HOLIDAY MOVIE PREVIEW 2010 - Entertainment Weekly

Highlights from ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’s November 19, 2010 issue

(on newsstands nationwide Friday, November 12):

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY’S

HOLIDAY MOVIE PREVIEW 2010

Colin Firth in The King’s Speech

Apparently, being Colin Firth these days means being the most popular guy in the room. The veteran British actor is following up his Oscar-nominated turn in last year’s A Single Man with another career-capping achievement, this time in The King’s Speech (rated R, out Nov. 26). In the comedic drama, Firth plays King George VI, the 20th-century British monarch (and father of the current Queen Elizabeth) who was plagued with a crippling stutter until he sought the help of an eccentric Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush).

Firth’s performance has already received such acclaim that he is destined to earn back-to-back Best Actor nominations, a feat accomplished in the past decade by only Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp. Now 50, the man best known as a heartthrob from such projects as the 1995 BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice and two Bridget Jones movies is continuing to turn in the most complex work of his 25- year film career. “The stories about men my age are rather interesting. They have a past. Maybe I’ve been given an opportunity which has perhaps invited me to raise my game.”

To prepare for The King’s Speech, Firth pored over archival video footage of George VI (informally known as “Bertie”) delivering painfully awkward public addresses to crowds as big as

100,000. “You see first an expression in his face of ‘I can go on,’ ” says Firth. “Then he realizes he can’t. I remember him closing his eyes and just trying to gather. One of the things that brings tears to your eyes is the fact that he gets on with it. You start to get very moved by the dignity. It was incredibly painful to watch, but there’s something beautiful there, too.” Once shooting began, Firth fretted over getting the monarch’s stutter just right. “Colin was terribly afraid that he was going to stammer too much, that he was going to misjudge the level of Bertie’s affliction,” says director Tom Hooper (HBO’s John Adams). “I remember pushing him for the stammering to be more violent. I wanted him to be fully in the agony of it.” Firth also consulted his sister, Kate, a speech therapist. “I am quite concerned about how people who actually do stutter are going to take it,” he says. “Any smack of inauthenticity and you’ve lost the battle.”

So far the reception has been excellent for The King’s Speech, which has racked up prizes on the festival circuit (most notably the audience prize at the Toronto Film Festival, previously won by eventual Oscar favorites Precious and Slumdog Millionaire). Firth’s castmates certainly hope that the Academy takes notice of his performance. “They would get it right if they gave it to Colin,” says Rush, a Best Actor winner for 1996’s Shine and a shoo-in for a Supporting Actor nod for The King’s Speech. “A role of this scale, it is like climbing an Everest. And to not do it riddled with showy clichés, but to find a humanity and a depth and a layer that really empowers an audience’s imagination and draws them into something quite complicated? He’s good stuff.”

But Firth—who’s currently filming the spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Gary Oldman—isn’t popping open the champagne just yet. “They say a week is a long time in politics,” Firth “A lot can change in terms of what people’s sentiments are.” He learned that lesson the hard way last year, when Crazy Heart’s Jeff Bridges entered the awards race at the last minute and won every major American acting prize. Firth, who lives in quiet West London with his wife, Livia, and their two young sons (“I’m all about the kids, really—look at the widths of the sidewalks here”), doesn’t foresee his life changing much even if this ends up being his year at the Oscars. “Come end of February,” he says, “whether I’ve been invited to the party or not, I’m still going to be taking out the trash.”

Info courtesy of Entertainment Weekly

Interview: "Amanda, Colin and the word "Minge"

Amanda Seyfried has a tattoo of the word 'Minge' on her foot because Colin Firth used to say it to make her laugh.

The American actress decided to get the etching - which is a British slang term for vagina - after her 'Mamma Mia!' co-star Colin Firth used the word repeatedly while filming and found it hilarious when she discovered what it meant.

She told Britain's Glamour magazine: "My and my best friend Rachel McDowell, who was in 'Mamma Mia!' with me, have matching tattoos, which say 'Minge'. I've never really been a fan of tattoos, but I wanted to see what it felt like. Rachel has a lot of them.

"Anyway, Colin Firth used to say that word on the set and Rachel had to explain to me what it meant. So it's on my foot. It's to make me laugh, and every time I look at it, I do."

Interview: "Colin Firth First Person Singular" (Filmink Australia)

The March issue of FILMINK is available from February 15th across Australia, but you can buy the magazine now direct by emailing an inquiry to dina@filmink.com.au

This Interview is published thanks to FILMINK,

Australia's best movie magazine.

Interview: Colin Firth doesn't always have to play the romantic (Vancouver Sun)

"There are certain times in one's career when you take a role out of necessity. You just need a job. That's a very real concern for almost every actor. But the luxury of being employed on a regular basis is you can afford to, you know, evaluate each project and what it means to you," he says.

"That's not to say I think I've made some shabby choices in the past. It just means I can make a noble choice over a shabby one."

The eyes smile. The mouth does not. More

Interview: "Family Matters" by Rob Driscoll (IC Wales)

Archived completely due to unavailability on the internet

Forget glitz and glamour, Colin Firth returns to cinemas tonight in a poignant British film about a father and son. He tells Rob Driscoll about his own relationships with both his parents and his children

YOU could say Colin Firth is a bit of a chameleon. The heart-throb British actor has just returned from Greece where he has been singing some Abba.
Dressed in full obligatory ‘70s-style spandex, it was part of his performance in the film version of the stage musical Mamma Mia! with the likes of Meryl Streep, Julie Walters and Pierce Brosnan as co-stars.

And this Christmas he will be seen flirting outrageously with a dragged-up Rupert Everett in St Trinian’s.

It’s all a far cry from the role that made him a true superstar – the smouldering Darcy in the 1995 BBC version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which was sexed up by Cardiff screenwriter Andrew Davies.

But one suspects that, out of his latest big screen projects, the movie of which Firth is most proud is a far humbler, less glitzy affair.

