Interview: Dominic Cooper, actor

Published on Sunday 18 October 2009 13:33

For a man who's just been to the dentist and will, within hours, be lusted over onstage by Helen Mirren as Phedre, Dominic Cooper is remarkably relaxed.

It's partly the way he looks – a trendily crumpled checked shirt, slim jeans with perfectly engineered worn patches and artfully distressed leather boots, loose and unlaced. It's as though he's just rolled out of bed, straight through the men's department of Selfridges, and landed in the Soho Hotel. But it's also just him. Cooper is open about everything, from being a sex symbol to his relationship with his Mamma Mia! co-star Amanda Seyfried, to line dancing in Deptford with his local football team. He laughs easily and seems blissfully unaware, at least at a personal level, of his status as great British acting hope and heartthrob.

"I can't stand when I read things about other actors, my peers, and you can really tell when the shutters are up and it's cold," he says. "It doesn't come across well. Does it?"

No, of course it doesn't, I tell him. It's much better to be honest and open, spreading out the details of your life like a buffet for the rest of us to nibble on. But, I don't know whether it's his puppy dog eyes or utter sincerity that prompts me to add that I do understand why some people want to hold back on certain aspects of their lives.

"Well there's got to be some stuff that remains personal to you, otherwise you just become … public." Well done, I think. I have just sabotaged my own interview by convincing my subject not to tell me anything about himself. Thank God, Cooper completely ignores me.

It is true though, that with revelations about his family (he shared with a journalist that he discovered recently that his father had a daughter from another relationship, giving Cooper and his two brothers a sister they hadn't known about) and the end of his 12-year relationship with Joanna Carolan, with whom he'd been with since drama school before beginning a relationship with Seyfried, Cooper has been anything but boring in interviews. Slouched on an oversized sofa, with no PR sitting in to monitor my questions or his answers, he doesn't seem to have been burned by his experiences. So how does he feel about having been so forthcoming?

"Is it a regret? Yes." He laughs. "I think you should be open but, having been naive and very young, you realise certain things should never be discussed with anyone apart from your three closest friends."

So that's family and relationships, you mean?

"Exactly," he says with a smile. "But beyond that, nothing, no. Otherwise it's boring. It's nice to be honest and say who you are or it's dull."

I gratefully agree. We're actually here to talk about An Education, the Nick Hornby scripted coming of age story based on a chapter of journalist Lynn Barber's memoir. It's a film Cooper is obviously pleased with, and for good reason. Set in the leafy suburbs of London in the early 1960s, well before any swinging had started, the film mixes beautifully drawn social history with a tender family drama. The young Jenny (Carey Mulligan), dressed in shapeless shift dresses and handknitted cardies but longing for mini skirts, is being hothoused for Oxford but dreaming of romance and adventure. It arrives in the shape of David (Peter Sarsgaard), a much older and sophisticated boyfriend whose best friend, Danny, is played by Cooper. A suave and sophisticated conman who buys Pre-Raphaelite paintings at auctions, listens to opera and always has a perfectly mixed martini in his hand, Danny is a cad and, of course, utterly desirable.

"Danny's got a bit of an edge to him. I don't truly trust him," Cooper says. "I just loved playing someone who was part of that lavish lifestyle. All that glamour and knowing how it could be so tempting to get caught up in it. He has a great life. I'm sure it was very exciting – sports cars, lots of different girlfriends, booze, gambling."

I tell him I could feel a ripple around the cinema as people recalled moments where their desire to be grown-up dragged them out of their depth. For most of us it ended in nothing more than embarrassment, but the memory of what might've happened is shocking as an adult.

"Of course, it's happened to all of us," says Cooper. "It becomes so obscure to us because once we're older we're so desperate to be young you can no longer understand that desperation for time to move on. But then you just couldn't wait. You want to know what will become of me? Where I will I be? Anything's got to be better than this."

Cooper grew up in Greenwich in London, with his mother and two older brothers. His parents split up when he was five but childhood was happy. It was only later, as he grew up, he felt that pang of wanting something more.

"I was definitely tempted. I can completely understand that concept of wanting something else, a lifestyle that is beyond what you have and it being completely compelling. Your own life just seems so crap, there's no other way of putting it."

I wonder if that's an experience that for actors is repeated, especially ones like Cooper, whose careers seem to move unfailingly upwards, as they mix with bigger stars at grander parties in ever more glamorous locations. Since he graduated from Lamda in 2000, Cooper's hardly been out of work. In his final year (after being told he had no rhythm or talent for musicals – the irony that Mamma Mia! opened in the West End the same year isn't lost on him) he performed in Waiting for Godot. It was lucky, he says, because his performance bagged him an agent and brought himself to the attention of Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre, with whom he's worked on various high profile projects. The first saw him play a male prostitute in Mark Ravenhill's Mother Molly's Clap House, then Will in His Dark Materials before a global tour with Alan Bennett's The History Boys. Then came Mamma Mia! Cooper played Sky, the reluctant groom to Seyfried's Sophie and a phenomenon was born. "Every day I hear something about it – about someone's daughter who watches it ten times a day – everyone from two year olds to 48-year-olds love it," he says. "I don't really feel like I was in it. Whenever I'm with Amanda people are obsessed with her. I'm often just standing there and I don't even get recognised. So I feel it was just a holiday for me. I was just visiting Amanda on her film." He laughs.

