Jeremy Northam
written by Josh
Rottenberg
It’s been
one month since Jeremy Northam made his latest vow to
quit smoking, so he’d like to be interviewed someplace
where he won’t be too, you know, tempted. After some
discussion, it is agreed that the meeting will take place at
happy hour on a Friday evening at a bar in New York
City’s arty SoHo neighborhood. This sounds a little like
interviewing Chris Farley at a Pringles factory, but who’s to
argue?
Arriving at the appointed place, you find the 35-year-old
English actor seated in a dimly lit corner behind the
pool table, hunched over a glass or some
pinkish-orange concoction and, sure enough, a half-full ashtray.
Sporting an expression as sober as his downtown-watering
hole camouflage – rumpled gray sport jacket, black
jeans and tousled hair – Northam clearly is not
thrilled about having fallen off the nicotine wagon. “I
felt great for a month, and why I’ve started again, I
do not know,” he says, exhaling a stream of smoke.
“I’ll stop again tomorrow.” But cut the guy some slack.
Northam recently flew in from his home in London and is
still nursing a case of jet lag. More important, the
man who terrorized Sandra Bullock in The Net and
swept Gwyneth Paltrow off her feet in Emma is here to
tackle one of the most arduous roles any British
thespian with Hollywood hopes must face: Celebrity
Interview Subject.
From coldblooded technovillain to
Jane Austen’s stouthearted My. Knightley, Northam has
combined keen intelligence and an air of mystery with
not-too-froufy leading-man looks, earning comparisons to the
young Laurence Olivier and tags like “the thinking
woman’s pinup.” “Jeremy has a wonderful civilized
masculinity,” says Emma director Douglas McGrath. “He manages
to retain the best of the Old World – courtliness
and gentlemanliness – while at the same time there’s
also something very modern and sexual about
him.”
In this month’s Mimic, Northam stars alongside Mira
Sorvino as a scientist battling a killer virus spead by
mutant insects. Miramax is hoping the arty $25 million
frightfest can scare up Scream-sized box-office receipts
against this summer’s blockbuster contenders, and Northam
is well aware of what’s at stake. It’s the actor’s
first crack at the hero role in a slick thriller and,
after his 11 years of working mostly in the theater,
could help propel him to full-blown Hollywood stardom.
Northam’s just not sure what to make it of all. “I’m still
coming to terms with doing movies,” he says, reaching
for another smoke. “I’ve never felt like a member of
a club. You still feel like you’re a hire-and-fire
artist – you luck out or you don’t. And it doesn’t feel
smooth. It never feels smooth.”
Frankly, an interview with
Northam doesn’t always feel smooth, either. He can be
effortlessly charming, revealing a serrated, self-deprecating
wit when discussing, for example, his difficulty with
the science part of Mimic’s science fiction (“I’m the
kind of person who bought A Brief History of Time, and
I’m afraid it has remained three-quarters unread”) or
the uptightness of Austen’s world (“Part of us wants
to give everybody a good slap around the face and
say, ‘What’s the f---ing problem? You all look like
you could do with a good sleep! And have you ever
thought of working out?’”). But press the wrong button
and Northam can shut down in an instant – only to
brighten again just as quickly. Returning from a hushed
phone call, he explains that his girlfriend is waiting
for him back at his hotel. When asked what she does
for a living, he replies coolly, “I’m not telling
you.” (He will confirm that she is not an actress.)
Then, moments later, he’s talking blithely about his
increasing desire to settle down and start a family: “Part
of me would like to be in a position to have kids,
but I’d hate for a child to be brought up under these
circumstances.”
Perhaps work-related subjects are safer: Does Northam
fell he’s competing for plum roles with other
trans-Atlantic leading men, like, say, Ralph Fiennes? Whoops –
wrong button, thank you for playing. “Sure, I would
have given my eyeteeth to play Ralph’s part in The
English Patient,” he says, bristling. “But there was
never any chance I was going to be seen for that part,
so how can you be competitive?” Late, thoroughly
defrosted, he says, “Ralph is in a very fortunate position.