Behind the clunky title of the new British film And When Did You Last See Your Father? hides a strongly emotional, unapologetic study of family relationships with the power to reduce many of its audiences – especially men – to tears.

Based on Blake Morrison’s award-winning autobiographical memoir of the same name, the film is an extraordinarily honest and unflinching exploration of a father/son relationship, as Morrison deals with his father’s terminal illness and imminent death.

In the film, Firth plays the real-life Morrison, with Jim Broadbent as his father Arthur, ultimately struck down by cancer. As soon as Firth was offered the part, there was no hesitation about accepting it.
“Everyone can relate to this movie,” explains Firth. “We’ve all had a father or a father figure. The issues in this film are so wired into absolutely all of us, that I really don’t think you have to look that far to find bits of your life that overlap.
“One of the reasons why people respond so much to this story is that everybody’s got unresolved issues in any important relationship, and this story is so starkly honest about that. Yet you don’t come out of the cinema depressed.
“It gives you some rather difficult truths that apply to all of us, and I think there’s something soothing and edifying about that. I don’t know why, I don’t know if it’s because you realise you’re not alone with all your inadequacies in that department. But I think it makes you feel actually better than coming out of a sugar-coated fantasy.”

Indeed, the very notion of Hollywood getting hold of this project and heaping it with gloss is a terrifying one. The strength of And When Did You Last See Your Father? is in its deadpan truths and refreshingly un-flashy honesty.
Firth immediately empathised with a screenplay that refuses to shirk from all those petty embarrassments of a suburban upbringing in baby-boomer Britain that still hover over his conscience.

In the film, Firth’s parents are played by Broadbent and Juliet Stevenson, while his wife is played by Gina McKee. TV star Sarah Lancashire makes a telling big screen debut as a family friend of the Morrisons whom we slowly realise means much more to Arthur.
The essence of the central father and son relationship is further expressed through flashbacks to Blake’s teens – a family holiday, a fumbled affair with the au pair – where the awkward and introverted Blake is constantly crushed by his father’s flirtatious ways and need to be the centre of attention.
“The more you enter the film, it’s clear that there’s so much of this that is immediate to everyone,” says Firth, whose own father is 73.

At 47, Firth is also a father himself to three children – the younger two by his Italian wife Livia Giuggioli.
“My father couldn’t be more different from Arthur Morrison, but I still had issues, and I have that dreadful piece of programming in my system, that however far I think I’ve gone in life and however much I’ve moved beyond the trials of living with my parents, it only takes five minutes walking into the parental home and I’m 16 again,” he smiles.“The film’s made me realise that there’s the danger we let our parents die with things unsaid – though, of course, I’d like to think there’s nothing unresolved with my parents.”

Firth had read the book on which the film is based several years ago, although he never imagined seeing it on the big screen.
“I loved the book from the moment I read it for all sorts of reasons,” recalls Firth, who is an executive producer of the forthcoming documentary feature In Prison My Whole Life, the latest film from Welsh director Marc Evans.
“I responded to the flavour of the ‘60s, the ‘80s, washing your car on a Sunday, putting up a camping tent come hell or high water, being stuck in the family car in motorway traffic jams, all of that.
“It was such a self-contained piece. The adaptation is quite a big reinvention of the book. There’s nothing of a film in the book. There are little episodes you can imagine being filmed, but it doesn’t have that shape, that quality – it doesn’t cry out to be a film at all. It’s a series of brilliant, courageous observations.”

Familiar as he was with the material, there wasn’t much time for the eternally-in-demand Mr Firth to prepare for the challenge of playing an autobiographical figure.
“My preparation basically involved getting on a plane in New York and arriving just in time to shoot,” he chuckles. “It was a bit on the hoof. I’d lived with the idea of it for quite a long time. But I’d met the director Anand Tucker before, we’d chatted about it, and I’d known the book for a good 10 years. And then there was a lifetime of having a Dad…”

As for Firth’s own parenting skills, he insists he tries to make himself available to his children.
“I think that’s a constant issue for any working person, questioning your availability,” he says. “Actors, in fact, have quite a lot of down time, and however all-consuming the work period is, the down time is real down time at home, probably more so than with people who have a regular job. So one thing balances off the other.”

Firth is optimistic that there will be a very real audience out there for this movie, which stands out from the usual diet of formulaic thrillers, romances, comedies and period adaptations. “I really do think its success hinges on its unflinching honesty,” he says. “Blake wrote the book fairly soon after his father’s death, and he was probably in an unguarded period.
“He might have been more cautious if he’d written it a bit later on, but what we have is something very real when it comes to warts-and-all portrayals. If it was just the usual love-fest, I don’t think many people would care.”

And When Did You Last See Your Father? opens today.

Interview: "Proof good guys can finish first" by Evan Fanning (The Irish Independent)

'HAVE you seen Rock 'n' Roll, the Tom Stoppard play?" Colin Firth asks me. Colin Firth is a vinyl junkie, which is why we're talking about a Tom Stoppard play and not about his acting career, or his relationship with his father, or even his new movie, And When Did You Last See Your Father?

His collection, he says, is big. "It hasn't been expanded in many years, but it's big for where I stopped buying. It takes up a few shelves... and I've still got the turntable," he says, rather enthusiastically.
Despite being a lover of vintage vinyl, Firth has embraced modernity and now downloads most of his music -- mainly, he says, due to "laziness". However, the perfunctory nature of buying online has made the 47-year-old somewhat nostalgic for a different time.

"In some ways the download thing has driven me back to the hard-copy satisfaction," he says. "CDs never gave me that anyway. Every vinyl lover bangs on about the cover and the artwork and the gatefold and the inner sleeve, and I was a sucker for all of that. And CDs were crap....more

Interview: "Colin Firth: portrait of a young writer" by Sheila Johnston (The Daily Telegraph)

"If a film succeeds in weaving a spell over you, you won't really question it." When he was shooting Girl With a Pearl Earring, everyone was sceptical about the choice of Scarlett Johansson. "By the time it came out, there was endless talk about how uncannily like the girl in the painting she was.....more

Interview: "Colin Firth's Darcy dilemna" by Tim Teeman (The Times UK)

Something went awry in Firth’s teenage years. “I loathed authority but was frightened of it. My rebellions were sneaky, passive. I didn’t smash windows or get into fights – if I did I was strictly on the receiving end. Like Blake, I took refuge in books with the hope of getting laid by name-checking Dostoevsky. It wasn’t Hardy or Austen for me, but Camus. I grew my hair long, pierced my ears and then got slightly stranded by the punk thing.”

