PAUL BETTANY
Paul Bettany talks Empire through his greatest roles
He won Wimbledon before Andy Murray. Now he’s ready to tell all.
TALL, IMPOSING, ABLE to switch between charming and cold-blooded at the click of a finger, Paul Bettany burst onto the scene with a bravura turn in Gangster No. 1 almost 20 years ago, and has notched up a raft of excellent, compelling turns since. The past year has been something of a banner one for the British actor — whether it’s in blockbuster Avengers: Infinity War or playing on a much smaller canvas in low-budget World War I flick Journey’s End, he’s delivered some of the best work of his career. We got him to talk us through some of his finest roles to date.
YOUNG GANGSTER
GANGSTER NO. 1 (2000)
Here was an old-fashioned calling card; Bettany on scintillating form as the rapacious, psychotic younger version of Malcolm Mcdowell, in Paul Mcguigan’s excellent thriller-cum-character study. “I totally lied to Paul Mcguigan in the audition,” recalls Bettany, in his cut-glass tones. “He thought I was from some firm in South London, and a ruffian. On the first day of rehearsal, he shat himself when he heard me speak.” The role put Bettany on Hollywood’s radar, but he says he was almost fired halfway through. “Paul came to me and said, ‘The producers don’t feel you’re crazy enough.’ So he put up the scene where I interrogate Eddie Marsan and put an axe on the table. I knew nothing I did could be more frightening than that axe, so I let it do the work.”
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
A KNIGHT’S TALE (2001)
Bettany’s first big US role was an eye-catching one, as a punk-rock version of the great writer Geoffrey Chaucer in Brian Helgeland’s bonkers period actioner. It called for Bettany to enter the fray stark bollock naked. “I read the script and it was me, naked, walking up the street, covered in shit,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘If you can do that with a smile on your face, people are going to be happy about it. And they’ll forgive whatever bad acting you do later on.’ A flop at the time, it’s now something of a cult classic. “People still shout, ‘Hey, naked guy!’ at me in the street. Which is weird. I’m not naked at that point. Not usually.”
DR STEPHEN MATURIN MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD (2003)
One thread that connects all of Bettany’s roles, with the possible exception of Jock in Mortdecai, is he has a rare ability to convey intelligence. “I think it’s what fooled my wife into marrying me,” he smiles. “I’m very thankful of that.” Nowhere is that better utilised than in Peter Weir’s nautical drama, in which Bettany plays the alarmingly bright surgeon, Stephen Maturin. “It was so far away from me, someone with real emotional resources. I wish they’d made another one. It’s the film I get asked most about.”
PETER COLT
WIMBLEDON (2004) “I don’t think about it often,” admits Bettany of his one outright stab at a romcom, in which he plays a British underdog who gets a shot at glory on the grass of SW19. “Mostly once a year, when I think, ‘I won Wimbledon 36 times, you fuckers!’ And I think about it when I’m trying to play tennis with a friend, and I literally can’t play.” The role of Peter Colt saw Bettany dip his toes into Hugh Grant’s waters. “What I learned was,
‘Fuck me, that’s hard stuff to do and fuck me, isn’t he brilliant?’ To be relentlessly charming and affable is fucking exhausting,” he says, charmingly and affably.
WILL EMERSON MARGIN CALL (2011)
Bettany is one of the standouts in J.C. Chandor’s financial meltdown drama, in which his British trader is one of the few characters to recognise the moral fluidity of what they do for a living. So much so that he wrote his character’s standout speech, in which he dismisses the impact of the impending crash upon normal people. “They were good enough to let it remain in,” he says. “I loved playing that character. He’s a total scumbag. These people call themselves the Masters Of The Universe, for fuck’s sake.”
VISION AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR (2015-2018)
What started as a simple voice gig, as Tony Stark’s Ai-butler JARVIS, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, turned into an on-screen upgrade when Bettany was cast as Vision in Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Since then he’s sketched the purple android’s journey towards humanity touchingly and even tragically, most recently in Avengers: Infinity War, where we even get to see him briefly in human form. “It was fun that he looks like me,” says Bettany. “It was a relief not to be in the costume for a couple of days. It mirrors his quest to know what being human is. But this has been one of the great privileges of my career. It’s a lovely, pretty emotional arc in the middle of three action movies.”
OSBORNE JOURNEY’S END (2017)
As the stoic, sympathetic sergeant trying to protect his men’s mindsets as they face certain death in the trenches of World War I, Bettany is heartbreaking in Saul Dibb’s adaptation of R.C. Sherriff’s classic play. “I based him very much on my uncle Theo, who to me represented everything that was great about that understated, buttoned-up Britishness that’s actually really moving,” admits Bettany. “He died from a virulent cancer and was so courageous and funny about it. It was almost his last job to give you a good image of death. He went well, so that his family were less frightened of it. That’s what I tried to do with Osborne.” JOURNEY’S END IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DOWNLOAD