I had to grow up as hellraisers get fired!
THE WORDS “bad boy” seem permanently affixed to his name, but Nick Moran assures me he is a lot more chilled now. “I’m in my 50s and I’ve had to calm it down a bit,” the film star says... but there’s that but. “I love a little bit of anarchy and chaos,” he adds. “Anyone that’s been on a film set with me knows that.anyone who was out with me running around Soho when I had a couple of quid in my pocket can stand testament to that.”
Indeed, tabloid stories involving Moran – who is fondly remembered as cardsharp Eddie in Guy Ritchie’s classic 1998 gangster flick Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – once abounded.
Leaving private members clubs with £3,000 bar bills (“The girls in my accountant’s office used to read them out loud and laugh”); knocking a photographer unconscious at the red-carpet premiere of Lock, Stock; living in a disused pub in south London; dating TV star Denise Van Outen, then marrying actress Sienna Guillory. Then getting divorced fewer than three years later...
“I was doing silly stupid things,” Moran, 53, admits. “Whether it was swearing on telly or getting into fisticuffs.
“I was all over the tabloids – my life destroyed, relationships ruined, really difficult and unpleasant. I did it when I was 30 and I don’t want to do it again.”
He still rails against the new societal norms that he feels have robbed modern life of much of its individuality – and fun.
“It’s about being polite and using the right pronouns and behaving yourself. It’s left me a little bit confused.”
He goes on. “I’ve no interest in fame. I have no social media. I’ve only got a dumb phone, a little Nokia. I’ve never had a website or a Twitter. I’ve never posted a picture of myself. I’ve never posted a comment.”
Instead, he has spent the quartercentury since he first shot to fame starring alongside a string of movie legends, including John Hurt, Joseph Fiennes,
Catherine Deneuve, Tim Roth and Stephen Rea, in a steady stream of high-profile British films.
In 2008, he co-wrote and directed the acclaimed Joe Meek biopic Telstar.
And in 2010 he directed The Kid, based on the true story of Kevin Lewis, a survivor of childhood abuse who turned to organised crime.
Moran related to Lewis’s story of growing up on a tough London council estate.
“I was brought up on a tin-house council estate, two rows behind South Oxhey estate, just north of Harrow and Willesden,” he says. “I’m not knocking it, I’m just not part of it anymore.”
LIFE WAS different then. The National Front was everpresent and street crime was rife. Teenage Nick’s escape was acting in school plays and playing in bands. At 16 he lied about his age to get into Mountview drama school in Peckham south London, where he read Pinter and Brecht.
As well as a career now spanning more than 40 films, Moran also starred in a number of successful West End plays including Look Back In Anger, Alfie, and Twelve Angry Men.
But the major Hollywood stardom that was predicted in the wake of Lock, Stock’s huge international success always eluded him. Or rather, Nick did a pretty good job of eluding it. “When I was at drama school, I read all these Peter O’toole biographies and I was like, that man is just a maverick genius. I was just obsessed with these stories of old 1960s actors and what they used to get up to.
“The unfortunate fact is, if you behave like that now you are fired and they get someone else. Or what happened with me is, if you try and behave like that, they’ll go, ‘We won’t give him a job next time’.
“I got confused, I think, by idolising these hellraisers and thinking that’s what it’s about – when really it isn’t. I got a bit lost in that. You can’t be a hellraiser anymore.there’s no room for it.”
Yet in the wake of Lock, Stock’s US success Nick was hot property: “I was in LA and they made a fuss about me. I was a guest on Jay Leno and met all of these guys. But I kept making massive c***-ups.
“I met Brian de Palma for his movie, Hollow Man. He said, ‘How’s your American accent?’ Brian de Palma’s like a bear, this huge, imposing figure.
“I did this little Al Pacino impersonation and he stared at me like he was going to tear my head off. I thought, ‘Oh crap! You made Scarface and Carlito’s Way and I’m taking the mick out of your leading man for two of your greatest movies’.” There was a similarly disastrous encounter with director Paul Verhoeven, whose most recent film Starship Troopers had been roasted by the critics.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but I asked, ‘When you did Starship Troopers, did you employ really bad actors and just get them to do this stuff, or did you get really good actors and tell them to act badly?’
“Because it has that B-movie feel. And he just glared at me.”
HE ALSO met Martin Scorsese to discuss a leading part in Gangs of New York, the acclaimed 2002 movie for which fellow Brit Daniel Day Lewis won an Oscar for Best Actor. “I said, ‘Yeah, the script, it’s great. It’ll be really good when it’s finished’.
“I thought it was funny, because when you read it, it doesn’t make sense, the strange dialogue.”
He didn’t get that part either...
Nick did finally land a starring role as the womanising Aramis in The Musketeer, a 2001 action-adventure movie. “It had the number one opening weekend. That was September the ninth, then on September the eleventh...”
He shrugs. “It’s like a pub quiz question. What was the number one movie in America that weekend?”
The biggest one that got away was Peter Jackson’s epic Lord Of The Rings trilogy. “They were desperate for me to do that, but at the time, it was going to be three or four years in New Zealand. Jokingly, I said to Peter Jackson, ‘There’s only so much lamb I can eat’. That was really bad.”
He shakes his head. “I had this brilliant manager who was just pulling his hair out going, ‘Nick, Christ, no!’ He started going to interviews with me and just sitting there, like I was being babysat.
“If I was there now, I’d be far more reverential, less cocky, less full of myself.
“I brought all the Britpop swagger of being the number one movie in the UK to America – where they just don’t get it.
“They don’t like you being cocky. They don’t like ***holes – and I was one.”
Better luck finally came Nick’s way when he landed the role of evil child snatcher Scabior in the two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
Nick’s latest role is as a former SAS commando dragged out of retirement to avenge the murder of an old friend in British thriller Renegades. It boasts a cast of veterans, including Lee Majors, Patsy Kensit and Stephanie Beacham.
He took the role he says “because I wanted to be in a film with Lee Majors, The Six Million Dollar Man. I don’t care about anything else, the plot, script, whatever.” He laughs and saunters off, the anarchy and chaos trailing behind him.