The anti-romcom leading man
Actor Leo Bill on being Billie Piper’s unorthodox romantic interest in her directorial debut, Rare Beasts
LEO BILL MIGHT not seem like a conventional romcom star, but Rare Beasts — Billie Piper’s directorial debut, in which he stars — isn’t a conventional romcom. Pete (Bill) and Mandy (Piper) are a pair of messy coworkers-turned-lovers, and both bring their fair share of baggage to the relationship: she’s a single mother trying to figure out what she wants in a relationship, while he’s abrasive at best, misogynistic at worst. The opening scene epitomises the dynamic perfectly: Pete says he finds women “intolerable”; Mandy vomits in the street; Pete then declares they’ll be married within a year.
“They’re utterly flawed,” Bill says with a chuckle. “Pete’s not a great guy, and I imagine there will be people who will absolutely hate him. But, for me, whichever part you play, no matter how horrendous they are, you’ve got to find a way to love them. He’s a guy who thinks he knows what he believes, but I saw him as someone struggling to understand himself and his place in the world as much as anybody. I wanted to lean into his bad qualities — but not turn him into a baddie.”
Although Rare Beasts is about a romantic couple and, at times, very funny, the film couldn’t be further from a British romcom. “I don’t think I’ve ever fitted the Richard Curtis mould,” Bill says. “But it wasn’t a route we were going down anyway. British movies in that genre tend to be just quite
nice. I looked more at French and Scandinavian cinema and John Cassavetes’ Minnie And Moskowitz for inspiration, which are all a bit more raw and loose.”
As he admits, Bill has played his fair share of oddballs, in films from 28 Days Later to
In Fabric. “I spent a lot of time in my career playing guys who never get the girl; they normally try to get the girl and then are waiting in the bush to attack the girl.” His role in Rare Beasts marks a more subdued, albeit still eccentric, turn. “To be honest, the hardest thing for me was playing just a normal guy. No weird limp, no wig, just normal. It turned into a Daniel Day-lewis achievement!”
RARE BEASTS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 19 FEBRUARY