That is the subject of great envy among many British
actors, because he seems to have cracked [the American
market] completely.”
Those who have worked with
Northam say that while he can be funny and generous off
the set, his strict, demanding approach to his craft
is also tough to crack. “Jeremy is… it’s difficult
to say,” Paltrow offers cautiously. “He’s incredibly
driven. We worked so differently. He’d get frustrated
with me sometimes, and I’d get really frustrated with
him.” McGrath found himself continually trying to
balance Northam’s rigid precision with Paltrow’s
laid-back style. “Gwyneth just reads it, absorbs it and
does it, whereas Jeremy studies it, analyzes it,
breaks it down,” McGrath says. “But they’re both very
professional, polite people – I mean, nobody was throwing any
hairbrushes.”
According to Mimic director Guillermo del Toro, Northam had
a similar tricky working dynamic with Sorvino.
“Jeremy is very academic and technical, and Mira comes
from the spur of the moment, the emotion,” he
observes. “I think that halfway through they found a way to
work that was working for both of them.” Still, you
can’t argue with the results. “Whatever he demands is
worth it,” del Toro says. “It’s never a matter of ego.
It’s about the part.”
Northam’s meticulous working
style might go back to a childhood spent surrounded by
the rigors of academia. The youngest member of four,
Northam was raised in Cambridge and Bristol, England, by
a father who taught literature and a mother who
made pottery. An admittedly lazy student, Northam says
his happiest memories are of playing – albeit a
characteristically exacting form of play: “I remember riding a
bicycle around a circuit of my own design, doing hundreds
of laps,” he says. “I’d imagine I was in some kind
of race, but I was all the
competitors.”
After graduating from Bedford College with a degree in
English, Northam began taking roles in local theater and
soon won acclaim as a stage actor. In 1989, he found
himself playing Osric in a production of Hamlet while
serving as Daniel Day-Lewis’ understudy in the title
role. One night in the middle of Act 1, Scene 5,
Day-Lewis suffered a sudden emotional meltdown and exited
the stage, leaving a stunned Northam to finish the
performance and the production’s run. “It was a total
surprise,” Northam says. “My first line was ‘O all you host
of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple
hell?’ And it was a bit like that, because I thought,
‘Christ, will I be able to remember
this?’”
Northam’s understudy days are well behind him – in April he
wrapped Steven Spielberg’s slave-rebellion drama,
Amistad, and in August he’ll begin shooting The
Misadventures of Margaret, with Parker Posey and Brooke Shields
– but as for what the future holds, he’s not
exactly comfortable speculating. “It’s all work,” he
begins. “Success for me is not money and fame or
anything. I want to improve as an actor and…” He falters,
runs his finger though his hair. “And get the chance
to play parts I’d like to play. And…” He glances
over at the guys playing pool – no help there. “And
feeling fulfilled in yourself.” Letting out a groan,
Northam drops his head into his hands. “God, this is
horrible. Sometimes I just feel like it’s a form of public
masturbation. I can’t bear it.”
Northam is flatly
unwilling to be pinned down – either to following a
straight and narrow career path or to being a
user-friendly public face – and when it comes to achieving
critical marquee mass in Hollywood, this could prove to be
either his biggest asset or greatest weakness. “Jeremy
can do a lot of things, which in a way makes it
harder for him,” says McGrath. “It’s makes it harder to
pigeonhole him. But maybe people are becoming a little
looser these days.” He pauses. “I mean, look at Ralph
Fiennes.”
It seems fitting that the clearest insight into
Northam’s personality comes when you’re not even looking
for it, as he explains what attracted him to the role
of the noble but inscrutable Knightley: “You’re not
always sure what Knightley’s thinking. He keeps his own
counsel, largely. And every now and again, he reveals what
he really feels in the most extraordinary outburst.”
Stubbing out his cigarette, Northam adds with a wry grin,
“I think I can relate to that.”
