Billy Elliot star is all grown up
New dad Jamie Bell finds his footing in acting world
PASADENA, Calif. — Child actors often grow up conflicted by the experience. But that’s not so with British actor Jamie Bell. Bell was at the peak of adolescent angst when, at 14, he was a smash hit in Billy Elliot, the film about a boy who becomes a celebrated dancer.
He himself hails from a long line of dancers and had been dancing since he was five.
“I had the regular pitfalls of being a teenager,” he said in the busy lounge of a hotel.
“I was very moody and angry and grumpy. It was actually around that time I didn’t really take work seriously. I turned up and did my best as always, but I didn’t really love the craft of it as much as I do now,” he says.
“Also remember, I wasn’t a Disney kid. I didn’t have a set of eyes just waiting for me to fail, quite fortunately. I met Billy Elliot — which did incredibly well — but then there wasn’t really anything expected of me. There wasn’t this great expectation that I should go on and play these amazing parts and continue to be a child star. I made that film, and then I just went off and kept making films kind of under the radar.”
Now, at 28, Bell is sailing above the radar with his latest role as an innocent farmer who is coerced into becoming one of the nation’s first spies during the Revolutionary War in AMC’s series, Turn, premièring Sunday.
“It must be horrible to be a child and have that much attention, because you do do stupid things,” he continues.
One of the stupid things he did was sneak a pack of cigarettes into class when he was 12. “I was desperately trying to fit into school … I didn’t really feel cool, sneaking in the cigarettes, I just felt dangerous — I don’t even know what I was thinking. Anyway, some girl saw them in my bag and told the teacher.”
That teacher reported it to his homeroom teacher. “The discipline they were going to take, they were going to send home a report card. It was really bad because always the troubled kids at school had report cards — it was really bad,” he recalls.
“I knew my mum would be devastated. It would beak her heart because I was a pretty good kid. I was disciplined with the dance. I was pretty good at school. I didn’t cause any problems. So this would’ve broken her heart.”
But instead of snitching to his mom, the teacher ripped up the card in front of him. “And she said, ‘I know this isn’t you. And I’m not going to send it home.’ I started weeping because I was amazed that someone believed in me. Someone saw through the actual act of a kid lost, trying to fit in and being stupid. I have no idea what would’ve happened.”
Though his father wasn’t in his life, Bell thinks that the rigours of dance helped him throughout his life. “That discipline kind of makes you — I don’t know — there is a respect for authority for whatever it is that you do, you do it with due diligence,” he says.
“Also, the trauma of that is perfection, the pursuit of perfection. It’s complicated, but I think a lot of it has to do with a kind of rigid sense of discipline and rehearsal … structure of performing was quite rigid early on. It wasn’t just a hobby. It was like something I really did.”
His classmates taunted him about being a dancer, and by the time he was 13 he decided he didn’t want to do it anymore.
“Being a kid regardless is just difficult enough; navigating high school is a battleground. At that point I’d always seen the benefit of not fitting in.
“It happened to me so early at 14 it was obviously very apparent to me — whatever I did got me here. So I can’t look at that negatively anymore. I have to look at that as something that is good and great and to be proud of and to protect.”
A few years later he realized he’d gained a maturity that others didn’t have. “By that time, by 16 or 17, a lot of people have difficulties: ‘What am I going to do with my life? The world doesn’t revolve around me.’ And all these things you’ve got to learn. By that point I’d already figured it out. I was kind of a step ahead.”
Considering all the gifts that Bell inherited, the greatest to him are his wife, actress Evan Rachel Wood, and his seven-month-old son. While he admits to being perpetually sleepdeprived with a teething baby, he says, “It’s an amazing time as much as it’s a very tiring time. It’s unbelievable. You’re seeing how a human being gets to interact with the world. And he’s looking at you with the purest eyes, untainted by any corruption, any darkness, nothing, just pure elation and joy when they figure out, ‘Oh, I need to love you because you keep me alive. OK, I love you forever.’ And you really sense that.”