Firth Sr could cope with the long hair but not Firth’s “bad choice” of friends. There was a charismatic hard nut at school who led Firth astray. Or “the misdemeanours that go along with wanting to be rock-and-roll and hippy, the music festivals, staying out late.” Drinking? “I was a bit naughty in that respect,” he says. Drugs? Firth looks stricken. “I’m not at liberty to go into detail about such misdemeanours. Yeah, it was all the usual stuff. If Labour Cabinet ministers can confess to some of those things, I probably can as well.” How did your father find out about the drugs? Did you smoke cannabis at home? “Nahhhuhhhh,” Firth mutters. “It was a whole series of things and was as much as to do with what he suspected. It wasn’t one incident.” The worst rows with his father “were about washing dishes and homework. There wasn’t a massive meltdown,” he insists.

But his teenage rebellion was concerted. “I would have gone to university had I not allowed myself to be derailed into moody adolescent laziness. I liked to characterise it then as a defiant decision to resist the system. But I was just resistant to schoolwork. If someone wanted me to read Shakespeare, I wanted to read Thomas Mann. If someone tried to make me listen to Brahms, I had to listen to Hendrix.” On the morning of A-level retakes, “I thought, ‘F*** it’ and went back to bed, it felt like a treadmill I didn’t want to be on.” Firth pitched up, “like Dick Whittington”, in London wanting to act and he got a job at a theatre switchboard. He read Kafka in his cubbyhole, and “stared into the abyss”, until he met a casting director who smoothed his way into drama school and then to a part in Julian Mitchell’s Another Country....more

Interview: "Colin Firth: Eben verrückt ... (just mad)" by Leif Kramp (Teleschau Gemany)

Original interview with thanks to Angelika.
Translation with thanks to Colinfever and Carola.

In our interview Colin Firth speaks , with a twinkle in his eye, about his relationship with children, the curse of Mr. Darcy and he lets on why he would sometimes rather occupy the director’s chair.

T: In you new movie you fight for the well-being of the 12-year old Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus . Do you get along with children in real life as well?
CF: I’m dealing with them, nothing more. I do like working with children. But I usually like it best if they are someone else’s children. (laughs) It can even be fun to be with them, because I can make myself scarce any time they start getting on my nerves. And I can return as soon as the storm calms down.

T: You are a father yourself. Where do you get parenting tips?
CF: In spite of the scores of books on parenting , that can be found on mile high shelves in bookstores ,we haven’t improved as parents. Even an armada of guide books doesn’t help. Everyone has to find their own way- there is no easy solution, even if the books suggest otherwise.

T: Why is it that you appear to be playing a brusque character most of the time?
CF: I am not interested in characters who are sociable. Indeed I find them most unpleasant. People who don’t have any problems and don’t search for them and have everything just fall into their laps, aren’t interesting in real life or in a movie. Even action heroes, whom we love best, follow the Harrison Ford principal: You never know how he’ll master any given challenge.

T: Your greatest success was as a romantic hero- your favorite role?
CF: To be honest I have always been fascinated by Indiana Jones. The concept is pretty easy; ordinary man against destiny. Nobody knows if he will make it. He has obstacles to overcome he has to be honest with himself in order to make it. Inadequacy. Failure, it doesn’t matter which. That is what I’m interested in.

T: Do you feel haunted by Mr. Darcy?
CF; Not really. Darcy is someone who is mostly mentioned when I am sitting among journalists. I do know that I will be connected to this character for my whole life. But he’s no ghost always hovering around me. Sometimes I even forget about him, especially when I am at work. Then suddenly he is here again, when I am sitting in front of a microphone and I know that I have to talk about him once again.

T: Sounds like torture. 
CF: To be labeled or categorized means to an actor to have a recognizable name, an identity which makes you well-known to the masses. That can be useful.

T: Do you think you could have achieved a similar popularity with another role?
CF: Who could have foreseen this? An archetype comes into being when people are ready for that character it has to be the right time. They recognize in it their hidden wishes and fears. A hundred years ago it was Dracula, a lascivious figure, that stole people’s souls and sucked their blood. Frankenstein became an icon because the, then still young, industrial society had waited for a character like that, who showed people that he could surpass himself. That he could bring creatures to life, but wasn’t able to control them.
On a much less unspectacular level I also hit the right nerve at the right time with Mr. Darcy. But to this day I can’t really explain why. He was pretty unfriendly, distant , and ignorant.

T: Are you more attracted to amiable or ambivalent characters?
CF: I think all actors have an inclination to the dark side. And I try to help my characters get a certain kind of ambivalence even if they are amiable. I am always searching for particular features that make the role more versatile.

T: Where lies the appeal of obscure characters?
CF: As actors we shouldn‘t judge our characters, but justify them and their actions, even if it might appear strange to the audience. After all we hope to get them on our side in the end. You can’t immerse yourself into an identity and leave out what you don’t like. It’s all or nothing. Mr. Darcy is an appalling patron in the beginning and I really tried hard to increase the distrust of the audience. In the end it’s a much better experience if the audience likes one or more traits of the character and doesn’t begrudge Darcy his success in capturing the girl’s heart.

That’s an enormously long journey taken in an incredibly short time for an actor, but the sympathies of the audience is much more sincere because they thought differently of the character before.

T: Is this the reason why you often portray a character who is actually deeply kindhearted underneath it all?
CF: Even roles of criminals have potential. The most favorite villains of movie history are the ones that can get the audience on their side. Take Hannibal Lecter for example, a nearly ideal model of a criminal icon in movie history: reason for its popularity is Anthony Hopkins’ charisma. It’s simply incredible that a worldwide audience will favor a cannibal! But ever since then we can’t get enough of his movies, no matter what topic, as long as Anthony Hopkins is in it.

