Erasing Darcy
He may never be able to shake off that smouldering Darcy image but Colin Firth is trying his best, taking on roles as diverse as he can find. Now, in the latest version of the Scrooge story, he’s been made into a computer animation
INTERVIEW | JAMES MOTTRAM
When we meet at the Cannes Film Festival where he is promoting his latest film, a new 3D computer-animated version of Charles Dickens’s perennial Yuletide classic A Christmas Carol, he’s just been outside the Carlton Hotel, surrounded by fake snow, a horse-drawn carriage and Jim Carrey gurning to the masses. In 30-degree heat. No wonder when he troops in, he grunts: “I haven’t got any Christmas answers.” Bang go all those questions about his favourite ever family Christmas then. A grin soon crosses the actor’s face, though. “My 18-year-old did say to me, ‘You’re doing A Christmas Carol and you’re not playing Scrooge?’ That’d be the role he would choose for me.”
In truth, Firth, 49, is anything but a grumpy old man. To begin with, he has a dry sense of humour – about himself as much as anything else. Like the moment I ask if Mamma Mia!, the adaptation of the Abba musical which became the UK’s highest-ever grossing film, has boosted his career. “Did it need it?” he says, drily. “I’m still waiting for that push.” Indeed, you just have to see his appearance in the recent St Trinian’s reboot to prove Firth doesn’t take himself too seriously.
As government minister Geoffrey Thwaites, one scene had him emerging from a pond in a sopping white shirt – reminiscent of his infamous lake-dip as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s seminal 1995 take on Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice.
As it goes, Firth first came to prominence as far back as 1984, starring in Another Country opposite Rupert Everett, and subsequently played in the controversial BBC Falklands drama Tumbledown four years later. “Back then, everyone talked about the fact that no-one knew who I was. Then Darcy came along and the same was said again. Then Bridget Jones – and still no-one knew me.” I suspect Firth may be exaggerating. After all, by the time he did Bridget Jones’s Diary – playing, in yet another self-referential moment, the titular diarist’s onoff boyfriend Mark Darcy – six years had passed since Pride and Prejudice.
In that time, he’d played an obsessed Arsenal fan in Fever Pitch, scored roles in two Oscar-winning Best Pictures, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love, and even appeared as the Bard in a Blackadder special. Firth’s problem was not so much being unknown but shaking off the enduring image of Mr Darcy. Casting in everything from Love Actually to The Importance of Being Earnest, and even his tortured painter Vermeer in Girl With a Pearl Earring, pigeonholed Firth as the housewife’s favourite. So was he relieved when Joe Wright’s version of Pride & Prejudice, in which Matthew Macfadyen was handed the Darcy baton, was released? “I was hoping it would bury it at a crossroads at midnight with a stake through its heart,” he jokes, “but it didn’t really quite do that.”
SINCE THEN, FIRTH HAS TRULY FLEXED HIS ACTING MUSCLES WITH A SERIES OF DEPARTURES FROM DARCY-LAND. He played a bereaved husband haunted by grief in both Trauma and this year’s Genova, a 1950s entertainer in erotic thriller Where The Truth Lies, a broken-down World War I veteran in Easy Virtue and even a hedonistic aristocrat in the recent Dorian Gray. “But I’m just going with what appeals to me on my own terms. If you do look for change, it’s probably because you’re feeling a bit jaded with too many comedies or dramas, so you’ll instinctively go for something that feels fresh.”
Perhaps that’s the reason he’s in A Christmas Carol, his first Hollywood effects-driven blockbuster? “It’s one of them,” he replies. “It’s one of my favourite stories and I was extremely curious about the technique.” The technique in question is motion-capture, whereby actors are covered in sensors and their movements recorded and animated.
Director Robert Zemeckis was already steeped in such new technology, having employed it for his 2007 version of Beowulf. “It’s like going back to your childhood and just playing in the playground,” says Firth of the experience. “But I did want to know how they did it and I’m none the wiser!”
At this point, I feel the same about Firth’s role in the film. He’s not Scrooge, or the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present or Future. Greedy old Jim Carrey is playing all four. Meanwhile Gary Oldman is Scrooge’s late business partner Jacob Marley, his beleaguered employee Bob Cratchit and the crippled Tiny Tim. Nope, our Colin plays Fred. Fred? “Certainly if you’re English or American, everybody can name every character,” says Firth. “And then you say, ‘Fred’ and people are like, ‘Right…’ But he’s in the book, and he’s in all the films as well, actually.”
