Barnaby by his sister Leah, who met Nina while she was travelling. Barnaby teams up with Nina to get his money back, but before long they’re both on the run.
‘Nina’s a great role,’ says Rosie, 53, when we meet at the antiques store in Holland Park, west London, that doubles for Jack’s father’s shop. ‘There’s a lot of action in the show. I do a lot of stunts and I’m championing all women of a certain age – showing that we’re still capable. Although I love Angelina Jolie and Michelle Rodriguez I’m neither of them,’ she adds with a cackle. ‘I told Jack I want to make Nina a real woman.
‘The show’s funny but it’s not over the top. We had to make sure we kept it based in reality. After all, the stakes are high. Both Barnaby and Nina’s families are in danger of being killed. We both agreed that if we didn’t play that straight it wouldn’t work.’
Chasing around the capital’s attractions, like Tate Modern and the London Eye, while beating up villains was tiring, but it was even tougher when they filmed in 40° C heat in Spain, which was standing in for Mexico. ‘It was far too hot,’ says Jack, 29, ‘and we were filming where they shoot Game Of Thrones so the locals were very disappointed when they saw it wasn’t them.’
Earlier this year Jack won praise for his performance as Paul Pennyfeather in the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline And Fall, and has enjoyed the chance to act again, as well as co-writing the character of Barnaby. ‘Barnaby’s repressed, quite highly strung and he’s been living in the shadow of his father. I wanted him to be a bit like Michael Douglas in the film Falling Down, a character who has kept everything locked up, but then over six episodes you see him break, and he loses it.
‘I also loved that after years of joking that my own brief time as a history of art student in Manchester learning about 17th-century Flemish textiles would never be of any use, that’s all changed because we made it Barnaby’s background. I’ve written a show with textile-based humour!’
Jack and Rosie first bonded four years ago at a Disneyland hotel in California when they were filming an American pilot episode of Jack’s BBC comedy series Bad Education. ‘It was quite an odd place to spend a long period of time, with lots of restaurants where you’re served by Goofy,’ says Jack. ‘The pilot wasn’t picked up, but it brought me and Rosie together.’
Rosie agrees. ‘Jack and I clicked immediately. We’d have meals after filming and we’d just crack jokes and tell stories. Then when the series didn’t happen, Jack said he was going to write something for us. I didn’t think any more about it, so when they came back with this series I couldn’t believe it. I thought, “Wow, somebody held to their word in this industry. That’s amazing!”’
Jack admits he was worried what Rosie would think of the production set-up here, which is more laid-back than she’s used to in America. ‘I mean, we even had a lady wander into the shop in the middle of a take while the camera was rolling and she started to have a little browse around. I can’t imagine that happening on an American set where everything’s so organised. You don’t really get people wandering through and having a natter.’
But Rosie says she’s enjoyed her time here after a difficult start when she missed home and her cat, although her husband, artist Eric Haze, did come over. ‘I love London,’ she says, ‘I worked here back in 2012 with Ridley Scott on the film The Counsellor. He’s very much about efficiency, so it was from hotel to set then set to hotel and we didn’t get time to take in the city. Now I have and I think it’s beautiful, although I can see glass buildings going up everywhere and it made me think, “No don’t do that.” Brooklyn did it and now everyone’s regretting it.
‘I didn’t get the whole pub thing at first either, why I’d see the same people standing outside drinking every day. But Jack led me astray and now I get it, that’s your watering hole, that’s your community centre, and it’s really nice.’
Rosie had a traumatic childhood as the daughter of a schizophrenic mother, and spent a lot of her early years as a ward of the state of New York. So now she clings to the family she has, to her sisters, her cousins and her second husband Eric, whom she married in 2013. Jack, who lives in London with Humans actress Gemma Chan, is close to his family too, especially his curmudgeonly father Michael, with whom he’s starred in the BBC show Backchat and recently in Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father, a road trip round south-east Asia, for Netflix.
Do they have any more trips planned? ‘It’d be fun to go somewhere else. I’ve suggested it to him. But he’s ditched me. He used me as a stepping stone, now he’s off doing Celebrity Antiques Road Trip with Nigel Havers; he’ll be doing The Jump by the end of the year. He doesn’t need me any more.
‘He’s also writing a book called Backing Into The Spotlight. It’s a ridiculous title. Crowbarring Myself Into The Spotlight would have been better. I’ll say so in my foreword.’
‘I’m showing that women of a certain age are still capable’ ROSIE PEREZ
Bounty Hunters starts on Wednesday, 10pm on Sky 1.