|
"I don't get up in the morning and
think, `I wonder who's going to offer me the romantic lead this
week.' I've played a lot of criminals too."
Neither does he seem to worry about hitting
his forties (he was 41 last April): "It's just a different
phase of my life," he says.
"In your 20s, you're striving to be
what you want to be. In your 30s you are quite comfortable, but
in your 40s you see things a bit more clearly. As for work, I
would hope I'll still be in demand. When you look at Anthony
Hopkins and Sean Connery, age doesn't seem to be a problem for
them."
Then again, acting was never really Sean
Bean's first choice. As a teenager, he harboured fantasies about
playing football, ideally for his beloved Sheffield United. He
fell into acting relatively late, at around the age of 22, and
he had never even tried to go to drama at school.
"I think we had a mime teacher come
one day, but we didn't have drama classes," he says in that
inimitable, unspoilt Yorkshire brogue - another ingredient of
his non-formulaic sex appeal, one suspects.
"People used to do end-of-term shows
and stuff like that, but I was never really involved. I didn't
think it was very cool."
Today, British actors don't get much cooler
than Sean Bean. He is undeniably a big star, having the luxury
of picking and choosing between quality television drama (Sharpe,
Lady Chatterley's Lover, Extremely Dangerous), big-screen blockbusters
(GoldenEye, Patriot Games, Ronin) and gritty, more modestly-budgeted
British cinema (Essex Boys, his latest movie in which he played
his nastiest villain).
And yet Bean remains resolutely, the most
down-to-earth, unspoilt bloke's bloke who feels perfectly at
home driving back to Sheffield to see his old mates. When he
left school he spent three years drifting from job to job until
he ended up working with his father in a welding and fabrication
shop.
"I was always good at painting and
drawing, and that was really what I wanted to do," he says.
"I finally left my Dad's place and
said `I want to be an artist' - which is even worse than saying
you want to be an actor! I went to three art colleges and I couldn't
stick it. I left one of them at dinnertime! I couldn't get on
with them because none of them had my idea about what art should
be. I stuck at one which had a drama course on the side and,
in effect, I switched courses from art to drama ... I felt at
home there." He applied to RADA, got a place, moved south
and never looked back. Today he lives in North London with his
third wife, Abigail Cruttenden, whom he met while filming Sharpe.
(His first two wives were teenage sweetheart Debra, with whom
he is still friendly, and actress Melanie Hill, from whom he
remains estranged; both, however, are no-go areas for the press).
Abigail and he have a two-year-old daughter,
Evie, and he misses them dreadfully whenever he is filming abroad
- which he has been recently, for Lord of the Rings, in New Zealand.
"I've always been away for certain
parts of the year - three months here, four months there - but
I've got used to it and I tend to focus on what I'm doing, get
down to it and come home," he says.
"Sometimes, if it's over three months,
it becomes a long haul and I start to feel it and I really want
to come back and get a break. We juggle our acting jobs to fit
around looking after Evie, although Abigail has not been acting
a lot recently - her last job was Anna Karenina for Channel 4.
Usually, it tends to work out that I'm working or she's working.
I'd not worked a huge amount last year and there were big gaps
in between projects, which was quite nice, really."
Lord of the Rings is one of his biggest
movies in a long time - the long-awaited adaptation of Tolkein's
cult fantasy - in which he plays Boromir, "a Gondorian from
the land of Gondor," as he helpfully puts it.
"It's a massive, hugely ambitious
project. It's taken about two years to film it and they won't
finish it until Christmas. It's basically three films back to
back, from all three books and they won't be out until Christmas
2001. There are some great people in them - Ian McKellen, Cate
Blanchett, Ian Holm, Liv Tyler and Christopher Lee."
Perhaps he is slowing down on the workfront
whenever he can. His year off from acting was a happy combination
of choice and the lack of right offers.
"I'd finished the final series of
Sharpe and wanted to change tack," he concedes.
"I was getting similar offers for
similar parts coming up and they weren't really suitable at the
time, so I chose not to do anything really. It was good timing,
because of Evie being born. But that all changed with Essex Boys
and Lord of the Rings. I know I'm lucky to have such a variety
of roles."
Not too many well-respected British actors
might have agreed to take on the part of Jason Locke, the brutal,
hard-as-nails, wife-beating drug dealer of Essex Boys. But more
and more, Bean seems less worried about his screen image and
far more interested in taking risks.
"With Essex Boys it was the script
- I couldn't refuse to do something so strong," he says.
"I'd worked with the producers and
writers before, on Fools Gold, and I liked their method of working.
Jason Locke, I found a fascinating character. He's seething with
jealousy, having been in prison for five years, and he sees all
his old mates with their flash country houses and BMWs. He's
bitter and vengeful and he wants to claim back what he assumes
is his rightful place in the criminal fraternity."
Locke produces some horrifying violence.
How did Bean find the anger to play him?
"I hadn't worked for a year - that
made me quite angry!" he laughs.
"I suppose everybody gets angry at
some point in their lives. You never forget what it's like, so
it's a matter of conveying that. I don't ask myself questions
about where my performance comes from - I just do it."
If Jason Locke is jealous of the success
of his peers, surely there most be one or two of Bean's old pals
in Sheffield who go just a bit green with envy at his fame and
fortune.
"Who knows?" he says. "Maybe.
I haven't come across them myself but there may be some who know
me that feel that way. It'll never stop me going back to Sheffield
- I go back a lot. There's always a certain element of jealousy
in any profession."
As for the future, he says he would like
to go on acting as long as possible.
"Maybe I'd like to do something a
bit more light-hearted and humorous," he says.
Don't mention Mr Bean! But, as a Sheffield
man, maybe The Full Monty could have been the perfect comic vehicle
for him - and wouldn't millions of female fans have liked to
see him in kit-off mode?
"It would have been nice to have been
involved but I was working, and I think they were pretty clear
on the casting - and it didn't involve me.
"I'm really keen to do Macbeth. I
keep seeing everybody else doing it. I read it when I was a kid
and I've kept looking at it since. It's the dark qualities and
the warlike nature, the jealousy and the intrigue."
Clearly not the sort to just sit on his
laurels, Mr Bean. |
