Interview: "Colin's sleazy side" by Anita Singh (The Mercury Australia)

Archived completely due to unavailability on the internet

LADIES, be prepared. Those who swooned at the sight of Colin Firth emerging from a lake dripping wet in shirt and breeches in Pride And Prejudice or wandering through the snow in Bridget Jones's Diary won't want to miss his new film, Where The Truth Lies.

The actor instantly conjures up images of a wealthy, slightly pompous, romantic comedy lead, but he's veered wildly from that for this murder mystery. The 44-year-old plays a pill-popping celebrity with an insatiable need for sex and some of the images are so raw, they troubled the North American censors and earned an R18+ rating here for the "high level sex scenes".
 
And Firth is right in the middle of them.
 
"A role like that is not usually a stretch for most actors," he jokes. "Playing a lord of the manor riding around Derbyshire required a lot more research.

"I wasn't trying to manipulate people's perceptions of me, I just go where I'm most comfortable," he adds. "Romantic comedies came relatively late in my career and took me by surprise. I'm still surprised about it. But roles like this can be found in the ancient archives of my career."
 
Adapted from Rupert Holmes's crime noir thriller, Where The Truth Lies has Firth and co-star Kevin Bacon playing a Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis-style double act in 1950s Hollywood.
 
They become celebrities and use their fame to seduce countless women - until a murder after a threesome with a hotel maid (Rachel Blanchard) brings their world crashing down.
 
Where The Truth Lies then jumps to the 1970s, when Firth's character is a washed-up has-been and an investigative reporter attempts to discover the impact of the murder on the pair's lives and their subsequent professional break-up.
 
"When I see a scenario like that, I daren't look to my future as an actor," Firth laughs.
 
The Egyptian-born Canadian Atom Egoyan, a director who has happily existed in the art-house world with films such as Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia's Journey, suggested Firth aim for a mix of David Niven and Rex Harrison in his character. But Firth says he was attracted to the character's dark psyche.
 
"Vince is a very bleak character to portray," he says. "Playing him was a real stare into the abyss, actually. To desperately need your celebrity fix and yet have it as part of your burden must be a kind of hell.
 
"Rather than just playing a psychopath or mass murderer, it was interesting to play someone who is apparently what you expect me to be, and then take off the mask to reveal something darker."
 
The darkness is not something we'd expect of the English actor. After springing to heart-throb status in 1995 in the TV adaptation of Pride And Prejudice as Mr Darcy emerged from the lake (which he later revealed he was supposed to be naked for but the BBC would not allow it), Firth has gathered female fans all over the world with his intense stares and romantic gestures in, among others, Bridget Jones's Diary and Love Actually.
 
As for the latest graphic sex scenes, Egoyan says they were imperative.
 
"It's an essential part of the film," Egoyan says. "I always saw this as a really sensual movie. I wanted it to be unbridled - these characters could take any amount of drugs they wanted, they could have any amount of sex they wanted.
 
"I don't know about the censors. They probably will have issues, but we are pretty firm about what we want the film to do."
 
After putting his clothes back on, Firth will next star in the new film from Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh.
 
He will appear opposite Robert Carlyle in The Meat Trade, a contemporary reworking of the story of 19th-century bodysnatchers Burke and Hare.
 
Welsh has written the screenplay for the film, which is set in Edinburgh and will be directed by Antonia Bird.

Interview: Oh, Mr Darcy, by Mary Colbert (The Sydney Morning Herald)

The unthinkable has happened: British actor Colin Firth is talking about "shagging". Mr Darcy, shagging?
 
The heart-throb of millions of female viewers of the BBC's Pride and Prejudice and the Bridget Jones's Diary movies is expounding on the explicit sex scenes in his latest movie, Where the Truth Lies.
 
In Atom Egoyan's film we see plenty of Firth, who first sent a wave of hysteria across the globe as he emerged from a lake in a dripping wet shirt and breeches.
 
In Where the Truth Lies, adapted from Rupert Holmes's noir crime thriller, Firth plays the pill-popping, sex-driven Vince Collins, one-half of America's hottest showbiz musical comedy partnership of the 1950s. In one scene, Firth has a threesome with fellow comic Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) and a hotel maid (Rachel Blanchard), who is later found dead in their hotel suite.
 
"Safety in numbers," Firth says. "Actually, I was saved by Kevin's butt." He grins across the table at Bacon, so renowned for his cinematic bed forays that detainees on a US witness-protection programme complained online "that his dangling member gets into far too many movies. Somebody should talk to him about it."

"What do you mean?" Bacon says. "You showed up late that week after I'd done most of the hard work."
 
Firth: "I hadn't been filming the week that some solid shagging took place between Kevin and various women, so by the time I showed up there was no interest at all. The crew were so sick of the sight of his butt and mine offered nothing new. People make a lot of the sexual thing but that's really only one more weird thing we get to do."
 
Egoyan's film is a far stretch from his last one, Ararat, about the genocide of Armenians. The director's mandate was that the sex be sensual and unbridled.
 
"A role like that usually isn't a huge stretch for most actors," Firth says, who admits it was a refreshing change from the recent spate of romantic comedies. Was it an escape from typecasting for the theatre-trained thespian?
 
"Not necessarily," Firth says.
 
"They came to me quite late in my career and are fun, but the appeal was the character's inherent darkness and, of course, the opportunity to work with Atom."
 
Firth and Bacon's comic duo are loosely modelled on the lives of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Egoyan suggested Firth aim for a mix of David Niven and Rex Harrison. The story moves between the '70s, when a young investigative reporter attempts to ferret out the repercussions of the murder on the duo's private and professional lives, and the subsequent break-up of their long-standing partnership.
 
Where the Truth Lies focuses on a complex exploration of celebritydom's underbelly. The film also gives the actors a canvas to improvise their own comedy and verbal jousts as well as sing.
 
Amend that to singing for one.
 
Bacon claims Firth hired a singing coach, only to be told his forte lay in the verbal thrusts.
 
For Firth, the drawcard lay in his screen persona's dark psyche.
 
"Vince is a very bleak character to portray. Playing him was a real stare into the abyss, actually. To desperately need your celebrity fix and yet have it as part of your burden must be a kind of hell.
 
"Rather than just playing a psychopath or mass murderer, it was interesting to play someone who is apparently what you expect me to be, and then take off the mask to reveal something darker."
 
Firth adds that depression is one of the least socially permissible things for human beings. "It is still considered very antisocial and shameful.
It used to be sex. But that's still a very private matter. Loneliness, fear and insecurity are much more so."

Interview: "At the movies: Where The Truth Lies" (ABC Australia)

It is a very interesting thing to study. What do you present on stage, what's the dream that you're peddling? What...what is it you're selling? What do you want people to accept you as? And the more divorced that is from what you are when you walk off that stage, the more fractured you become. And I think...this, I think, led to the choice of playing him as an Englishman, because in the novel he's not. In the novel he's an Italian/American. And I was tempted to do that, I wanted to show that I can do that. And it would have been great fun for me and hopefully to my advantage. But there was no getting away from the fact that making him English was...was irresistibly interesting. And, er, both from the point of view of the actor we were creating and the contrast between the characters, and from the point of the view of that paradox that we're talking about, the English gentleman who expects the English gentleman to explode so violently?....more