More than happy to remain an enigma

By LAURA TENNANT

I meet Jeremy Northam 10 minutes after the extremely romantic nature of the conclusion of his latest film, Cypher, had made me cry. Cypher is somewhere between a paranoid thriller and a satire on the nature of identity, but it was still Northam's fanciability which made the most significant impression on me.

So it was with heart aflutter and mascara hurriedly repaired that I entered Blacks, a cool, dark, faded private members club in Soho where he had suggested we meet. And even though I knew that I was meeting an actor, not Mr Knightley or Ivor Novello or even Cypher's Morgan Sullivan, it was unexpectedly disconcerting not to find at least one of them waiting for me at the bar. I mention this because Northam's relative lack of fame, considering that he's made 21 films and starred opposite a succession of super-famous leading ladies, Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman and Sandra Bullock among them, has always puzzled me.

A star, even a great star like James Stewart or Clark Gable, essentially plays him or herself, and we love them for it not just because their personality is intensely endearing, or charismatic, or powerful, or sexy, but also because we believe that we've been given access to their real self.

But Northam is too good an actor, and too private a person, to do anything but vanish completely and compellingly into the part. At some level the audience senses that his inner self is being withheld, that he doesn't want to be worshipped for himself, but respected for his work, and is piqued.

So the man I meet, of medium height and build, in pre-gym sweats, with a day's stubble and grey at the temples, could be anyone, and frequently is.

In Cypher, he transforms himself from twitchy nerd to tanned sex god; but Northam the man was no more inclined to play the celebrity than he would be to suddenly "switch on" his Dean Martin (a man he impersonated so expertly in an American TV movie that the critic David Thomson says he watched the film expecting to see the real Jerry Lewis suddenly appear next to Northam's "real" Dean).

His evident dislike of being interviewed meant that much of our conversation consisted of a kind of interview about interviews, and about the publicity commitments every actor must meet to "sell" his film.

"I've never had a desire to be famous," he says.

"Lots of actors are actually extremely shy."

Is he shy? "I have shy areas," he says guardedly.

It's not that he's anything less than sweet and co-operative and friendly, just that he can't bring himself to "put out", if that's not too vulgar an expression. His conversation is full of immense pauses and "ums" and "ers", while he ponders how to respond honestly without compromising himself, and of excursions into topics from which, had I not been so mesmerised by his Jeremy Northam-ness, I should have hauled him back. Most people adore talking about themselves, even to journalists.

For Northam it's excruciating. "I've never had a huge circle of friends. I can't spread myself that thin and go 100 million miles an hour all the time," he says.

"I choose to give truly of myself, entirely of myself, to the people I choose to do that with, and I can't do that with everyone."

The paradox is that, the better his acting, the less likely he is to get the brand recognition of a Tom Cruise or a Bruce Willis. The studio system being what it is, that means he is sometimes denied the parts he would play most brilliantly.

"I came across a very smart, very bright little independent movie a while back, and I'd met the writer and director years ago. They needed a big name to play the female role, but the studio seemed okay with me being cast as the male lead. Then I heard that they'd offered it to three enormous male names, all of whom were being asked to work for a ridiculously low fee.

"And of course you think, 'Well, I'd do it for that', but that's not the point. The studio will only take the risk, even on such a little low-budget film, if they can get a huge star for a tenth of his normal salary.

"As an actor you ask yourself what you can do to put yourself in a position where you can play that role.

"And I did decide that you have to put your name about a bit, and so, although I would have preferred to have never done a publicity junket or an interview or a fashion shoot for a magazine or a chat show - I've never had an ambition to make that a part of my professional or personal life - I've done an awful lot of it, mainly in the States."

Yet he remains deeply ambivalent about what it would cost him to become a name the studio trusted to "open" a film.

"I don't have the energy or the mental security to get involved with all that."

Besides, he says, "I think it's a good idea to be able to disappear into the story, so that the first thing the audience sees isn't you, but the part."

The not wanting to be famous (and I believe him, bizarre as it may sound given that successful actors are necessarily known to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people) is connected to a deeply serious view of his profession.

Northam trained at the Bristol Old Vic and then spent a couple of years in rep, which he says he loved.

"The discipline of the theatre, where everything backstage is clean and organised and stowed away, makes me think of being on board ship. And you are so determinedly fearless at that age. I really enjoyed doing Chekhov one moment and Rattigan the next."

Then he began to be cast in plays at the National and with the Royal Shakespeare Company. He received much acclaim after standing in for Daniel Day Lewis as Hamlet, and won the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer for The Voysey Inheritance.

In 1995 he was cast in his first big Hollywood role opposite Sandra Bullock in The Net, the same year making Carrington, in which he played the dastardly Beacus Penrose.

Since then he's mingled Hollywood with independent movies, appearing in Emma, The Winslow Boy, An Ideal Husband, The Golden Bowl, Enigma, Gosford Park and Possession, garnering almost uniformly glowing notices along the way.

It's a peculiarity of leading men that they get to play heroes, and I ask Northam if the varieties of chap he's called upon to represent have given him insight into what the manly virtues might be.

"Some of my most successful and brilliant women friends have told me that they're still looking for a bloke on a white horse," says Northam.

"But men don't know if they're supposed to be that, or a supporting presence, or just absent, or a toy, or what. But it's not as if it is something that other generations haven't grappled with.

"It makes me want to rush back and read The Way of the World, which has one of my favourite quotes (and he delivers it in a lovely, ironic drawl), 'Ah, men, men! Ah, women, women!"'

My time is up, and I suggest that Northam is anxious to get to the gym.

"No, no," he says drily. "That would be a misrepresentation." Ah, Jeremy, Jeremy!

On Screen

* Who: Jeremy Northam

* What: The movie Cypher

* When: Starting at cinemas tomorrow

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