< Previous58 Double-breasted wool overcoat, knitted polo neck jumper and suede trousers, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; brown semi- brogues, M. Dumas & Sons; gold Rolex Day-Date and L.G.R spectacles, Paul Bettany’s own. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5830/12/2021 01:33:20 PM59 Viewers should, Bettany says, expect a darker affair altogether to the show’s predecessor. “It’s very different in tone from A Very English Scandal. There’s no farcical element to this because you’re essentially dealing with a subject matter — domestic violence — where there’s no room for the kind of tone that A Very English Scandal had. In that one, the political fallout had a sort of Yes, Minister tone to it. This felt like the wrong subject matter, the wrong forum, to have that kind of tone. It’s much more serious.” Bettany once compared Lars von Trier’s directorial methods to Jackson Pollock (“You’re on the sidelines, mixing his colours”), and in the same 2013 Guardian interview he talked about “fences [being put] around the actors in a way that never used to happen”. How did he rate the Norwegian director Anne Sewitsky’s approach to A Very British Scandal? “I thought she was brilliant. She always chose to bat against the way that the scene was written, and I think consequently she got some really interesting moments from Claire and myself. I was often surprised by the direction she wanted to take the scene in. I found that really exciting.” It was also a chance to “flex some different muscles”, he says. “As an actor, having it be my job to deliver this incredibly entitled, malignant narcissist and potentially sociopathic man, who has worked his way through two other wealthy women and taken them for everything they had, just felt like a really nice counterpoint to everything I’ve been doing recently with WandaVision, and playing that passably charming robot fella.” Superhero status The “charming robot fella”, of course, is his character from the Iron Man and Avengers movies, as well as two Disney+ series from this year: WandaVision and What If...? The shows’ premises are no easier to explain to the uninitiated than anthropological ethnology is to a Britain First meeting, but here is an attempt to do so as briefly as possible: WandaVision is a T.V. spin-off of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, set a few weeks after the events of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, in which Bettany’s character, Vision (a physical cocktail of downloads, including the artificial intelligence robot J.A.R.V.I.S., whom he voiced in earlier movies), and Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff have been transported not just to this universe but to this world — suburban New Jersey, to be precise — where they try to integrate into society and hide their superhero status, in the process giving pastiche-y nods to old American sitcoms, such as I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Full House and Roseanne. What If...? is an animated series, with Bettany voicing his character and exploring parallel-universe plot lines to various major moments from the Marvel Cinematic Universe films. Now, Bettany may be a man who missed 2003’s nautical boot camp before Master and Commander (during which Russell Crowe and other co-stars learned how to set sails, use canons and fight with cannons), but he is a man who is happy to suffer for his art. He put so much zeal into every take as a shouty Geoffrey Chaucer in 2001’s A Knight’s Tale that he developed laryngitis. He ended up donning a wig in his role as the aforementioned albino monk in 2006’s The Da Vinci Code because the bleach the make-up department had been using burned bleeding holes in his head. But wearing Vision’s purple muscle costume throughout a day’s shooting, trailer time included, is something of an endurance feat. “One of the most challenging things I’ve had to do on a set, weirdly, is stay calm in that costume,” Bettany says. “I’ve only had one claustrophobic freak-out in all the years I’ve been doing it, but there’s definitely a meditative place you need to get into just to be in that costume that often — even though there’s a special suit underneath that pumps ice cold water through it. I don’t like to complain, though, because you get paid a lot of money to be in that uncomfortable suit. A nicer challenge is humanising someone who’s so visually not human. That’s why playing WandaVision is such a lovely process — it’s Vision’s Pinocchio-like journey: ‘I’m a real boy now.’” It was in his WandaVision role that Bettany got to deliver a line, earlier this year, that set the internet — or, at least, the corner of it devoted to the Marvel universe — alight. Conveyed to Wanda, who is suffering from immeasurable grief (long story), Vision asks, “What is grief, if not love persevering?” It’s a snippet that, for Bettany, encapsulates neatly the Marvel creative process. “It’s a pretty memorable line, and especially memorable in terms of how that line was built — by lots of people. Not just the writer of the episode, who was brilliant. Not just by [the show creator] Jac Schaeffer, who was brilliant, but also by Jac Schaeffer’s assistant, who came in with coffee and offered up that final word, which was ‘persevering’. So that was a microcosm of the whole experience of working at Marvel, which I don’t think people really appreciate or believe. But it’s such a collaborative experience. Everybody is invited into the process. The best idea wins.” It’s fair to say that Bettany’s involvement with the Marvel/ Disney milieu has launched his career further into the stratosphere. Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War both made more than $1bn at the worldwide box office. But his rise to the top of the Hollywood pile at 50 years of age, from his stage debut, aged 19 (in a West End revival of An Inspector Calls), has resembled not so much a rollercoaster ride as an electrocardiogram. “I remember my first night performing at the theatre, having taken the bus to Aldwych and first seen my name on the marquee,” he says. “And I remember later walking out onto Westminster Bridge, standing on the other side of where I once used to go busking, and the whole river was golden and it felt like my future rolling out in front of me — this sort of uninterrupted path of success. And, boy, was that not true!” “The whole river was golden, and it felt like my future rolling out in front of me. And, boy, was that not true!” TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 5930/12/2021 01:33:33 PM60 It was true for a while. As far, let’s say, as Waterloo Bridge. His breakthrough movie role, a savagely vivid portrayal of a terrifyingly gimlet-eyed gangster in 2000’s stylish, late-sixties, London-set Gangster No.1 (for which he received a Bafta nomination), was followed by a string of castings: roles as Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale; as Crowe’s boisterous roommate in A Beautiful Mind in 2001; again opposite Crowe, as the mild-mannered naturalist and ship’s surgeon Dr. Stephen Maturin in the aforementioned Master and Commander; and as the star-gazing philosopher Tom Edison Jr., in 2004, in that Lars Von Trier outing, Dogville. But that was the year that the creator of his career tapestry dropped a stitch, although Bettany blames himself — a touch of complacency he indulged in following his early 2000s purple patch. “I think I took it in my stride, in quite a naive way, and thought [success] would always be there for me,” he says. “And then I made a movie called Wimbledon.” Coming in the slipstream of Hugh Grant’s series of English-boy-meets- American-girl romcoms, Wimbledon — in which Bettany (Grant, at 44, was apparently considered too old) played a tennis veteran in decline who discovers his on-court mojo with the help of Kirsten Dunst’s women’s-circuit starlet — should have been career rocket fuel. It wasn’t quite to be. “I love the movie, I love the script a lot, and more importantly, my mum loved the film,” he says. “But nobody else did. And I felt that and a few other things were responsible for a real lull in being able to get work that I was interested in. “Right at the end of making that movie, my son Stellan was born, so I decided I was going to take two years off, and I just assumed it would all be there for me after that — that the faucet would still deliver water whenever I turned it on.” Again, the wheezy laugh. “I turned it on after two years, and it was a case of, ‘Ah, there’s no water coming out’. Nobody cared. So I definitely had a sort of naive notion that things would sort of continue as they had, and they didn’t.” He recalls times when he despaired of ever working again. “I remember ringing a new agent and saying, ‘Look, I really want you to lift the veil. I want to understand how this business works. I don’t want to be mollycoddled.’ And he went, ‘Totally, I’ll do that for you’. I said, ‘So how are we going to get me a job?’ ‘Oh, Gosh, no, I can’t get you a job. Not now.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you stink of s*** and we’ve got to wait for the smell of s**** to leave you.’” The cackle goes up to 11. “It was like taking a gravel shower — an incredibly painful thing to go through, but, boy, did I feel clean afterwards! Luckily, people remember the good performances, not the bad ones. In the long run… ” Bettany has zero regrets about making Wimbledon — not just because of his mother’s fondness for it, but because the actor playing his character’s agent was Jon Favreau, who went on, variously, to become an actor in, and director and producer of, movies in the Marvel Comics franchise. “It was Jon who, a few years after Wimbledon, told me he needed an actor — and I quote, ‘with absolutely no personality’ — to play Robert Downey Jr.’s A.I. I was obviously his first port of call.” Forward-wind a few years, and Bettany had a meeting in L.A. with a producer who told him, “You’re done in this town”. Bettany says: “I sat down on the sidewalk on Sunset Boulevard, and my phone rang. And it was [the writer and director] Joss Whedon saying, ‘Do you want to play Vision in The Avengers?’ I gave a look over his shoulder at the producer. ‘Yes, I dooooo’.” Mixed feelings Paul Bettany’s résumé is an eclectic one. Aside from the aforementioned roles, he’s played — and always with a blend of intricacy and power, of which his 6ft 3in frame is only one factor — literature professors (2020’s Uncle Frank), borderline fanatical police inspectors (2010’s The Tourist), widowed, abusive fathers (2008’s The Secret Life of Bees), and a businessman-cum-psychotic criminal mastermind (2006’s Firewall, with Harrison Ford). Oh, and talking of Ford, let us not forget his turn as the caped antagonist Dryden Vos in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story. He’s played a real-life nemesis to fundamental Christianity (Charles Darwin in 2009’s Creation), but also monks (in The Reckoning, as well as The Da Vinci Code), men of the cloth (2011’s Priest), and even a firearm-brandishing archangel (in 2010’s Legion), all despite not being Christian (“Were I playing Prometheus, I wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to believe in Zeus,” he once said). Inevitably, during the requisite T.V. stint sandwiched by theatre and movies, he did The Bill; less inevitably, he played Prince William of Orange in the drama Sharpe’s Waterloo, and he’s also done two Dickens characters (Bill Sikes and James Steerforth) on the small screen. No wonder time constraints forced him to turn down King George VI in 2010’s The King’s Speech and the American gynaecologist Dr. William Masters in 2013’s Masters of S** (roles that went to Colin Firth and Michael Sheen, respectively). Such a diversity of castings, he says, entails getting into different head spaces, which in turn can work wonders on how you approach real life. “There’s so much sort of vanity in the whole acting world, and the last edifying bit of it for me is having the exercise of imagining myself in somebody else’s shoes. And I do really, really love doing that. It’s made me less judgmental as a human being, I think. I hope so.” What of the other side of the coin, though? How does a breadth of human experience bolster one’s acting credentials? Bettany has certainly experienced intense tragedy — when he was 16, his brother, who was eight years his junior, lost his life falling from a tennis pavilion roof, which “blew the family apart”, he told The Guardian “Then I made Wimbledon. I love the movie, and more importantly, my mum loved it. But nobody else did.” TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6030/12/2021 01:33:38 PM61 Double-breasted wool overcoat, Ralph Lauren Purple Label. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6130/12/2021 01:33:45 PM62 This and opposite page: Sheepskin overcoat, cotton shirt and wool pleated trousers, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; Derby shoes, M. Dumas & Sons; gold Rolex Day-Date, necklace and L.G.R sunglasses, Paul Bettany’s own. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6230/12/2021 01:33:53 PM63 TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6330/12/2021 01:34:04 PM64 Denim western shirt and jeans, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; raincoat, Ten C at M. Dumas & Sons; suede Chelsea boots, To Boot New York at M. Dumas & Sons; gold Rolex Day-Date and Persol sunglasses and necklace, Paul Bettany’s own. TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6430/12/2021 01:34:09 PM65 — and you only have to talk to him about his family to know that his life has also been filled with a measure of elation and joy that ballasts the amiable animation with which he carries himself in this, and any other, interview. He’s done plenty of hedonism (his bromance with Johnny Depp — with whom he starred in Transcendence as well as The Tourist and Mortdecai — occasionally veered into mind-bending territory, according to Depp’s testimony in his libel case against The Sun), though Bettany is immersed in the more savoury thrills of family life these days. Does a wide spectrum of experience improve his acting? “I don’t think it can hurt, but you also see people who come right out of the gate as fully formed, amazing actors. I’m working with one right now. This kid, he’s called Riley Looc, and he always knows exactly where he is in the narrative. So I don’t know. And also, I’ve lost interest in how actors get to where they need to be during the scene as long as they get there. I used to be really kind of like, Well, how are they doing it? And the whole thing is a magic trick. It doesn’t really matter as long as they deliver. “For me, if the scene’s an emotional scene, I have a pretty torturous process of having to get there. And I know some people that can just do it. And they’re extraordinary. My wife, for instance, only has to think about what the scene is. I need things like artefacts from my life to get myself into some sort of place where I can deliver the thing that’s needed for the scene.” I assume this last point is a reference to the indie drama Uncle Frank, in which he plays a grieving son — Bettany reportedly travelled to the film’s set in North Carolina with his late brother’s T-shirt in his suitcase. When it came to Bettany’s foray into directing — 2014’s Shelter, about a widowed junkie and a Nigerian immigrant surviving on the