T: Anthony Hopkins is a famous representative of the English Method Acting.. How different are Hollywood and British cinema?
CF: I’ve worked with innumerable American actors and by now it is quite unusual to me to be in a British movie that doesn’t have an American actress in its cast. The difference between Hollywood and British productions isn’t that big. It’s mostly the audience that assumes an entirely different philosophy.

T: why is that?
CF: It might be cultural differences, which don’t have anything to do with quality. While Americans prefer to film a drama that takes place in a trailer park, the British might decide to make a movie portraying a conservative Prime-minister. I’d love to see Eminem in the role of the British conservative.
He might even pull it off. The cliché of the pompous British actor is no longer valid.: Daniel Day-Lewis, Tim Roth, Gary Oldman are all very versatile and have been featured in more US productions than European ones. My schooling in London was based on Stanislawski and Strasberg, which was also Method Acting , yet I have developed an American way of approaching acting. It all got mixed up quite fast.

T: How do you prepare for a role? 
CF: Nowadays I no longer prepare myself as intensively as I did in the past. I used to research for weeks and tried to adapt myself to my character’s situation in advance. When I was in my twenties all young actors trained for boxing rolls, because we were all fascinated by Robert De Niro’s “Raging Bull”. We no longer had the desire to be the typical British actor. It was a real cult that developed around the Method Acting. A whole generation of drama students was hypnotized by it.

T: Why do you think differently today?
CF: There is a danger that the method will eclipse the performance itself. It can have positive results when an actor doesn’t put his role aside after the filming is done, just so he won’t distance himself from the character, but often that gets more attention than the movie itself. When Renée Zelllweger makes changes to her body in a way that would be out of the question for most actresses ;then you can talk about an amazing achievement. And all of us are impressed by the magic of the change. However everyone involved in the movie was bombarded with questions about her diet. The move itself became unimportant. In my opinion the process shouldn’t become the actual product for the public to become interested in.

T: Are you happy in you occupation?
I experience true happiness, if you can call it that, when we rehearse, best on stage. In the moments when I perform for an audience or when I film the finale scene I simply fulfill my contract. I am nothing but a hard worker.

T: Isn’t it time then to think about alternatives?
For many years I have been traveling from one movie set to another and have worked with very many capable directors. And sometimes they really haven’t got a clue . On such occasion I have often thought to make suggestions, in a way that would sort out the misery within 5 minutes. But I didn’t. Maybe it is just an illusion that I could direct a movie. I’ve even dabbled in scriptwriting. But the greatest difficulty is that success dilutes the will to change. It is much easier to accept the next offer of a role when things go well. And the times are very good at the moment. Until I feel a deep dissatisfaction, my alternative plans are put aside.

T: What does acting mean to you?
CF: One thing I can say for certain is that acting doesn’t help at all when you are having emotional problems, it even makes it worse.

T: What do you mean?
CF: Someone who behaves in real life like an actor, a bank assistant for instance, would quickly end up in a mental institution or prison. A lot of successful actors use bad expressions and have no sense for what kind of behavior is acceptable . You can’t really blame them, since we are permanently encouraged to cultivate such feelings in our line of work. Besides nobody cares if the actors becomes a better person or not when the filming is done. If one works in a mine you might inhale toxic fumes and as a flight attendant you might become dehydrated. Actors just have to struggle with bad social manners.

T: You hear over and over again that actors expect therapeutically consequences from their occupation.
CF: A movie isn’t supposed to heal you, it is supposed to work in itself. I remember a famous colleague at the theater, who was completely mad. I won’t mention his name of course. He was on tour in Europe with a play that used a lot of body paint. Someone discovered that he had bruises under his body make-up, which he never washed off. A doctor talking to him for hours wasn’t concerned about the bruises but his mental health and diagnosed him as mentally ill. This colleague had to work mighty hard so he wouldn’t be admitted to an institution. They thought he had already found his institution on stage. If he weren’t so talented he’ d been already in a mental institution. What we actors do is simply mad.

T: What can be done about that? 
CF: We have to pay attention not to lose our sense of reality.

Interview: "On the move: Colin Firth" by Garth Pearce (The Sunday Times)

So what does he drive? A classic Jaguar perhaps, or maybe something discreet from Bentley? No, until a couple of years ago at least, Firth, 46, was to be found behind the wheel of a dependable Morris Minor. He was still happily driving his very first car, bought in his twenties for £2,000. It might not have won over Bridget Jones, but it was good enough for him. “I am not a Bentley sort of chap,” he confides".

He says the new Prius will be ideal for his young family. He and Livia were married in 1997 and now divide their lives between Italy and London with their two boys – Luca, 6, and Mateo, 3....more

Interview: "Colin comes home" (Total TV Guide)

When fictional drama Cathy Come Home was first shown on British TV in 1966, it was such a realistic look at the issue of homelessness that many viewers mistook it for a documentary. Forty years on, a new one-off drama about social exclusion, Born Equal, hits our screens.
And while it’s unlikely to have the same shock value as Ken Loach’s original film—viewers are used to seeing gritty social dramas— it promises to be just as bleak and thought-provoking.
Boasting an all-star cast, Born Equal interweaves the stories of several characters whose paths collide in and around a London B&B that houses the homeless and dispossessed. The story was given an even rougher edge by writer and director Dominic Savage’s style of letting his cast improvise much of the story themselves at the start.
“I’d never done anything like this before, where there’s absolutely no dialogue to begin with,” says Colin Firth, 46, who plays Mark, a wealthy but disillusioned City worker. “You just jump in cold, which is a bizarre feeling. You’re flying by the seat of your pants all the time.”
Despite money, status and beautiful, pregnant wife Laura (Emilia Fox), Mark is dissatisfied with his life and finds himself moved to do something more, with devastating consequences.

