COSMO’S A REAL KNOCKOUT
ACTOR and musician Cosmo Jarvis said that he’d been in ‘some pretty dark spots’ in his life so he knew very well how to play an out-of-shape former boxer way down on his luck.
He’d never been in the ring in real life, but ‘I know what it’s like to be at the bottom, for sure,’ said the actor, who gives one of the best screen performances so far this year in director Nick Rowland’s deeply-felt film Calm With Horses.
It’s about Arm, Jarvis’s character, who’s desperately trying to raise money to send his young son to a special needs school. But the only ‘work’ Arm is able to find is as a thug hired out to a vicious drug-running family in the west of Ireland.
Jarvis brings such sensitivity to the cognitively impaired Arm. ‘My decision was that he was a boy who happens to have some kind of frightening physical mass. He’s a big lug but by no means does that mean he’s evil,’ he told me.
The actor did a lot of weights and bulked up. Meeting him in person was a revelation because he was half the size he appears in the film.
After his parents had a messy divorce, he and his younger brother lived in a series of short-term foster homes. ‘I was ten and my brother was eight.
We were failed by a lot of people and we soon learned that life is a giant s*** sandwich.’
He said that he was raised ‘all the way up the train tracks’ in Devon. He left school at 16 and headed for the big wide world. ‘There was no hope in hell of becoming an actor if I stayed there.’
He and his brother began making music and they toured the country playing gigs and making albums. Seven of them slept in a van. He shook his head: ‘It was horrible.’
Calm With Horses opens today.