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Clive Owen
He has been an almost-big star for some time. Is the actor finally about to really make it?






Clive Owen has been about to be a big star for quite some time. But even the former lead of the television series Chancer couldn’t have predicted that it would take a low-budget film version of a blistering National Theatre play to bring him the nearest he has yet come to A-list attention. The film is Closer, directed by the veteran Mike Nichols and based on Patrick Marber’s play about a tangled, and often terrible, weave of love and lust. Owen is the last-billed of the movie’s four leads, after Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Natalie Portman. Since Closer’s American release in early December, however, he has been touted as the revelation in this ensemble of Hollywood heavies. Whether he will be promoted to play James Bond, as has long been mooted, remains uncertain, but an Oscar for best supporting actor now looks well within his reach. He has already been named in the same category by the New York Film Critics Circle and has a Golden Globe nomination to show for the movie as well.
Ask Roberts for her view of Owen (the two play a couple who meet at an aquarium and end up, against the odds, as husband and wife), and the American Oscar-winner is quick to praise her 40-year-old British co-star. “I do some of the most unapologetic scenes in the history of movies with Clive, and I think he’s just breathtaking,” she says down the phone from Los Angeles, speaking before the birth of twins took her off the PR circuit. “He’s very, very powerful, a jack of all trades, that Clive. I can’t wait for everybody to figure out how versatile he is.”

Nor, presumably, can Owen wait to command the attention that has been claimed for him, sometimes prematurely, in years gone by. His early television work made him a tabloid darling (though, by all accounts, his initial journalistic encounters turned him press-shy for many years); he was also the smooth, suave lead in the sleeper film hit Croupier, and has coupled small West End plays such as A Day in the Death of Joe Egg with summer film behemoths such as King Arthur. But his breakthrough role is, less predictably, as Larry, a London dermatologist whose fierce approach to the sexual rondelet that is Closer gets under the viewer’s, well, skin.



Owen can claim a previous purchase on the material, being the only member of the film’s cast to have performed Closer on stage. However, in the first run of the play, at the National Theatre in 1997, he appeared not as Larry, but as the journalist, Dan (played on screen by a throaty Jude Law), opposite Ciaran Hinds as the sexually questing and more than candid skin doctor. “It was weird,” Owen says of the trajectory that got him the film role. “I remember, in my initial meeting with Mike (Nichols), him saying, ‘Of course, you know all that; you have all the experience.’ But I realised while I was talking to him that, in a play, you see the piece through that character’s perspective, so my experience had been through Dan’s eyes. Playing a different part, as far as acting goes, is starting again: I had to inhabit another character and see the whole piece from a different viewpoint, given that these are four characters whose perspective is constantly changing.” Indeed, that is the nub of the play, and of Marber’s screenplay, too, which is scrupulous about pairing off the four principals in every poss-ible combination at one point or another.

In person, Owen appears taller and even more darkly imposing than he does on screen, and he looks entirely at home in the Armani suit worn for a meeting earlier that day with the Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein. (He has been working for Weinstein on the forthcoming movie Derailed, with Jennifer Aniston, directed by the Swedish film-maker Mikael Hafstrom.) Dressed for success, you could say.

However, Nichols speaks of not being sure about Owen’s potential at first, especially because he never saw the play at the National. “I wasn’t really that aware of Clive,” he admits, adding that now he can’t imagine anyone else in the role. In particular, he has discovered that Owen’s working-class fire proves an electrifying contrast to Law’s middle-class sang-froid, however fragile that turns out to be. “Sure, the part hands the piece to whoever’s playing Larry,” Nichols says. “But the thing about Clive is that he’s sexy and unpredictable. There’s a real sense of danger to him — that comes with him.”

Having played both the script’s male roles, Owen has a unique take on Marber’s depiction of the gender. “The two characters together sort of make up a whole person,” he says. “I think Larry gets seriously hurt and gets pissed off about it, but he’s tough; he comes out fighting. Dan’s the sort of artist, and Larry’s more practical, so he’s also tougher in that way. Dan’s in love with the idea of being a writer — in love with the more sensitive side of being a man — and Larry’s more of a realist. He paints it as it is.” But Owen is quick to deflect any praise that has come his way toward the material, which, he argues, cannot fail to connect: “Yeah, I’m very working-class, as Mike has said.” (He grew up in Coventry, the fourth of five boys.) “So that bit of Larry was instinctive, you know? But I challenge anybody who watches the piece not to identify strongly throughout with some of the more horrific things. Most people will go, ‘Uh, I’ve been there. I’ve been in that scene or a version of that scene.’ That is what the play did, and now the film does it. We start off as a romantic comedy. It’s lovely, it’s safe. You think, ‘This is how relationships should be, this is the potential of it all.’ And then we say, ‘Here’s the f***ing tougher, painful, harsher reality: recognise this.’ It packs a very powerful punch.”