“Mark works in a world of big business, a world of self-interest, and it bothers him, and for one reason or another he ends up working with homeless people,” says Colin, who made his name as the moody Mr Darcy in the 1995 TV version of Pride And Prejudice and whose recent work has been on the big screen in films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually and Girl With A Pearl Earring.
“Perhaps some of what he goes through is a product of a mid-life crisis, problems with his marriage or his wanting to run away from feeling trapped.”
But things spiral out of control when he becomes involved with a teenage runaway, Zoë (Nichola Burley), who begins to rely on him.
“Mark is a sympathetic character at times, but there are other times when his behaviour makes it impossible to feel that about him. In trying to assuage his guilt, he ends of hurting a lot of people,” explains Colin, who lives in London with his Italian TV producer wife Livia and their two sons Luca, five and Mateo, three.
The actor feels that his character is not so far removed from those he helps.

“It’s not just about middle-class versus sleeping rough. Mark is as alienated from his life in his own bedroom as he is from life in some underpass. He and Zoë have something in common in that they’re both fugitives. In Zoë’s case it’s more understandable but with Mark it’s much less defined.

With thanks to an English Fan

Interview: "Nowhere Like Home" (Radio Times UK)

On seeing Colin Firth in Dominic Savage's powerful tale of homelessness, Born Equal, you could be forgiven for thinking the part he takes is hardly a stretch. After all, as Mark, a City hedge fund manager, stricken by guilt at his own wealth and with a desire to help London's most needy, Firth, 46, appears to be playing the kind of comfortable, urban, middle-class role that over the years has been, if not his bread and butter, then certainly his focaccia and olive oil.

But, as the actor is at pains to point out, the role took him outside his comfort zone in more ways than one. It's been suggested that to play a City boy with a conscience could be the ultimate challenge for any actor, but Firth found it difficult initially because the world of finance is a mystery to him.

"I don't know people from that world at all," he says. "I don't understand it. I look at those screens and the figures and I feel like I'm drowning."

This unfamiliarity became more of a problem because of Dominic Savage's improvisational method of film-making. The director discussed with his cast the outline of the drama, which sees Mark befriend teenage runaway Zoe (Goldplated's Nichola Burley) sleeping rough in London, but left it up to them to come up with their own dialogue.

"I don't have anything in common with that character except that we might share an English accent," explains Firth. "And that makes finding his words difficult. My way into the character was to see him as a guy for whom something snaps and his excuses don't add up, whether it's fear of fatherhood [Mark's wife is pregnant] or just finding life empty. That's something almost everybody has experienced at some time."

With admirable candour, however, Firth - whose grandparents were Congregationalist missionaries - admits that the biggest difference between him and his character is that, unlike Mark, he doesn't have a guilty conscience.

"My own view is that Mark is a colossally naive person, and that's a challenge for me," he says “I’m naïve about a lot of things , but not in the areas that he is. I did my soul-searching many years ago. Now , when I see there’s something I feel I can do, I just do it and I know it's inadequate, but I just live with the shortcomings. I throw my hands up and say, 'Yeah, hypocrite! Contradictions? You've got me!' I live quite comfortably alongside my excuses now. I'm not the soul-searcher I once was."

Neither is that the only difference between the actor now and in his younger days. Asked if he considered sleeping rough for the purposes of researching his role, he laughs, "The short answer is I wouldn't dream of it now. But there was a time when I would have leapt at it. Even if the part didn't require it."

Born Equal offered Firth the further challenge of shooting on the streets of London. At one point this involved a fuIl scale row with Nichola Burley's character.
"There was no closed set," he explains. "It was just off Marylebone High Street. We just had to do it and b****r off before the neighbours got cross."

Yet, while the scenes were shot, nobody intervened - a fact that doesn't surprise Firth. "People don't want to get involved," he reasons. "{ think it's embarrassment, which is a British quality. I remember some years ago Ben Elton joking about an untended package on the Tube, saying that British people would probably sit there hoping it would go off rather than face the embarrassment of asking if it belonged to anyone."

Does this reflect one of the truths at the heart of Born Equal, that people prefer to look the other way, whatever the problem?

"Quite possibly," he replies. "I remember years ago in [Falklands War drama] Tumbledown the camera was hidden in the roof of a supermarket on the King's Road. 1 had half my brain hanging out and was one-handedly wheeling myself across the road. Everyone pretended I didn't exist."

Anne_Marie Duff

Anne_Marie Duff remembers Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) as the television drama that first made her aware that perhaps the world wasn’t that great a place”

It's tempting to think that her moving performance in Born Equal may have a similar impact on a younger generation. The 35-year-old plays Michelle, a pregnant single mum who has run away to London with her daughter to escape domestic abuse. Michelle' s just one of the desperate people whose lives collide at a bed-and- breakfast temporarily housing the homeless.

The former Shameless star admits that the drama has been an education, and one that has caused her to question some of her self-confessed "woolly liberal" views.

"I had this scene where I was talking to a real social worker," recalls Duff. "I was saying, 'I'm a single mum and I have another child on the way', and she said, 'You'll be looking at three years before you get somewhere to live.' Facts like that blow your mind. I hope people will be affected."

From her experience on location she believes, like Colin Firth, that the general public needs to be affected. Duff's opening scene in the drama was shot on the concourse at London's King's Cross station, with cameras in the distance & the actress in apparent distress

Nobody, but nobody, asked me if I was all right," she recalls. "I was a heavily pregnant woman, for all they knew, with a six-year-old girl, sobbing my eyes out, and nobody asked, 'Excuse me, darling, are you all right?' I was shocked. You like to think yourself that there's no way you'd walk past someone like that."

For Duff, whose next TV appearance will be in ITV 1 's more upbeat The History of Mr Pally, due for transmission over Christmas, Born Equal carries a simple but powerful message. "I suppose the message is that these people are out of sight and out of mind," she says. "It's asking us to question that."

