KEY POINTS:
I don't," says Dominic Cooper, dipping a biscuit coquettishly into his cappuccino froth, "take roles where I keep my clothes on."
He is joking. Or is he? Even now I can't help but think of Keira Knightley lowering her embonpoint to his buff chest in his new
costume-drama romp, The Duchess. Not to mention that scene in Mamma Mia! in which he bobs towards his fiancee across the Aegean, astride a jet ski, half naked but without a hint of torso jiggle. Not since Daniel Craig emerged from the sea in those swimming trunks has British masculinity been so out and proud on celluloid as it has been in Cooper's recent work.
But Cooper does more than the nude torso. "In any photo shoot," he says, archly raising his left eyebrow, "I have to be covered in lube." He's responding gamely to my what-were-you-thinking-of question about his recent shoot for the gay lifestyle magazine Attitude, in which he appeared in an array of moist poses. "Actually, it wasn't lube, it was water," he says. "The photographer had an idea, which I thought was good aesthetically, that there would be a mist of water between him and me. But when I got to the shoot there was this bloke on a ladder with a bucket of water which he kept throwing over me. I only got mildly aggressive towards the end."
Cooper, 30, is lucky enough to unite two distinct demographics in drooling, a feat that would make his contemporaries at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (from which he graduated in 2000) envious. While Attitude describes him as "tall and lithe and tanned with big, brown eyes and a sexual charisma that envelops you like a kidnapper's sack over your head", British newspaper Daily Mail reckons Cooper is the "new Mr Darcy".
In the latter fantasy, Cooper is a similarly smouldering but younger Colin Firth, the man who made women swoon during the TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice more than a decade ago. Does he mind being a sex symbol? "For the three years I was in school training to be an actor, I was told, 'It's very unlikely you'll work at all on the stage or in film', so I feel I have to take all the opportunities I can. I'm terribly lucky. There's a constant fear that it could end at any moment. To stay lucky I have to work at it."
In a wet T-shirt? "If that's what it takes," he says, then checks himself. "You know, the problem with this whole career is that you get sucked into a whirlwind and other people make choices for you." His 12-year relationship with Joanna Carolan, PA to playwright Harold Pinter, has been one casualty of Cooper's whirlwind success. "We're no longer together and that is probably because I've spent too many hours concentrating on my career. It's very tough on a relationship."
The tabloids told a more lurid tale. "Hunk who plays Sense And Sensibility's Willoughby is a cad in real life too" ran one newspaper's headline above a story reporting the rumours that Cooper had been seen kissing his on-screen lover in Mamma Mia!, 22-year-old Amanda Seyfried, at the Cafe Rouge in Bath. How could he? the writer seethed.
Good point: Cafe Rouge is a rubbish place for a date. Carolan, Cooper told one interviewer this year, is a brilliant actor but made a decision to change career two years ago. "I think she just got fed up," he said. "There's only so much you can do of trying, finding yourself very close to getting a part and then not getting it." Did his success and her relative failure put strains on their relationship? "It wasn't that," says Cooper.
Instead, he offers a mea culpa. "There are probably only a certain number of people who can understand or tolerate how long a job will take and what demands it puts on you. And why should they? It breeds a strange kind of selfishness immersing yourself in a character for so long."
In his new film, The Duchess, Cooper plays Charles Grey, the future Whig prime minister, who comes to Chatsworth House in Derbyshire to get it on adulterously with Knightley's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. He says that he has learned a lot first-hand from Firth about how to make an honourable career from being perceived as costume-drama crumpet. "I've literally been around the world promoting Mamma Mia! and most of that time I was sitting next to Colin on flights to some press junket. So I know all about the Mr Darcy stereotype and how he avoided being pigeonholed while using that part to help his career. We want to pigeonhole things and people, but it is absurd to regard me just as a furry wig-and-britches actor."
But he did play Jane Austen's Willoughby in the TV adaptation of Sense and Sensibility this year, and now he plays Grey in The Duchess and soon he'll appear as Steerforth in a TV adaptation of Dickens' David Copperfield, which may well feature britches. "Yes, but I was also wearing a pink spandex leotard in Mamma Mia!"
To be fair, Cooper is not just crumpet. He is regarded as one of Britain's great young acting hopes, often ranked with James McAvoy (Atonement), Ben Whishaw (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada).
After graduation, Cooper was fortunate enough to get a role in the play Mother Clap's Molly House at the National Theatre. He worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal Court and had some minor TV and film roles before he returned to the National to make his mark with His Dark Materials and The History Boys.
In the latter, he was Dakin, the randy sixth former with impish eyebrows whose bedroom eyes promised his teachers afternoons of career-ruining bliss. It was some calling card. "I never thought it would be a huge success, but I really wanted the part because it was [English author] Alan Bennett."
But it was a success: the production transferred from London to Broadway and was then made into a triumphant film. The stage role brought Cooper to New Zealand's Festival of the Arts in 2006. "I had a fantastic time [in Wellington]. It was a great experience to take a show around the world. That play was only meant to run for three months originally and it took up three years of our lives, but I wouldn't change it for anything." How does he feel about what literary critic George Steiner no doubt calls "the erotics of pedagogy"? "The who?" he replies, nearly gagging on his coffee.
Teachers copping a feel, as Richard Griffiths did in The History Boys. "Oh right. I'd better be careful here, because I don't want to make it seem I'm endorsing copping a feel by teachers, but it was certainly a story that needed to be told."
Quite so. Whether that is true of his latest film is less certain. The Duchess uses Amanda Foreman's bestselling biography of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, to spin a fictionalised history of her life. Cunningly, perhaps cynically, it stresses the links between her 18th-century menage and the Charles, Di and Camilla love triangle (Georgiana was an ancestor of Lady Diana Spencer).
The movie tie-in edition of the book even has the blurb "there were three people in her marriage", alluding to the line Diana used when interviewed by Martin Bashir. In Georgiana's case the three people were the Duchess (Knightley), the Duke (Ralph Fiennes), and his mistress, who supplied him with a clutch of illegitimate sons. Grey was the fourth banana in this marriage - the lover who was both, if one wants to press the Diana parallel, Dodi Fayed and Captain James Hewitt united in one neat package.
Ripping off a bodice might look like fun but "it's harder than you think," says Cooper, who, it must be said, is endearingly game to answer any daft question I fire at him. "Keira was lovely to act with, but there were something like 73 layers of petticoat to get through. You wonder that they managed to get any action at all in those days."
This is Cooper's third film this year - he first appeared gritty prison flick The Escapist, then as Sky in Mamma Mia! We will next see Cooper alongside Emma Thompson in the coming-of-age drama An Education, a film based on an original script by Nick Hornby. He took the role of a smooth-talking early 60s London playboy after Orlando Bloom declined it. "'He replaces Orlando Bloom.' I love that," Cooper says. "You know you've arrived when headlines say that.
The story is wonderful: about this middle-class girl who is seduced by my character, who's a kind of glamorous Rachman-type criminal who charms old ladies over tea into giving him their houses. I'm slimy, repellent and glamorous."
Cooper yearns to get back to the stage and hopes to appear in a new production of Racine's Phedre next year. In the meantime, he's enjoying being back in London.
"It's really exciting going round the world with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, being treated like royalty, but I really relish being back in London, playing football and getting kicked shitless by mates in Dulwich I've known since I was 5. It's a relief to be treated as a numbskull, you know?"
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