Inteview: Jeremy Irvine, actor

Before he was cast as the hero in War Horse, Jeremy Irvine had only acted professionally once – and that was playing a tree. Siobhan Synnot meets director Steven Spielberg’s latest protégé

WHEN Jeremy Irvine shared his first scene with his War Horse, there were tears in his eyes. “It was an audition and I was desperately trying to portray myself as this master horseman,” he recalls. “Then I put my foot in the wrong place and the horse stamped on it. I got through the rest of what was already quite an emotional scene with a real sob in my voice.”

Irvine is 21, with the hair of Montgomery Clift, the blue-eyed squint of Paul Newman and a healthy appreciation of luck and irony that is all his own. We’re sitting in his suite at Claridge’s in London, two floors above the tearoom where he first met Steven Spielberg as part of a long audition process for the role of Albert, the Devonshire teenager who forms an unbreakable bond with a horse called Joey at the outset of the First World War.

Spielberg was looking for a new face, and was prepared to trawl UK, Ireland and Australia for the right one. Irvine, who read the Michael Morpugro novel when he was ten, was convinced he was not the boy Spielberg was looking for.

For a start, he had no film or television experience. In fact, his only professional engagement had been a play. On the plus side, Dunsinane, by Scottish playwright David Greig, was a Royal Shakespeare Company production. On the minus, his role was small and the performance wooden. “I was a tree,” he says cheerfully. “I had no lines and my main job was to wave my branches. I think I was only there because I was cheap.”

“At no point did I think I’d get this part in War Horse. My agent would phone me up after each audition and the two of us would just say, ‘Well, this is great audition experience.’ That’s all it ever was. We never said, ‘God, what if we got this part?’ I wasn’t even getting called back for commercials, so that just wasn’t on the cards.”

After two months and five auditions, he was told that Spielberg wanted to hear his accent one last time. “My agent said, ‘Make sure you sound natural.’ So I went in front of the camera one more time and at the last minute they handed me this script. I turned it over and read, ‘Joey, Joey! Steven Spielberg wants me to play Albert in War Horse.’ They gave me a DVD of my reaction, and I’ve got it at home. Don’t ask to see it, it’s very embarrassing.”

Spielberg admits the casting was a leap of faith, but he’s not allergic to taking chances on young actors. He took a 13-year-old Welsh boy called Christian Bale and placed him at the heart of his PoW movie, Empire of the Sun. And a six-year-old called Drew Barrymore went on to make a few more films after appearing in ET. In fact, the only point of debate had been Irvine’s height. At six foot, might he be a little too tall to pass for a fresh-faced 15-year-old at the start of the film? Certainly Irvine towers over his screen dad, played by Peter Mullan, but in the end Irvine’s fresh, open manner won him the role.

“Jeremy wasn’t battle-tested in any way, but he had a certain honesty and all I look for is honesty in any young person that I direct,” says Spielberg. “He was the most real kid that we saw. Also, the horse liked him a lot. The horse helped.”

Irvine chuckles a lot when this is relayed to him. “I’d no experience of horses at all. I’d certainly never ridden one.” Along with Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch, who play cavalry officers, he was sent to a horse-riding boot camp to learn to ride like a natural in eight weeks. “I would turn up to ride at 8am and Jeremy would already be there, mucking out the stables,” says Hiddleston. “He was like part of the furniture.”

“To begin with, learning to ride was quite sore,” says Irvine. “There’s a reason why John Wayne waddled a bit.” Along with toughening thigh muscles, he also softened towards his four-legged co-stars.

“I really didn’t think I would get suckered into getting moist-eyed over horses,” he says. “But these are the most well-trained horses in the world, they are like the Formula 1 racecars of horses.” More than a dozen horses were required to play Joey, all of them painstakingly painted with a white star on the forehead and white fetlocks. Some were skilled at galloping, other were trained to hold their heads low, to appear sickly. Irvine was the actor who had the most screentime with the horse, so was he tempted to take a shortcut to their affections with sugarlumps or a contraband apple?

“You’re not supposed to give them treats,” he scolds. “Besides, then every time you do a take, they would try to get food out of your pockets.

“It was purely down to hours spent with the horse,” he continues. “Some of them came to us untrained, and I’d spend hours standing outside the stable – you couldn’t even get into the stable with them. Then later you’d get in the stable with them and eventually you could touch them and play hide-and-seek in the fields. Horses love little games. I’d sit down and take my shoe off and they’d run off with my shoe.”

He says that being at the heart of his first film was a daunting experience: “I turned up on the first day and there were just hundreds of trailers and all the machinery that goes into making a big movie like this. Pretty much every actor had more experience than me.”

He turned to co-stars Peter Mullan, Emily Watson and Tom Hiddleston for support. Hiddleston, only a decade older than Irvine but far more experienced in filmcraft following work in Thor and Deep Blue Sea, gave him his best piece of advice. “He told me to treat it like any other job, to turn up and do the best that I could. Then go home, and freak out.

“There was one day where we were shooting the scene where I discover Peter Mullan is going to sell my horse, and literally I was so emotional that I couldn’t get all the words out. But Spielberg said to me, ‘Really focus on getting into Peter Mullan’s eyes, to get your point across.’ So the scene went from being very loud and big, to something small and intense. He guided me through the process. He was so much more than a director to me. This was my first film so he also had to be my film acting teacher.”’

Irvine, who comes from a small Cambridgeshire village, didn’t even tell his friends about his first speaking role. “This stuff doesn’t happen to people there.” Instead, he simply disappeared for several months.

Two years on, he seems just as unassuming, even though War Horse has dramatically upgraded him from woodland roles. He is currently filming director Mike Newell’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic Great Expectations, starring Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, and he also just finished work on the drama Now Is Good co-starring Dakota Fanning. Heartthrob status also seems to beckon: not only is he confident, good company, he also scrubs up rather well, with a noticeably more chiselled jawline than when he shot War Horse.

“The catering on the set was amazing,” he says, glumly. “And when you’re an actor to learn to stock up when you can, so I was stuffing my face on free food. I put on a stone during the shoot. When we had a screening for my friends, the next day I got about 15 texts, each one saying, ‘Jeremy, did you eat the bloody horse?’”

• War Horse is in cinemas from tomorrow.