Dominic Savage

It is a measure of Dominic Savage's life less ordinary that as a child he worked with both the idiosyncratic film director Stanley Kubrick and the hyperactive infant hoofer Bonnie Langford, and survived to tell the tale. The former was as a child actor in the 1975 film of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon; the latter, somewhat less grandly, as an organist on 1970s TV tot -talent programme Junior Show time . Both were way-stations on his long and winding road to being one of Britain's most respected filmmakers, one associated with hard-hitting, socially conscious films like this latest project, Born Equal.

In work such as Love + Hate and When I Was 12, Savage has marked out his territory--identifying with the underdog and aiming to give a voice to his social conscience, he believes comes from growing up in Kent, where his father entertained holidaymakers with organ recitals in the summer months,and scratched a precarious living the rest of the year

Inspired by his chidhood meeting with Kubrick, Savage quickly realized despite a brief stint at stage school his future lay behind the camera. After graduating from the National Film School he began making documentaries – until he was exposed by a tabloid newspaper for having staged scenes in a film called Rough Males, which supposedly folIowed the lives of a group of Manchester wideboys

"It hit the front page of the Daily Mirror chuckles Savage. "I had that page ‘Fake doc' - framed in my loo for a while”

Savage abandoned documentaries for dramas, albeit ones shot in his unorthodox fashion, with a strong sense of realism ,no rehearsals and improvised dialogue .

His track record made him an obvious choice when the BBC were looking for a new film to mark the 40th anniversary of Ken Loach's landmark drama Cathy Come Home. Although Born Equal has no direct connection with the original (early, mistaken press reports suggested it was to be a sequel) Savage was delighted to get the call To Colin Firth and Anne- Marie Duff in his cast of starry British talent, he added David Oyelowo as a Nigerian desperate to bring his father to Britain, and Robert Carlyle as an ex-con trying to find his mother.

"I was very interested in people who just don’t have anything in life," explains Savage .No-one to turn to and nowhere to go. Above all, what this film deals with is a lack of love, a lack of family, a lack of everything. It's not just about not having money, which is bad in itself"

Like Cathy Come Home, Born Equal at times makes uncomfortable viewing. While the showing of the former famously led to the creation of homeless charity Shelter, what does, think his film can achieve?

"As long as we think about those people's lives, about this ridiculous gap between the very rich and the very poor and our consciences are stirred, I'll be happy”, he says. "I think it's a warning that there by the grace of God go us. It woildn’t take much for it all to fall apart. There aren’t the safety nets out there that we think there are.

Interview: "We're too embarrassed to help needy, says Firth" by Alexia Baracaia (The Evening Standard)

"People don't want to get involved. I think it's embarrassment, which is a British quality. I remember Ben Elton joking about an unattended package on the Tube, saying people would probably sit there hoping it would go off rather than face the embarrassment of asking if it belonged to anyone."

He told Radio Times he had a similar experience while filming scenes in Kings Road for the 1989 Falklands war TV drama, Tumbledown.

He said: "I had half my brain hanging out and was one-handedly wheeling myself across the road. Everyone pretended I didn't exist.....more 

Interview: "Born Equal?" by Peter John Meiklem (Big Issue Scotland)

Archived completely due to unavailability on the internet

Forty years after Cathy Come Home, the BBC's shocking film about homelessness, the station is confronting the issue again. As our government gears up to end homelessness by 2012, we find out if television can still change the world

Colin Firth will soon appear in the television equivalent of a Trojan horse. The Hollywood actor, famous for smouldering in that wet shirt in Pride and Prejudice as well as getting the girl in Bridget Jones' Diary, says his next project will be a surprise akin to a hidden army of Santa's elves climbing out of the Christmas presents. A new production, to be broadcast by the BBC in the run-up Christmas, it will bring stars like Firth, Robert Carlyle and former Shameless actress Anne-Marie Duff into the warm, festive living rooms of television fans.

Many of them, no doubt, will be expecting a wee smoulder or a bumbling joke from Firth: a good laugh before the holidays begin. But they'll be disappointed.

acclaimed Dominic Savage (Love and Hate, Out of Control) the film has been commissioned to mark the 40th anniversary of ground-breaking docudrama Cathy Come Home, the film that shocked 1960s Britain into confronting the grim reality of homelessness and led to the formation of housing and homelessness charity Shelter.
Firth is looking forward to raising some eyebrows. "If the audience tuning in to see me are expecting a romantic comedy then that would be great," he says. "I think all the cast would be thrilled by that kind of surprise. Personally, I don't want to be condemned to romantic comedies for the rest of my career. I like participating in something that goes into different territory."

Firth plays a businessman in the throes of a mid-life crisis who, after an attack of guilt, decides to help the homeless. He says his celebrity could be useful tool in encouraging the audience to deal with the tricky social problems behind the drama.

"There's something about familiarity which makes people engage. It's not just a man in a suit with crisis. It's him. I know him. It's his crisis. If people go with it, and sympathise with it, that might take them a bit further than they might otherwise might have."

When it comes to people living on the streets, part of the problem is that it's generalised in people's minds. The suspicion and fear and hatred can only be preserved if they don't know any individuals in that position." People stop hating a social group when they make contact."

Public outcry
Usually, nobody expects a television drama, especially one broadcast at Christmas time, to do more than keep the family's bums on the sofa for a few hours. But not every drama was commissioned to commemorate the anniversary of Cathy Come Home. That docu-drama, the first of its kind directed by a young Ken Loach, was broadcast in 1968 to a quarter of Britain's people. It appalled millions, leading to a political outcry that succeeded in provoking real social change.

Born Equal, too, aims to be an out-of-the-ordinary piece of work; no scripts were given to the all-star cast and the actors were expected to improvise the dialogue interacting with both actors and, like Cathy Come Home, real people who were homeless for many different reasons.

Director Dominic Savage says he wanted to produce a piece that was as true to life as it could be. Asked by the BBC to come up with a drama around homelessness he was quickly drawn to the lives of people living in homeless hostels and temporary accommodation. It's a story plucked from today's society - here in Scotland, as property prices continue to soar, 8,135 households, both individuals and families, are currently living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. But Savage says it will be difficult for his drama to emulate the success of Loach's Cathy Come Home.

