Interview: Clive Owen, actor

Published on Sunday 10 January 2010 10:49

NO-ONE dedicates good looks to the service of near-mute introverted brutes better than Clive Owen; an economical approach that has served him well in his Hollywood career.

Unlike motormouth matinee heartthrob George Clooney, he doesn't deliver one-line zingers, but his smouldering intensity seems eloquent enough whether he's playing King Arthur, a hitman in Sin City or even Sir Walter Raleigh – whose suggestive stare rather than a puddle-soaked cloak was enough to make Good Queen Bess swoon in Elizabeth: The Golden Age. "I'm always interested in what you can express without saying too much," agrees Owen. "I'm one of those actors whose approach to every line is to ask, 'Do I have to say that?'"

Yet the star is far from his usual gruff comfort zone in his latest film. The Boys Are Back is an unashamedly open-hearted drama about a widower struggling to raise two sons in Australia. It's a film about messy emotions and demands tears; both Owen's, and yours. When it comes to casting against terse badass type, this is as much a departure from type as Bruce Willis in a Liberace biopic.

In one of the film's earliest scenes, Owen wrestles not with gangsters or double agents, but with the family's washing machine.

"Scott Hicks, the director, says the bit where I do the laundry is his favourite scene," says Owen, who probably smiles more in 30 minutes of conversation than he has in 20 years of brooding film and TV roles.

Based on Simon Carr's 2001 memoir and directed by Oscar nominee Hicks (Shine), The Boys Are Back features Owen as a sports journalist who loses his wife (Laura Fraser) to cancer then has to pull himself together to raise his six-year-old son (Nicholas McAnulty) and a moody teenager (George MacKay).

"I've always considered being a father separate from work," says 44-year-old Owen, whose own father left home when he was three. "I go off and make movies. I come home, and I'm a dad and I hang with my girls.

"But suddenly there was this brilliant exploration of being a father that resonated enormously with me.

"I've seen lots of family movies where the family exist in a lovely warm bubble but real families are much more volatile. When Nicholas throws a tantrum in the film, I recognise that from my kids. Until they are eight or nine, kids are crazy, manic obsessives and they go into funks. There are a lot of ups and downs in parenting, and I wanted to do a film that would not be afraid to show the harder times and would be something that people would relate to."

At times he improvised through scenes in order to match Nicholas's naturalism. He also arranged some "Nick and Clive" bonding time, taking the young actor on outings to the zoo or riding the dodgems so that when it came to filming a pillow fight with his screen son, "for half of the scene he didn't know we were filming".

Owen's childhood sounds less idyllic. He grew up in Coventry with four brothers, mother and stepfather, and didn't see his natural father, country and western singer Jess Owen, again until he was 19. The reunion didn't take, but he isn't keen to discuss this. Of his upbringing, he only says: "It wasn't an unhappy experience."

He is markedly more comfortable talking about parenting from a father's perspective. Fourteen years ago he married actress Sarah Jane Fenton, and the couple have two daughters. Hannah is 12, Eve is 10. Neither of them has known a time when their dad wasn't famous, or didn't leave their London home to spend a month or three on a film set, but until recently they hadn't seen many of his movies. "They just thought it was weird that strangers wanted to talk to me on the street but lately they've got some idea of what it's about."

Earlier this year he let them see some of his double-crossing espionage thriller, Duplicity, "apart from Julia Roberts and I kissing a bit", but The Boys Are Back is the first of his movies they have seen from start to finish. "They were very thrilled to see it," he says dryly. "They will be able to see a big library of my work when they're 18, but I'm not happy about them seeing all of my work even then.

"It was really beginning to get to them that they couldn't see my films. They'd ask: 'Why can't we watch it? We know it's a movie!' But the idea of them sitting down and watching Closer or Shoot 'Em Up is a big no-no. Now they are putting serious pressure on me to do a kids' film."

They've also started to take an interest in his co-stars. When Owen made the twisty thriller Derailed, his children begged him to let them meet Jennifer Aniston because of Friends; but they aren't so impressed by their father's own star status. "If anything they're very disdainful," he laughs. "Hannah's favourite phrase at the moment is 'If only they could see what you're really like.'"

Even his appearance on Best Dressed and Most Beautiful People lists doesn't impress them. "They think I'm a joke," he says. "A friend of my 12-year-old showed her some magazine and went, 'Your Dad's on this list, and that's weird.' And I agreed with her."

In the film, Carr has to find a balance between work and family, a dilemma with which Owen is also familiar. When Eve, his second daughter, was born, he took the rest of the year off to support his wife. "I thought I'd planned it well with Hannah because I had a job lined up which seemed to be a little while after her arrival. In the end, she was quite late, and I had to go away when she was three weeks old. I really regretted it afterwards. It was a very crucial time, those first few weeks, and it took a long time to get that closeness back."

He credits his wife, who is now training to become a therapist, with shouldering the burden of child rearing. "There was a time when I was running round doing films back-to-back," he recalls. "I came to realise that I could end up at the point when I turned around and they'd be 16, and I'd have missed it all."

Right now, he has no project to move on to. There's another film, Trust, awaiting release and the possibility of a sequel to the heist flick Inside Man or even a stint on stage – but nothing has been planned. "It's actually quite nice because it's the first time for a long time when I haven't known what I'm going to do and it's a reminder of when I first started out in acting when we'd talk about the unpredictability of it," he says.

The trouble is finding good scripts, but unlike other actors, he has had success in the past and is confident that enough good work will come his way.

"In the early days, when I went for jobs and didn't get them, I used to think it was their fault," he says. "I never doubted myself – I was that single-minded." So when ITV's rogue-on-the-make series Chancer brought him recognition and massive fan adulation, he hated it so much that he bailed out after 20 episodes.

Afterwards, he made a determined effort to take more offbeat, non-formulaic work, like Close My Eyes, Stephen Poliakoff's movie about an incestuous brother and sister, and then Bent, the Holocaust drama about Nazi persecution of homosexuals, for which he lost nearly three stone in weight. When there was talk of him becoming the next James Bond, he subverted his hard-man image by spoofing the suave superspy in Steve Martin's remake of The Pink Panther.

And Owen will keep on trusting his instinct about refusing to play the hero. "We're all fallible, and those are the most interesting characters to play. The worst mistake an actor can make is to want to play heroes. And I've done the opposite ever since."

The Boys Are Back is in cinemas from 22 January, www.boysarebackmovie.com

This article was first published in Scotsman on Sunday on 10 January, 2010.