Julia Roberts and Clive Owen star opposite each other in romantic espionage caper Duplicity, which marks a return to leading lady for her and the first of two spy flicks in quick succession for him. They talk to Michele Manelis and Elizabeth Day
Nobody took Clive Owen seriously when he announced, aged 13, that he wanted to be an actor. It was 1977 and Owen was a pupil at a local secondary school in Coventry, central England, a rough sort of place where the unruly kids were given overalls and ordered to do manual labour around the school.
Owen was bright - in the top streams for all his subjects - but then he got a part as the Artful Dodger in the school production of Oliver! and loved it so much that schoolwork no longer seemed important.
"I think everybody knew I loved acting, but they didn't think I would actually get into a drama school and do it,' he says now, 30 years later and sitting in the balmy sunshine of a Los Angeles afternoon. "I don't think anybody took it seriously. There was another kid at my school, Dominic, who wanted to be a guitarist and me and him were like the two freaks that were being 'unrealistic'. But I was really, really stubborn about it."
The stubbornness paid off. At 44, Owen still has a noticeable English Midlands burr and a slight roughness around the edges, but everything else about him shrieks movie star. Today, he is wearing a casual Armani suit and beige suede trainers. His pale blue shirt is unbuttoned far enough to reveal a modest sprouting of chest hair and a heavy silver chain worn round his neck. He is tanned in a way that looks slightly unreal and his teeth are such a luminescent
white that it is difficult not to do a double-take when he grins. His face is just the right side of craggy, defined by pale green-blue eyes that stare at you with unnerving focus.
His brooding masculinity and penchant for complex tough guys has led to comparisons with Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart.
His big-screen break came in 1998 when he was cast as the lead in Croupier. Critically acclaimed roles followed - as a scene-stealing butler in Robert Altman's Gosford Park in 2001 and as Larry, the unreconstructed caveman, in the 2004 film adaptation of Patrick Marber's play Closer, for which he won a Golden Globe and a Bafta as well as an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.
Since then, he has appeared in a string of big box-office hits - starring in the title role of King Arthur in 2004, as a mysterious bank robber alongside Denzel Washington in Inside Man in 2006 and, a year later, playing a goateed Sir Walter Raleigh in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth: The Golden Age. His latest films - Duplicity and The International - have him as an ex M16 spy and Interpol agent respectively.
According to Naomi Watts, his co-star in The International,
Owen is "a fantastic guy with a British schoolboy sense of humour. He can laugh at himself although he does take his work very seriously." Alfonso Cuaron, who directed Owen in the 2006 futuristic cinematic dystopia Children of Men, said Owen had "a constant awareness of the film we were trying to do. He understood the rhythm of the scenes."
Tellingly, the people who work behind the scenes like Owen, too. "You get lots of actors who have an edge," says his hair and make-up artist, Dorka Nieradzik, whom I run into on my way to the interview. "With him, there is no edge. He is totally sincere."
Although he is undeniably good-looking, he professes to be unaware of it - one suspects this is because he does not think it is the sort of thing a real man should care about. "I don't think about it at all," he says. "I think any actor who ever thinks about that or considers himself to be a sex symbol has got serious problems, so I don't spend time reflecting on that."
It is true that he appears to possess little professional vanity. The International sees Owen in a state of almost permanent dishevelment, his face a haggard mugshot of bloodshot eyes and heavy stubble. His forte on-screen is portraying a kind of crumpled masculinity: a superficial hardness that peels back to reveal glimpses of complexity beneath. He is understated in his approach, often relying on the merest twitch of an eyebrow to convey a change in mood.
Apparently, Owen once asked to have a line cut from the script in Gosford Park because it didn't sound like something his character would say - much to the astonishment of the director Robert Altman, who was more accustomed to stars demanding their roles be made bigger.
"I can smell bullshit in a script and I can call it and say, 'That's not right,"' Owen says.
"I can't fix it. I wouldn't be able to rewrite it. But if you give it to me, I can say: 'Now that works.' I'm very clear [about] the rhythm and the way people speak it." Can he smell bullshit in people? "Yeah," he says languidly. "I can smell a rogue."
And although his film characters might not smile much, Owen's gift for humour became evident when he appeared two years ago in the Ricky Gervais sitcom Extras, caricaturing himself as an egocentric movie star who refused to sleep with a prostitute because the actress was too ugly. "I just played myself," Owen deadpans.
He says he would like to do a more light-hearted film, if only to keep his daughters happy. "It's a constant thing in my house at the moment. My daughters come to the set, they meet all the people, they have a great time, they hear the film's coming out, they're told they can't see it and they're not happy about it. They're bugging me like crazy to do a children's movie at the moment. Like you wouldn't believe."
In between keeping tabs on his family and his mild obsession with the fortunes of the Liverpool football club (he sheepishly admits he has it in his contract he can stop work to watch their games) Owen found the time to film Duplicity opposite Julia Roberts, a Mr and Mrs Smith-type thriller, and The International.
In the latter, he stars as the obsessive agent Louis Salinger, a man determined to bring justice to a powerful bank that has been funding unethical arms sales. It is, if you like, the first credit-crunch thriller - the baddie is a bank rather than a single individual, and the tagline - "They control your money. They control your government. They control your life. And everybody pays" - seems designed to appeal to the indebted sub-prime generation. Directed by
Tom Tykwer, who made his name with Run Lola Run, the movie is set in multiple locations - Istanbul, Berlin and Milan - and features a memorable set-piece shoot-out in New York's Guggenheim building.
Does Owen think it marks the beginning of a new genre of film that pitches capitalist corporations as forces of evil? "Yeah, I think like Tony Gilroy's film Michael Clayton - that was the same world in terms of corporations and how they conduct themselves. The financial implode is bound to be reflected in the movies that are being made, there's no question." He believes that we make better art in times of crisis "because people are more passionate, more excited, more angry or more upset, they feel they've got a story to tell".
- OBSERVER
LOWDOWN
What: Duplicity, starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen
Where and when: Opens at cinemas on Thursday
Who: Clive Owen
Born: October 3, 1964, Keresley, Coventry, England
Key Roles: Close My Eyes (1991), Bent (1997), Croupier (1998), Second Sight (TV, 1999), Gosford Park (2001), King Arthur (2004), Sin City (2005), Closer (2004), Derailed (2005), Inside Man (2006), Children of Men (2006).
Latest: Duplicity opens Thursday, The International opens April 23