The film changed things for Cooper and gave him a window into a world where it's easy to forget who you are and where you've come from. Isn't it tempting?

He laughs. "One minute you can find yourself eating sushi on Tom Hanks's yacht in the middle of the Aegean Sea and you think oh this is my life now, this is how I live. And the next minute, you know, you might not work again for a few months," he shrugs. "That's a moment in time, it's not really your life. It's so seductive. You can misinterpret who you are quite easily.

"I've been very lucky, so one minute you've got a film coming out and you do press for it. You're flown around to some beautiful places and you get treated like a king. For a week. It's amazing, you stay in fantastic hotels and you live the life of someone that you're not. And then you go back. What you need to do is go wow, that was amazing, appreciate it but remember that's not your life."

Cooper also keeps in touch with what's real is by "getting the shit kicked out of me every Thursday playing football with the boys.

"You find yourself back in Deptford playing football with your mates," he says. "It's equally wonderful and grounding and brilliant."

His role as Hippolytus opposite Mirren in Phedre has given him more than just a theatrical challenge. It's provided the kind of stability that was missing in his life.

"For two years from the point of flying off to film Mamma Mia! I was doing a bunch of films and a bunch of press. I was literally living out of a case. It was fine and then suddenly I just reached a point where all my stuff was spread across America, at my mum's and my gran's and my brother's, in garages and at friends' houses. Finally it just got too much and I just walked into an estate agent and said I've got to rent somewhere right now. I just needed to put my stuff in one place."

The fact that Cooper has made a habit of ending up in projects that transcend all expectations has both positives and negatives. On the one hand, he's doing what he loves and he's experienced amazing things. But on the other, it takes a toll personally. He's too self-aware and modest to whine about it, but he's honest about the difficulties.

"In terms of family and friends, it's hard," he says. "That's why being here for the last six months has been so good. You get to see people you want to see and spend time with them. My brother and his girl and my nieces, these are the people you should be seeing."

And what about his relationship with Seyfried?

"Having a relationship, especially if both of you are doing the same job, is hard." He tells me that because Phedre has been a repertory performance he's been able to get proper time off to fly to Italy to see Seyfried, who has been filming there. It's made things a bit easier.

"You have to really negotiate it and find your way around it. It's time constraints, really. You've got to find out how you can work around it and make it feasible. You've got to be quite aggressive with work.

"It's about not taking jobs for the sake of it but really thinking about whether it really is what you want to do."

Even as his name and reputation have grown, Cooper has deliberately taken roles across film, theatre and television. He played the dodgy mortgage broker, Dave, in the acclaimed television drama Freefall earlier in the year. It's not easy for actors to talk about their craft without sounding like a bad spoof of a Woody Allen character, but Cooper manages. It's obvious that he loves acting and that he's serious about it. And because of that, certain aspects of the industry get him down. More than a few of his peers from Lamda have given up, he tells me. He's just heard about one guy, a "fantastically talented actor" who's decided that he's getting out.

"He wants a family and he wants to be supportive to them," he says. "He wants to give his wife and his kids his time and his concentration. He was working but he just couldn't have that feeling anymore of not knowing where he'd be or whether he'd be working. I completely respect him for that, especially given he was so talented."

Cooper has spoken in the past about how his commitment to his own career was part of what ended his relationship with Carolan and he's clear about how all encompassing it can be. He's also clear about the limitations of the film industry.

"You do look at it sometimes and think it's so simplistic and sad the way acting works, certainly movies. You know, if you take a snapshot of all the young actors at the moment, in America, certainly, you'll have a photograph of a bunch of people who all look one kind of way. In the 60s and 70s there was a more interesting look for leading men, more rough. It's the time we're in at the moment, people seem to like identikit pretty boys. It's a bit depressing."

Bobbing around on a jetski in the Aegean while singing Abba tunes cemented Cooper's status as a sex symbol, but the press attention isn't something he relishes.

"I never believe it," he says. "I can't quite get my head around it. I don't know how you're meant to take that stuff or what it's supposed to mean."

Do you read it? Is it hard to avoid?

"I read some things. Normally I get a phone call or an e-mail. The football team usually have someone working on a nice selection of embarrassing e-mails that are circulated amongst the team. That's usually how I see it which makes it quite fun because it's your mates taking the absolute piss out of you."

Time's up, Cooper picks up his bag and shakes my hand. He's off to be ogled by Helen Mirren.

An Education is on general release from 30 October

This article was first published in The Scotsman on 17 October 2009