For those of us none the wiser, Fred is the poorly treated son of Scrooge’s late sister. “I probably wouldn’t have chosen to play Fred,” smiles Firth. “I would’ve liked to play Scrooge and all the ghosts, or something.” It doesn’t help that, unlike Carrey and Oldman, who look vastly different to their real selves, Firth does not. “One feels a bit exposed in the middle of a cartoon. You’ve got this extraordinary creation of Scrooge, and then this amazing, bizarre Jacob Marley floating around, and then Colin Firth in the middle of it all. It’s a bit odd! I’m not quite like myself – but the closer you look to yourself, the weirder it is, in a way. It’s much easier to accept when it’s very stylised than when it’s nearly you.”
From where I’m sitting, Firth looks just great. With his mop of curly brown hair just shaded by a tinge of grey, he still looks as handsome as he did the day he emerged from that lake. He dresses like a true English gentleman – modestly. Wearing black jeans, a navy jacket and two T-shirts – a white one underneath a grey one – it’s a simple ensemble that suits Firth down to the ground. He’s not the type prone to ostentatious displays of wealth or fashion– though he might argue that with two small children, he doesn’t have the chance to.
Firth has two sons – Luca, eight, and Mateo, 10 – with his wife of 12 years, Livia Giuggioli (his aforementioned 18-year-old is William Joseph, from a relationship with actress Meg Tilly). Firth, who met Giuggioli on the set of a TV version of Nostromo where she was a production assistant, calls her formidable. “She’s bright, ruthless and efficient. She knows me too well and is always a step ahead of things. I’ve always been attracted to frightening girls!” Caring for his clan is now his main motivation. “The only reasons I worry about the next job are for the family now. I’m ambivalent now about whether I want to work or not. I just want to be paid.”
Not that major money worries were ever a problem for Firth, with his middle-class background. Born in Hampshire, he came from an academic family. His father David was a history don (at Winchester University) and his mother Shirley a comparative religions lecturer at the Open University, who had met when they were five and three respectively, both being children of Methodist missionaries. As a result, Firth spent his early years in Nigeria before returning to England at five.
He was not a fan of learning, however. “I was a schoolboy and schoolboys don’t like school. I couldn’t wait until the bell rang.” At this point, Firth checks himself. “If you say anything against your school days it can get blown up into ‘Your traumatic school days!’” He’d previously got into a battle with an ex-headmaster, who’d read a throwaway remark Firth made about his time at school. “He wrote a very angry letter to my parents, even though I was 40-something at that point! I could see detention coming up!”
He shakes his head in disbelief. “The reality is I have no feelings about school. It’s long gone. Funnily enough, the bad memories have faded. Whereas teachers that I liked have remained quite vivid.”
The eldest of three – his sister Kate went on to become a voice coach, his brother Jonathan an actor – Firth calls his entry into his profession “a path of less resistance for me”. While he had started acting classes when he was young, his father steered him towards university – only for Firth to drop out. “It wasn’t that I was rebelling. I just wasn’t proving myself to be capable. I couldn’t keep track,” he says. “I was being distracted by all sorts of other things, I was not disciplined enough for it.” Instead, he veered off towards acting, studying at the Drama Centre in London’s Chalk Farm. His first professional role was as Bennet in the West End production of Another Country, which led him to being cast as Tommy Judd in the 1984 movie version.
NOW, 25 YEARS LATER, FIRTH IS STILL GOING STRONG. “All you can do is survive in a way,” he reasons. “Whenever I see anybody write about an actor who’s been around for a while, they always talk about this choppy trajectory, the up times, the down times – the time when it all went horribly wrong, the comebacks, the disappearances – but I think that’s true of almost everybody.” Yet right now Firth is experiencing something of a golden period. After A Christmas Carol, he will be seen in small town thriller Main Street, the last script ever to be written by Pulitzer-winning dramatist Horton Foote, and A Single Man, an adaptation of a Christopher Isherwood novel for which he has already won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival.
Calling them “two of the most interesting things I’ve ever worked on”, in the former Firth plays a Texan drifter and the latter a British literature professor struggling with the death of his male lover in 1960s Los Angeles. So has he just been churning out film after film? “It seems to come across that way,” he shrugs. “But it depends if people notice them or not really. There have been times when I’ve worked back-to-back, and no-one notices them, and then I’ll do one film and people will say, ‘You’re back! Where have you been?’ It’s just whether anyone cares.” It’s the sort of self-deprecating comment that makes you want to grab his lapels and say ‘Come off it!’ After all, he’s near enough a national treasure.
A Christmas Carol opens on 6 November
