We might be entering into another peak phase of Jamie Bell‘s career. After an unfortunate association with the “Fantastic Four” reboot and a four-season run on AMC’s “Turn,” the 31-year-old actor returns with one of his best performances yet in Paul McGuigan’s “Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool.” And, frankly, while the movie has its issues, more people should be paying attention to Bell’s impressive work in it.
Annette Bening shines in ‘Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool’ [Review]
Based on a true story, “Film Stars” chronicles the romance between long-forgotten Oscar winner Gloria Grahame (Annette Bening) and a young, struggling actor, Peter Turner (Bell) in the ’70s – who met when the Hollywood studio star moved to London as her career shifted to stage work. Turner eventually chronicled their years together in a novel that inspired the film. He also, uniquely enough, was on set for most of the production (although he wasn’t afforded a producer credit).
Jamie Bell on being ‘bitterly disappointed’ with Josh Trank’s ‘Fantastic Four’
Earlier this month Bell took some time to talk about the movie, working with Bening and what’s next on his busy slate.
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The Playlist: Let’s talk about this movie. How did it first come your way? How did you even get to hear about it?
Jamie Bell: I read it, so I get sent the script, in kind of a usual fashion. I didn’t read the top note that comes with it.
Oh, really?
I knew, like, Annette Bening was in it. So, that was pretty much it. I genuinely, honestly, really did think, “This is a really bizarre subject to focus it on. Couldn’t possibly be true.” Met with [producer] Barbara Broccoli, she told me that she knew Gloria and Peter. They went to Magic Mountain together, of all things. And she handed me the book and I was kind of blown away. It was like, “Oh, my God.” I realized just how much of the script was just lifted and all these things. I mean, there’s just so much more that we shot that isn’t in the movie, that is kind of just extraordinary. It’s just bizarre and there’s things in the book that we didn’t put in the script, because it was just too …
You’d have a three-hour movie.
Exactly. I think it really meant a lot to me that, actually, what I thought was kind of absurd suddenly changed, and became so heartfelt and so beautifully unexpected, I suppose.
I can’t remember. How old is he when he meets her?
He’s like, 27, 28, something like that.
And she’s in her fifties or something?
Yeah.
Did you watch the videos of her that are online?
Yeah. I immediately kind of started looking up where her grandfather was at. “Oh, shit. She was a real actress” and she worked with amazing people and won an Oscar and all this stuff. And then, dug a little deeper. Then all those marriages and these children. And these sort of troubled lives, all that stuff. But I didn’t really want to watch too much of her work because I wanted to have a similar kind of reaction as Peter did. I didn’t really want to know everything about her. I wanted some mystery to her.
You have an intriguing situation because your character was actually very involved in the production.
True.
Did you talk to him about it? Or did you want to just interpret it on your own?
I mean, I asked him anything and everything. I prodded and poked him and pushed him in places that I’m sure were uncomfortable for him, and he told me stuff that he’s told me, never to repeat, and I’ve tried to get as much of what he told me directly into the spirit [of the character]. Certainly, I mean, Annette did a lot of work in the beginning, to just try and push scenes as far as they could go and really chart the trajectory of the relationship just because there’s so much passage of time that you don’t see and you want to progress the relationship in a very real way. So, all that was incredibly useful.
You can imagine a romance because of the written words in a script, you can think, “Oh, she was beautiful. He must have been enamored of her.” But then, you watch, and I’m not trying to discredit her, but you watch the video of this independent movie she made in the ‘70s that’s on YouTube. I think it was right before they met.
Sure.
She seems a little off. And she’s got a really strange voice.
Right.
So, did he ever explain why he became infatuated with her then? What sort of won him over?
Yeah, of course, I mean he was a guy who was from a working-class family. He wanted to do something a bit different than everyone else had done. He wanted to be an actor. He wanted to be a part of the creative arts. If you come from any kind of working-class background, like myself, this is just not the done thing. Like, you just don’t do that. Gloria dedicated her life to that. That’s all she’d ever done, was, commit her life to the arts. I think, more than anything [his attraction had] less to do with the way she looked, or the fact that she was once a star, or anything else, [but that] she saw him. She identified him. He felt understood by her. Their interests were similar. She could, she knew what he wanted. She could sense his ambition, she could sense that he had these aspirations, and they had that connection. One can’t really downplay the sense of how often misunderstood we are when we feel like someone really gets us. It changes everything. And I think, certainly at that time, [had some confusion over his sexuality]. There was something with her where none of that mattered, really. She was so accepting of so many things, just because of all the stuff that she’d been through. That he felt accepted and understood and identified.