"I don't think it can have that same impact. When Cathy Come Home was broadcast people weren't used to shocking material but now we're exposed to it all the time. It's a very difficult thing to shock people, to make them think differently or to change people. All you can do is make something that engages people, makes them think about others a bit more, makes them think about the injustice and inequalities in society and hope that people care a bit more about those who are less fortunate than them."

The issues facing homeless people have, in some senses, changed since the 1960s and Savage was keen to tell a new story. He says that hostels, and the events in people's lives that have led them to be there, were both the most "dramatically interesting" and the best way to expose the social inequalities in modern Britain.

"It's the idea of the journey to that hostel and why those people fall from grace. Something can go wrong in someone's life, suddenly they find themselves without a home, and that's interesting," he explains.

Falling from grace
Born Equal's plot - weaving in asylum seekers, battered mothers and recently released prisoners, all sectors of the population routinely in danger of becoming homeless - shows there are as many ways to "fall from grace" as there are people in the world. Homelessness has never been simply about bricks and mortar, as the old soundbite goes. Savage hopes his work will encourage his audience to think a little bit harder about their own lives.
"Anyone with any sense realises that all our lives are fragile and it doesn't take much for us to upset that balance and for us to be left in a desperate situation," Savage says. "That's what stirred me to make it.

"We live in our own bubbles. We just think everything's alright and we get locked into our own world. Lets break out of those bubbles and see what happens when people do. But, of course, there are no easy answers." Encouraging an audience to break out of their bubble is no mean feat, and Savage says he is glad to have his "extremely gifted" big name cast. He's hoping the draw of celebrity will bring an unexpected audience to his film where, the "Trojan horse" will both shock, surprise and fascinate.
"When you make something as dark as this then it's a difficult, emotional and harrowing journey. If you want to get an audience for this sort of thing you want to make it as attractive as possible to people. Those actors are very fine and talented and that was the reason for choosing them. But they are also the actors that people want to see.

"They allow people to come into a film such as this where they might have avoided it otherwise. It might be relegated to a late night slot if it was full of newcomers. You don't want that, you want to be in there and get as big as possible an audience watching it. You forget they're stars after a bit and you get on board with them as characters.

"It's an ambitious piece. I wanted to make a film that dealt with the huge divide between the people that have and the people that don't. It's by showing that contrast, that huge gulf, you can show people it's not right."

But can a bunch of celebrities in a TV drama really make people care? After all, homelessness isn't just a convenient background to filmmaker's story, it's a real and damaging social ill. According to Shelter, who this week marked the anniversary of Cathy Come Home with a reminder about the problems of homelessness today, Scotland is in the middle of a housing crisis. In 2005/06, 39,923 households were homeless.

Shelter claim nearly 30,000 children are homeless, most of them living in unsuitable temporary accommodation. At a screening of the 60s film this week, Shelter Scotland head Archie Stoddart called for more housing to be built to meet demand - and for continuing commitment from government and councils to reach the 2012 deadline set to end homelessness.

"You can hope that this drama will help but I don't think it will," says Anne Marie Duff. "I don't think people give a shit anymore. I'm a storyteller. You like to feel you've got some power some of the time, maybe, to change things or make people more aware. I just think a lot of people think the world is a ghastly place but don't act upon things."

Duff says audiences, like the society they live in, have changed since Cathy Come Home was broadcast 40 years ago.

"I think people have got less of a sense of community than they did in the 60s," she says. "I think we've been encouraged to be insular and not involve ourselves in other people's problems. There is a strange terror that if we do then they'll permeate and become part of your life."

Duff plays a heavily pregnant young woman who, with her child in tow, has run away from an abusive partner. Many of her scenes were shot in public places where passers by didn't know she was an actress in costume. It was an experience she found harrowing. "I stood in two railway stations: one in Basildon and one in Kings Cross. I was standing there with a child who was six years old, I had a big bloody lip, I had an eight-month pregnant belly on me, crying my eyes out.

"Nobody stopped. You think in your head there's no way you'd see a pregnant women with a kid and not say 'excuse me, love, are you alright' but they do," she says. "People walk past all the time.

A call for motivation
She says that reaction from the public made her feel ashamed. "They looked at me with disgust. We [actors] are usually woolly liberals. We like to think that we don't judge people, anyway, but I'm sure it's given me an insight. There's no way it couldn't. People do look at you like you're some sort of stain and you've spoiled their day. I found that really shocking."

Although unsure of the reaction Born Equal will provoke and - like the rest of the cast and the director - unhappy with it being measured against Cathy Come Home, Duff isn't completely despondent. She says there is no point in giving in.
"You just hope that a project like this will motivate somebody, somewhere, who has any kind of power to address the housing situation. It's a problem people need to know more about because if they can't see it then it doesn't affect them. The audience, because of the actors that are involved, will think 'oooh, I'll watch that because so-and-so's involved'.
"I'm hoping we'll get an audience you wouldn't expect."

Born Equal will be screened on BBC1 on December 17 at 9pm

Interview: "Colin Firth plays Mark in Born Equal" (BBC)

For Firth, Mark's story really began to fall into place as the cameras rolled.

"For me, it was never simply a case of him being well-intentioned but naïve. I didn't want to see him behaving out of moral purity or idealism, I wanted it to be muddier than that," he says.

"Perhaps some of what he goes through is a product of a mid-life crisis, problems with his marriage or his wanting to run away from something he feels trapped by – perhaps any of those things might create disillusion or fear in a middle-aged man.

"But I think it's far more interesting to try to tell a story about a guy who has a multitude of motivations and conflicts and whose failings are very apparent.....more

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

Interview: "A scandal myself " (Vanity Fair Italy)

Archived completely due to unavailability on the internet

This Italian interview is translated to English by Margo.