streets of New York, for which he also wrote the screenplay — he was inspired by an issue that, for any city dweller, manages to be quotidian and yet deeply affecting. At 17, he would regularly sleep on the floor of his sister’s boarding house, leaving at 5am to walk the streets of central London, past endless shop doorways with human forms shrouded in grubby sleeping bags, cowering within them. Later, when taking his children to school, and with his life at a profoundly different juncture, Bettany would walk past a homeless couple who lived under a plastic sheet on a triangle of grass close to his and Connelly’s Tribeca home. “When Hurricane Sandy came, in the mayhem of trying to get my family out and get out of New York, because this crazy storm was coming, I didn’t stop to think about them at all,” he says. On their return to the city, the couple had vanished. “I later spent a lot of time thinking about them and wondering what their story might have been. I’d been tinkering with the idea of writing a movie about empathy and polarisation, and that was the story I chose.” Bettany almost took up the megaphone for Harvest Moon. “Part of the reason I’m not directing is that we’ve got a great director, and part of the reason is I don’t have time to spend eight months after shooting editing and finishing it,” he says. But he insists he’ll take to the folding canvas chair again. “I just like telling stories, whether it’s writing or producing somebody else’s thing, or acting in it… I love the collaborative spirit of making films and everybody coming together to tell one story. I love that feeling.” Life experiences aside, something that has affected Bettany’s career is a learning disorder that was identified as early as 1877 but seldom addressed during his own formative years in north-west London and (from the age of nine) in Hertfordshire. He explains: “I remember at school, I was in biology class, and I must have been about 10 years old. The teacher showed a picture on one of those old projectors, and I knew what it was. ‘So what is this that you’re looking at?’ he said, and I put my hand up and said the wrong thing due to my disorder. I never spoke again in class after that.” Fascinatingly, dyslexia affects about 10 per cent of the general population but rises to about a third — according to the casting website Spotlight, which has a page devoted to the condition — in performing arts circles. Keira Knightley, Judi Dench, Keanu Reeves and Tom Cruise are among the big industry names to be affected by it. Is there a correlation between the condition and acting ability? “I think it’s really helped me because, in the end, I would refuse to come into auditions and just read something off the cuff because I couldn’t,” Bettany says. “I knew I was going to fail. So I would learn scripts in advance. I remember, in the read-through for A Beautiful Mind, we were all sitting around a table, and I was pretending to read the script — I had learned the whole thing off by heart. And I think that helped me. I could never control whether I was more talented than another actor walking into an audition, or better looking, or more suited for the role, or taller, or with a better build, whatever it is. The only thing I could control was how prepared I was. And I think because of my issue with sight- reading, I came really, really prepared. “It’s calmed down now, because I’m 50 years old and more confident and whatever. But still, life is full of moments where you don’t know what’s about to happen. I’ve always felt my heartbeat slow down when the cameras start rolling, even from the beginning, because I know I am about to be asked a really difficult question by my dad in the show or whatever, and that somebody much brighter than me will have written me a response that I have been able to wrap my brain around, and really understand it before I deliver it. So I’ve always felt much more relaxed acting than I have bumbling through real life.” Our conversation comes to a close. Bettany’s parting gambit — “Try not to make me sound too much of a pontificating a***” — is suffixed by a kiss of the fingers, flung across cyberspace with a sweep of his arm. I’m still oblivious as to what was in that list of banned topics — the profile writer’s forbidden fruits stay out of reach — but Bettany is not a man who’ll let anyone he speaks to go hungry. “For me, if the scene’s an emotional one, I have a pretty torturous process of having to get there.” TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6530/12/2021 01:34:17 PM66 “There’s so much vanity in the acting world, and the last edifying bit of it for me is having the exercise of imagining myself in somebody else’s shoes. I do really love doing that. It’s made me less judgmental as a human being, I think. I hope so.” TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6630/12/2021 01:34:49 PM67 Sheepskin overcoat, grey cotton shirt and wool pleated gurkha strap trousers, Ralph Lauren Purple Label; brown semi-brogues, M. Dumas & Sons; necklace, Paul Bettany’s own.GROOMING: CHANDLER WEST NAJJAR TRME_52-67_Paul Bettany_11914744.indd 6730/12/2021 01:34:56 PMNext >