Interview: Colin Firth - 'If you're afraid to play a character because they're gay, just grow up'

Published on Thursday 4 February 2010 18:03

COLIN FIRTH is associated more with British reserve than letting it all hang out.

• Actor Colin Firth and director Tom Ford from the film 'A Single Man'. Picture: Getty

So it comes as a surprise when the actor claims that from the age of eight, he committed himself to being a hippy – at least "as much as you can be when you go to school every day". He grew his hair long, took guitar lessons, and at some point got his ears pierced. Then, sartorial elegance was the last thing on his mind. In fact, he laughs, "One of the reasons I became an actor is because I wanted a career where yo

As he speaks, Firth is sitting before me in one of the snappiest black suits and crispest white shirts I've ever seen. The objects of envy are the work of Tom Ford, the former head designer at Gucci, as is the film we have met to discuss, A Single Man – a role which will, shortly after the interview, see Firth being nominated for an Academy Award.

The movie, like the suit, is a thing of beauty. But far from being as bloodless as a showroom mannequin, as some commentators had cynically predicted, Ford's directorial debut – intelligently adapted by the designer himself from a novel by Christopher Isherwood – is a poignant portrait of loss and grief that conveys heart-wrenching intimacy, not the icy detachment and hauteur of the runway.

Present in almost every scene of the film, Firth delivers a devastating performance as George Falconer, a man unanchored by the sudden death of his long-time partner, Jim (Matthew Goode), in a car crash. Now 52, and at a crossroads in his life, he wavers, like the world dangerously embroiled in the Cuban missile crisis around him, between choosing life or suicide. Before the Oscar nod, he had already received a string of award nominations, from the Screen Actors Guild, the Golden Globes and BAFTA.

The 49-year-old knew he was onto something special with A Single Man, but not, he says, when he read the script. It interested him, but "I couldn't be sure from that what kind of thing we were dealing with. It was what it felt like to act it, what it felt like to play, that started to convince me there was something in it."

To be precise, it was while filming an early scene of George alone in his house that Firth really "started to get that buzz". "It was beautiful, but it wasn't beautiful in the fashion magazine sense. It was a very elegant image of solitude. I could really feel then that there's a power to this story of a lonely person."

Firth was not entirely surprised by the apparent ease with which Ford made the transition from fashion to film. Working as a designer had given the American a "lifetime of experience of thinking deeply into a concept and marshalling people, and inspiring them to share the concept so they will do it with you. That's what a good director does," the actor says, "and he had done that as someone who does fashion shoots.

"If you've got as strong an instinct as he has for design and for photography and for light, and you love film as much as he does, and you love story, it's not necessarily the biggest leap."

In truth, the same could be said of Firth's casting as a man dealing with bereavement, given that he previously played a father mourning the death of his wife in Michael Winterbottom's Genova. "I don't think they're completely different," he says. "There's a decision in both of these characters to go about their day as a way of dealing with grief."

In A Single Man, though, we see the "public George" – meticulously constructed in front of a mirror at the start of the film – and the "private George". "I think that is specific to our film," Firth says. "There's a lot of Tom in this, and that, I think, is a profound part of his psychology, if you will forgive me for pop psychoanalysing him. I think people with great emotions and great passion sometimes are fastidious as a way to contain and control all that."

This is not the first time the actor has played a gay character; he launched his stage career with the flamboyantly un-closeted Guy Bennett in Another Country. Since then he has been out in Relative Values, in Mamma Mia!, and ambiguous in Where the Truth Lies, yet people still ask if he was "afraid" to play George. Just thinking about the question makes him bristle.

"If you're an actor who is afraid to play a character because they're gay," he says sharply, "you should probably go and get yourself sorted out, actually. Grow up." To Firth, George's homosexuality was almost irrelevant. "I certainly didn't walk around gay, thinking gay, brushing my teeth gay."

He is not sure why, but George has stayed with him longer than most of his other roles. There is a lot of him, as well as a lot of Ford, in the character, Firth says, though he refuses to be more specific. The film's theme of age and youth may have something to do with it. Firth jokes about being in the midst of an extended midlife crisis, but his attitude to ageing appears ambivalent.

On the one hand, watching himself is "horrid", because it looks like he's "being imitated on screen by someone who looks like my paternal grandmother". However, his maturing features mean the work is getting more interesting. "This is my raw material," he says, pointing at his face. "A youthful face, particularly if you're rather bland-looking like I was when I was young, it's just bland. I remember being 25, and working with older actors and wanting a couple of wrinkles, because I thought, 'I can't express anything until I have got something on my face.'"

With age, too, has come characters with histories and a "more complex attitude to their problems, because they've either encountered them before or realise that they're not able to deal with problems that they thought they were able to deal with, which echoes where I'm at in my life. So I'm reflecting where I am. I would hate to be playing a callow youth in love for the first time now."

These kinds of parts do not always pay well, relatively speaking – "You don't make a Michael Winterbottom film for money, and definitely not the Tom Ford film" – but that's not always what's important. "I'm not that materialistic," Firth says. He jokes, though, that he started out with "pretentious ideas about changing forms and mixing media", until he got the opportunity to be in a film. "I sold out immediately. I turned into a huge whore. I used to have standards." The work shows he is kidding, of course. Even so, it cannot always be just about the art. "Peter O'Toole used to say, 'Darling, one for show, one for dough.' So it's not a perfect world."

A Single Man may not have fattened up Firth's wallet, but the kudos it is generating should do wonders for his future. He is not taking anything for granted, however. He knows acting is nothing if not a fickle business, and careers are often built on sand.

"Sean Connery's been doing action movies to well above my age, with love interests that are 25 years old," he says. "But I'm sure it won't go on forever. You can get a good momentum in middle age and then it starts to get less interesting again. Who knows? A lot of people break the pattern. I'm finding it's a good age to be, work-wise."

&#149 A Single Man is released on 12 February.