The darkness in Closer clearly appealed to Owen, two of whose earlier films, both flops, dealt with the Nazi incarceration of homosexuals (Bent) and global hot spots of torture and genocide (Beyond Borders, with Angelina Jolie, which never received a cinema release in this country). “It’s obvious what I gravitate towards, yeah,” he says, cracking a wry smile as he orders a second cappuccino. Of Closer, he says: “It’s not just abuse, it’s great writing, and what more do you want as an actor? What sort of actor do you want to be if you don’t want to go to those places? I enjoy the heavy scenes.”

At the same time, he says: “It’s a very strange thing that in some scenes in Closer, I’m as light as I’ve ever been, which is unusual. I probably have a lighter touch here than maybe I’ve had in lots of other movies. Even though this is a particularly heavy one, it’s also funny.” (However, don’t be misled: Larry describes the heart as “a fist wrapped in blood”.) How, then, to explain this apparently new-found delicacy of approach? “It must be to do with me,” he muses. “It’s funny, because the one thing I’d like to do at the moment is a romantic comedy, just because I haven’t gone down that road. But finding a really funny script is hard, and I don’t like frothy.”

What Owen has done is flirt with a stardom that, paradoxically, he is now achieving for a modestly budgeted film. Nichols proudly confirms that it cost “all in, $27m (about £14m). So there’s no way the studio isn’t going to get its money back on that”.

If Owen reacts warily to talk of this being his moment, it is because he has heard that line before: “They’ve been saying that for a long time.” Just this summer, for instance, he headlined a putative blockbuster, Jerry Bruckheimer’s King Arthur, which didn’t quite set the princely records some had been expecting. “I’d never done a film of that size and scale,” he says, taking its box-office performance in his stride. “And at the end of the day, I don’t sell the f***ing things. If it had been a huge, stonking success, that would have done me very nicely, thank you very much. But you know, I do what I can to the best of my abilities, and beyond that I can’t sweat too much about it. I don’t sell it — there are 25 other people who are employed to try to put it out there.”

All of which helps to explain why Owen is unlikely at any time soon to uproot his wife, the former actress Sarah-Jane Fenton, and their two young daughters from north London to Hollywood, despite the zeal with which Americans embraced the Mike Hodges film Croupier, and Owen’s sleek performance in it, after it had all but vanished without trace in Britain. “It slipped into one cinema without a poster, without any advertising, so of course it disappeared,” says Owen drily of a movie that was only resurrected here on the back of its success Stateside. Los Angeles is a “one-industry town”, he says. “Pare it away and it’s only status, really. How much power have you got? What can you do for me? Where are you in the pecking order? I mean, you don’t just judge people by how well they do, or you shouldn’t — there’s more to life than that.”

There is also more to life, one senses from Owen, than being tossed about like some thespian football every time the topic of the next James Bond arises. “There’s not a single strand of anything in those rumours,” he says, claiming that such speculation “has nothing to do with me; it just goes on out there”. In any case, he’s quick to insist he “was never in this for the glamour”, despite being part of a heady vintage at Rada, where he was a year behind Ralph Fiennes, Iain Glen and Jane Horrocks. Owen reprises his theme of being perhaps the hardest-working actor people sometimes haven’t seen. “Nobody goes to see Beyond Borders, or whatever? That’s out of my hands,” he says. “The fact is, I would jump at it today with the same appetite, because my gut tells me more than ever that it’s not about making career movies or movies that look good for this or that. The most important thing is to do the work you want to do — and that’s how you grow as an actor.”

And now that people are not just seeing Closer, but talking Oscars? Owen is staying cool. “I haven’t had time with my newest film, Derailed, to get all whipped up.” And that, he notes calmly and perhaps triumphantly, “is the best position to be in”.


Closer opens on January 14

CC999

Clive Owen- Good actor, didn't like the film though.

Rob Compton

Sorry but I can't alter my opinion of Clive Owen as wooden....

rgds
Rob