Clive Owen has been working successfully in Britain for more than fifteen years but it was the low-budget film The Croupier that made Hollywood sit up and take notice. Since then the dark and handsome 41-year-old has appeared in the lead role in King Arthur, in Gosford Park, Sin City and last years Closer, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.
Owen, who still lives in London (and is an ardent supporter of Liverpool F.C.), also appears alongside Jennifer Aniston in the forthcoming thriller Derailed. He plays a regular suburban married man who meets a beautiful woman (Aniston) on his morning train and gets caught up in an affair that plunges him into a maelstrom of blackmail, deception and violence. Here Owen talks about broken noses, his famous co-star and his very busy work schedule.
Q: Are you glad that Daniel Craig has been cast as the new James Bond and all the speculation about you taking the part is finally over?
A: I have no idea why my name even came up in connection with James Bond and that’s all it was anyway: speculation. What’s more, I put myself out of the running early on by taking on several other films and I’m very happy with the ones I’ve been getting.
Q: You’ve been shooting films back to back, haven’t you?
A: Yes, and right now I’m shooting The Children of Men, which is set 30 years in the future at a time when nobody has conceived a child for 18 years, so the world’s grinding to a depressing halt.
Q: Right now you also have Derailed about to come out. People are already calling it a morality tale, as if it’s a latter day Fatal Attraction. What’s your take on that?
A: I don’t think of the film in those terms at all. The thing that always appeals to me is the character and I like that he’s just an ordinary guy and that there’s a naivety to him. You know, he talks to a beautiful woman on a train and suddenly he ends up being thrown into this awful, awful nightmare. There’s something very attractive about playing such a reactive part. He has so much that he has to respond to as events happen. He has to be very spontaneous.
Q: Do you choose parts after great deliberation or is based on some sort of gut level reaction?
A: It’s always the gut. Funnily enough I read a script for another thriller about a week before I read the script for Derailed and I was told that I was really going to like it. It was a thriller with lots of twists and turns, and I didn’t like it at all. It was very cleverly constructed but so contrived. I didn’t buy the situation so I didn’t know how to act it. Then I received the script for Derailed and it was a similar story in a way – I mean it was a psychological thriller – but I immediately understood it and knew I could play this guy. I understood his decision and why he does what he does.
Q: This is immensely physical role, isn’t it? You’re thrown around a lot at the start of the movie. Did that appeal to you?
A: Not in itself, but it was important to me that the audience sees the character’s torture. In lots of movies someone gets really beaten up and smacked in the nose and in the next scene they have a little redness and then it’s gone. We ended up in discussions about what it really looked like when someone gets their nose broken.
Q: You star alongside Jennifer Aniston in the movie. Given how famous she is, was it easy to meet her without having any preconceived ideas about what she’d be like?
A: Preconceived ideas always go straight out the window when you actually meet people. For someone in the place she is, I think she’s incredibly grounded and just a lovely girl and uncomplicated in the best sense of the word.
Q: How did she surprise you as an actress?
A: She didn’t surprise me because I’m such a great admirer of the people that make it look easy and that light comedy thing, which people think is a piece of cake, is really very difficult. I think she’s just naturally gifted in that way and people who can do that can usually do anything.
Q: Your career took off in Hollywood just a few years ago, though you have been working in the UK a long time. Was it the attention you got for The Croupier that got the ball rolling?
A: Yes, though it wasn’t as if the American public saw it, it just seemed as if everyone in Los Angeles and New York did. It really got some momentum going. I came out to Los Angeles and all of a sudden I get a call from Robert Altman asking me to have lunch with him.
Q: Would you have been happy if your career had never taken off in Hollywood?
A: Well, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. You can’t sustain a career in films in Britain but I worked a lot in television and on the stage and always felt I had a pretty full career. But what’s happened for me here, I feel very privileged to be working with so many hugely talented people.
Q: Is there a big difference between making films in Europe and making them in Hollywood?
A: What’s odd is that I haven’t worked much in Hollywood itself. Closer was shot in London and so was Derailed and now The Children of Men. Still, I’d say there’s pretty much no difference, except that when you get into bigger studio movies there are so many people with opinions that have to be taken in consideration. The bigger the budget the more true that is, so small films have a sort of purity about them. But I have really been happy with all my film experiences. I mean, with Closer, even if no one had gone to see it, I would have still done it. And I’ve really liked the collaboration on Derailed, creating a character, working with Mikael Hafstrom the director, the whole cast.
Q: And now Derailed is about to come out, what are you doing next?
A: Finishing on Children of Men, then Elizabeth: The Golden Years in which I play Sir Walter Raleigh; and between those two a film called Shoot ‘Em Up, which is wild, very fresh and very original and inventive and basically ninety minutes of shoot-outs. There’s also a sequel to Sin City on the horizon. So I’m pretty busy.
