Anyone for Tennis?

By MICHELE MANELIS

When it comes to self-deprecating humour, a sense of the ironic and an understated charm, nobody does it quite like the Brits. As evidenced in hit movies such as Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones' Diary, all of which starred Hugh Grant, it would seem that for the last decade this effortlessly appealing actor has reigned as king of the romantic comedy.

However, all good things come to an end. Working Title (the producers of the above-named films) had to cast the lead in Wimbledon - the role of an ageing British tennis champion who falls in love with the feisty young American, played by Kirsten Dunst, 22. Grant, at 44, was decidedly too mature.

Enter Paul Bettany. Although not an actor who might spring to mind in this genre, the handsome 33-year-old Londoner, known for his dramatic supporting roles - to Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World - Bettany fitted Grant's sneakers perfectly.

Despite the fact that this urbanely witty actor hasn't done comedy, nor even picked up a tennis racket, Bettany managed to accomplish the impossible - with the help of some special effects.

"I don't know why I thought I could do this role," he says. "Looking back, I think it a combined low-level arrogance and a massive level of ignorance on my part.

"A few months into tennis training and lifting weights, when I thought I was doing very well, I went to see Roger Federer and Andy Roddick play a game."

He shakes his head. "It was at that moment I'd realised I'd said, 'I'd like to play Rudolph Nureyev. How long do I have to learn ballet?'

"It was enormously stupid of me and the director, Richard Loncraine, knew nothing about tennis, either - and probably still doesn't."

The movie was shot using CGI and a lot of blood, sweat, tears and hard hours on the court. Tennis icon Pat Cash, among others, helped to make the actors look authentic. "Pat meticulously choreographed each and every point of every match in the film," Bettany says. "But of course we had to use CGI, otherwise it would have taken 25 years to make the movie - waiting for us to become accomplished players.

"But it's very nerve-racking. As it was, CGI and I had no idea how it was going to end up, I could have looked like a idiot."

Bettany spent a lot of time with Cash. "I don't really understand the competitiveness of sport and as that's not in my nature I couldn't relate to it in terms of my career, but I do have a really strong work ethic.

"If somebody pays me any amount of money I want to do a good job. Even when I peeled potatoes in a fish and chip shop I tried to peel the best potatoes I could.

"Do you know what I mean? I don't know why, it's just a compulsion I have to work hard."

Bettany also had to work on the aesthetics of his body in order to look like a believable athlete, and, more importantly, a burgeoning leading man and aspiring heartthrob.

"Oh my God, it's insane," he shouts. "I really feel for these American actors who have to keep buff the whole time. I mean, it's really crazy.

"And poor Russell Crowe, who's working on this job at the moment. He's got himself down to 80kg and he said to me, 'When you start hitting 40 that's work, that's really hard work.'

"But I find it enormously boring going to the gym. It's so funny. the first gym I was taken to, their big marketing campaign was a huge poster that said: 'Think less and feel better'.

"I thought, 'Oh wonderful, that's the gym culture I'm getting into here'. And the truth of it is, it's impossible to have an interesting thought when you're lifting a couple of hundred pounds.

"I trained very hard for 10 months and ate boiled chicken every day to keep fit. I can't imagine living that way as a lifestyle."

You may remember Bettany in the Heath Ledger medieval action movie A Knight's Tale - he played Chaucer, who entered the movie naked. Clearly, Bettany hadn't seen the inside of a gym when he shot that movie. He smiles in acknowledgment.

"When I got married to Jennifer Connelly, she fell in love with a slightly out-of-breath European. Suddenly I was out on the court, coming home tanned and getting buff while she was pregnant and putting on weight. She said to me one day, 'You've become all the college boys I chose not to go out with.' "

Connelly, the 33-year-old erudite beauty, met him on the set when she starred opposite Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Connelly has a 6-year-old son, Kai, from a previous relationship with the photographer David Dugan, whom she raises with Bettany. And in August last year, Bettany and Connelly had a son, Stellan (named after Bettany's friend and Dogville co-star, Stellan Skarsgard).

Faced with the obvious comparisons to Grant, his predecessor, Bettany says, "There are a few people who are good at this kind of humour.

"I'd never done it before and it was hard. I've never had this kind of pressure to be elegant in a movie either, and Hugh Grant does that very well. As to whether I can step up to the plate, we'll just have to see how it goes."

LOWDOWN

WHO: Paul Bettany, actor

BORN: London, 1971

KEY ROLES: A Knight's Tale (2001),

A Beautiful Mind (2001), Dogville (2003), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), The Heart of Me (2003)

NEXT: Starring opposite Kirsten Dunst in Wimbledon. Opens September 30.