Friend in high places

Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Friend star in Cheri. Photo / Supplied

Rupert Friend seemingly has a life to envy. Yet the rising young star says that a huge part of how he chooses his roles is "down to my very perverse kind of curiosity that wants to live everybody's life except for my own".

This is not to say that the mild-mannered 27-year-old would always like to be his characters, or even come anywhere near them in real life. Lieutenant Kotler, the menacing Nazi officer in last year's harrowing child-focused Holocaust film The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, for instance, would presumably come under the heading of someone "I wouldn't like to meet" - which can be as much of a draw for the actor as someone he would. Nevertheless, his revelation about apparently wanting to live these other, imaginary, lives rather than his own is strange and unexpected. It is "a weird thing to say, maybe," he admits.

Indeed, being Rupert Friend cannot be all that bad. Career-wise he is in the ascendant, while in his personal life he has been steadily dating his Pride & Prejudice co-star, Keira Knightley, for years. Tall and handsome, his black T-shirt, brown jeans, distressed leather boots and slightly spiked-up hair give him the look of a frontman for an indie band the day we meet, and women clearly adore him. According to Emily Blunt, who plays Queen Victoria to his Prince Albert in The Young Victoria, Friend is the very "definition of a real man".

Harriet Walter, meanwhile, has confessed that she "fell in love" with him during the making of the romantic drama. "I wished I'd been 20 years younger and Rupert Friend was a possibility," she reportedly quipped.

If Kotler had been a study in Teutonic evil, then Albert, also a German, was the total opposite: a man so admired for his goodness that he was actually known as Albert the Good in some quarters. "My first question when I read that script," says Friend, "was, 'what makes a woman, after her husband has died, lay out hot shaving water in his room every single day for the next 40 years? What makes her never take the black off? What makes her unable to speak about him without crying?' I just thought, 'that's one of the most moving, posthumous declarations of love that I have ever come across."'

The actor says he spent a lot of time hanging around Albert's statue in Hyde Park, London - "which sounds weird," he laughs - just thinking about what kind of man would inspire such a memorial. "The idea that you would build that monument - how great was this guy? I just found him one of the most unsung heroes that I have found in history or literature."

The problem for Friend, however, was making Albert a rounded character; he had to get beyond Victoria's tears and black weeds to find the man. "It's tricky because you're playing a good guy; it could be nauseating. So you've got to find what the dark side is," he explains. "And the dark side is he was quite a take-over kind of guy. You see that in the film. He'd occasionally tread on [Victoria's] toes a bit in public. He was a king without a crown. He basically said, 'in marrying this woman I will never be the king.' And that, for a man who was already going to be the prince of his province, is a big deal, I think. But I was full of admiration for him."

I want to ask if he identified with Albert, as the partner of the more-famous Knightley, but Friend has made it a rule never to talk about their relationship to journalists.

In any case, he is fast becoming a star in his own right following roles in The Libertine opposite Johnny Depp, Pride & Prejudice, and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, among others. Next month he will be seen playing Michelle Pfeiffer's louche young lover in Stephen Frears' and Christopher Hampton's frothy Colette adaptation, Cheri. "It was terrifying," he says, recalling his feelings before meeting Pfeiffer. "I mean, this is Cat Woman we're talking about here."

If Friend's rise through the ranks to leading man since leaving acting school seems to have been effortless and struggle-free, the actor says looks are deceiving. He has been "really, really lucky", he admits, and "worked with some fascinating, wonderful people. But if I'm honest, and I'm not doing a 'pity me' act, there were some huge swathes of depression in the middle of that."

Now of course, he's got roles seemingly coming out his ears and with that comes publicity duties which, given his ties to Knightley, can be a mixed blessing.

"I only do the press for the work," he says. "I don't have a publicist. I don't go to events or self-promote, or endorse things, or whatever it is people are meant to do in that world. It's great to sit and talk about the films and the people I work with, rather than where I buy my socks or whatever."

His private life is so off-limits in fact that when I suggest that having a partner who is also in the movie business must make his life easier because she presumably understands the pressures of a film actor's life, Friend completely ignores the implied reference to Knightley.

"This industry is too bonkers to understand," he says simply. "Every single part is completely different. I've never got a part in the same way twice. I've never prepared the same way. I've never experienced the filming the process the same way. So I think it's almost impossible to make a rule for it."

Friend cannot evade the paparazzi's lenses as easily as he can the meaning of my question, however. And while he seems reluctant to complain about them on his own behalf, he gallantly steps up on behalf of actresses. Friend must have been a first-hand witness to their impact on Knightley's life, but he keeps his comments general.

"It's particularly distressing to me to observe that we're fine with these young women, who are chased, stalked, put under siege by battalions of strange men who sleep in their car and follow them and take pictures up their skirts, and when they throw the dummy out or whatever, everyone thinks they've gone mad," he says.

"I would defy anyone not to be affected by what is, I think, harassment, really. I just think it's slightly below a moral code that I have as a man or as a human being. To chase people, it just seems very bestial."

It's easy to see why the ladies love Rupert.

LOWDOWN

Who: Rupert Friend
Born: 1 October 1981, Oxfordshire, England
Past films: The Libertine (2004), Pride & Prejudice (2005), Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont (2005),
Latest: As Prince Albert in Young Victoria opening on Thursday and opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in Cheri, opening September 17.

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