He has the face and the fame of a nice guy. And in cinema this face and this fame have been following him (Remember the clumsy lover boy of Bridget Jones?) But now, prepare to see him in a bisex orgy with Kevin Bacon. Are you embarrassed? “I’ve done worst… "

Hardly ever happens to find a stranger who – about Italy- has something else to say besides “How much I love spaghetti”. On the contrary, Colin Firth is acquainted with (and fully appreciates) Giuseppe Piccioni’s movies and manages to read the daily press, sensing not only certain political irregularities of our country, but  the great difference between the “oral” Italian language and that of the “press language”, as well. He has try to read the “Oceano mare” (sea ocean) by Alessandro Baricco. What caused him to do it? Love! Just like it happened in his character  at the film “Love actually”- the guy that learned Portuguese because he fell in love with a girl from that country.
In real life, Colin  fell in love with a brunette and very pretty  Italian lady, the producer Livia Giuggioli, to whom has been married since eight years and have two sons, Luca 4 and Matteo 2 ( he has also a third son, Will 15, from an affair with the actress Meg Tilly).  People around him say that he speaks Italian much better than he is willing to admit, but we’re getting the interview in English, with only some small verbal incursions like “rincoglionito” (stupid) because, as Colin says, there is no such  an equivalent in his own language.
 
We are in Rome, at the bar of “Hotel de Russie”, Colin arrives punctually, dressed in jeans and blue jacket. In flesh and blood he’s more sexy and tall than in cinema. He has a fine sense of  irony, which emerges, in surprise, during the most serious discussions. He makes me think of those unknown schoolmates who, years afterwards, reveal to be genious.
He’s starring in two movies, released right now  at the theaters, very much unlike: The fairytale for children Nanny Mc Phee (already released) and the morbid, exciting nightmare for adults “Where The Truth Lies” of Atom Egoyan, to be released in theaters this weekend. For those who used  to affection  Bridget Jones’s Mark Darcy, sane sample of  clumsy charm, “Where The Truth Lies” could be a shock. At least at the scene of  bisex orgy, where Colin attacks Kevin Bacon.

In this movie, the two actors are performing two entertainers of the ‘50s , rich, famous and debonair. The leading heros personalities got inspired by those of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, while the movie is about a world where T.V. was at the very beginning, the celebrities were “divas” and Las Vegas was Las Vegas.
 
How difficult is making a sex scene, mostly gay, while you are not a gay?
I was not feeling very easy. But you never are during sex scenes. It’s a terrible moment, when you have to take off your clothes in front of all that people, even at 7 in the morning, right after you had had breakfast. But it’s worst in real life. The most important is the relation with the person you have to make the scene with. In that case, the fact that between me and Kevin there was neither tension, nor attraction, make things get easier. People use to imagine things  about what’s behind sex scenes in cinema, but, as for myself I find much more difficult performing scenes of violence. Above all, if you’re the one who beats- it’s really embarrassing. It is better when you’re on the receiving end. You have plastic capsules in your mouth, which are making fake blood come out and you feel like a hero. In the set of the “Hostages”- a T.V.  production , once, I got them really hard. At the end of the scene my “torturers, who were not professional actors, were very much in worry. Kept asking over and over: “Are you sure, you’re O.K.?”
 
In the homonyms book of “Where the Truth Lies” (by Rupert Holmes) there is a certain phrase: “You never bite the hand that  applauses you” . It defines the ambiguous of fame: You desire it, but there are consequences following. What’s your own relation with celebrity? 
It is quite tranquil, cause my career went ahead step by step, with moments of happiness and others of disillusion. In general, I believe there is hardly an actor in the whole world, who can not walk out there in Via del Corso without being disturbed.
Depend on the way you treat it. Of course, if someone walks around accompanied with body guards, wearing a pair of  sunglasses, ready to be photographed…….
 
Don’t your ever been recognized?
Yes, indeed. In the supermarket, actually. Well, there is always someone who’s spying on you, and grabs the mobile phone to tell friends what’s in my handcart. I swear it has happened!
 
And what was in there? 
I don’t remember. Probably toilet tissue! Great scoop, indeed!
 
The movie (WTTL) is also about Telethon and actors making beneficences. In  real life, you’re involved in various initiatives about Africa, about fair and stable trade, about civil rights. There are so many of you, the actors, doing that. Why?
It’s true, from an external point of view, it looks like a fashion. And it is also true that there is an element of hypocrisy in the fact that privileged people like we are, getting on the tribune to say what one should or should not do. I got involved because I had enough of reading the newspapers and do nothing but shaking my head. Then, if you really believe in this, there is no way back.  Humanitarian associations that are acquainted to you are calling or help and you certainly can’t say “I’m sorry, this week I don’t feel like helping with global famine, I have some other things to do.”
 
Bob Gedolf has actually stop performing as a musician in order to dedicate himself in humanitarian affairs. Could you do something like that?
No, I’m too egoist. Though, I believe that this kind of activity brings more critics than advantages. Plenty of them: The most cynics are thinking that you do it out of vanity and exhibitionism. Certainly it’s a paradox to have a nice house, living a good life as I do, and then go to find the cultivators of coffee in Ethiopia. But you can’t use the celebrity only for having the best place at a restaurant or travel first class.
 
What happens, in particular, when a person like you goes to Africa?
It happens that the people of the country are happy to see me and to know that I’m interested about them. Even if they know pretty well that none of my initiatives can radically change their situation, or even more free the world out of its tragedies. The solidarity though, it’s not something you can measure up in style: “Today I saved one refugee”, “On the contrary, me,I have saved two.” Otherwise, it doesn’t really serves.
 
Excuse me for saying that, but you seem to me too articulate to be an actor.
Thank you for the praise! Though you would be amazed to find out just how many intelligent actors are there.
 
And how come people think it’s the other way ‘round?
Cause, if we attend a pianist playing Rachmaninov, we stay charmed by his ability. We think: “I could not do that myself.” On the other hand, acting looks like something anyone can do. But it’s not like that.
 
Could you explain it to me?

It doesn’t matter. There is nothing more boring than an actor talking about his job.