Paul Bettany Interview, InkHeart

Paul Bettany has earned praise for his work in several high-profile films, including two for director Ron Howard: "The Da Vinci Code," with Tom Hanks, and the Academy Award-winning "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe. He reunited with Crowe to star in "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," for director Peter Weir. His performance in that film brought him a London Film Critics Circle Award for Best British Actor, as well as BAFTA Award and Critics' Choice Award nominations for Best Supporting Actor.

More recently, Bettany delivered a compelling performance in "The Secret Life of Bees," with Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Hudson. He also lent his voice to the blockbuster "Iron Man." His upcoming films include "The Young Victoria," with Mark Strong and Jim Broadbent, and Jon Amiel's "Creation," in which he stars as Charles Darwin, opposite his wife, Jennifer Connelly.

MoviesOnline sat down recently with Paul Bettany to talk about his new film, “Inkheart,” a fantasy adventure based on the best-selling book by Cornelia Funke that sends a father and daughter on a quest through worlds both real and imagined in search of a family member who disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Mortimer "Mo" Folchart (Brendan Fraser) and his 12-year-old daughter, Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett), share a passion for books. What they also share is an extraordinary gift for bringing characters from books to life when they read aloud. But there is a danger: when a character is brought to life from a book, a real person disappears into its pages.

Paul Bettany plays Dustfinger, the homesick fire juggler whom Mo accidentally brings to life while reading the novel, Inkheart. Director Iain Softley tells us, "From the beginning, Paul was the person I had thought of for Dustfinger. He has that mercurial and mischievous quality that Dustfinger has. And he played his emotional scenes with great depth and understanding."

Bettany's understanding came from a place of affinity with the character. "He wants to get out of this incredibly odd place and back to his home with his wife and kids," the actor explains. "I realized that is very similar to how I spend part of my life -- making a movie in some far-flung location, wishing I could get home to see my family. So I found I had a lot in common with Dustfinger."

Paul Bettany is an amazing actor and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new movie, “Inkheart”:

Q:  So what attracted you to this role? I heard there were many phone conversations with Cornelia and you said to her maybe I'll see you in Italy.

Paul Bettany:  Yes, that's actually true.  The reason being that it’s a trilogy.  Look, first of all the script turned up and it was called Inkheart, then my nine-year-old son was reading Inkheart the novel. 

Q:  What?  Really?

Paul Bettany:  Yes. So, in an entirely sort of cynical Machiavellian attempt to make him think I'm cool, I did the part. 

Q:  Did it work out?

Paul Bettany:  Yes, absolutely.  You're signing a contract for potentially three films. It would be moronic not to ask them what happens in the next films.  So the second one, you know, was out but the third one only existed in Cornelia’s head.  So I did. I had phone calls about, “All right, explain to me what is going to happen in script 2. Is it going to differ from the book and what's going to happen in script 3?” Because, well I would be a dreadful businessman if I did anything less.

Q:  And did you say to your wife, “You know, there's a part you could actually play in this and we could have a trip to Italy?”

Paul Bettany:  No.  No, those trips to Italy are sort of built into one's contract for one's family and I insist on them. And I'm never away, nor is Jennifer, we're never away from the family for more than two weeks at a time.  So, no.  What happened was she was there and I thought it would be a really nice thing.  It’s peculiar because I play a character that has found himself in a very odd and hectic world and wants to get home to his wife and children, which sort of describes my experiences of every movie I've ever been on.  So it was peculiar to sort of find myself with so much in common with this fantasy character. And Jennifer was just there. It's like an hour’s work and so I went, “Well why don’t you just put the dress on and it’d be nice for the kids, you know, when we get older really.”  We have since worked much more significantly together.

Q:  She's in Creation with you, isn’t she?

Paul Bettany:  Yes.

Q:  Yes, and what does she play?

Paul Bettany:  She plays my wife. She plays Emma Darwin, and it was an amazing and intense experience.  But this wasn't. It was just fun, and it was literally an hour’s work. 

Q:  It was a great opportunity for you to find a literary character in view of a reality, if there's one even apart from this, from either the source material or the script, where did you take your cues? Was it just what Cornelia said to you on the phone? Was it the script? Was it just the original novel?

Paul Bettany:  Well I read the script and I read the novel and you know, one comes up with one's own version of a sort of fun character to be, that sort of serves the purpose.  There's simply no more rocket science involved than that.

Q:  Is it difficult, for your own edification and to play the role successfully, to maybe depart from what Cornelia’s perception of the character is?

Paul Bettany:  I don’t care about any of that stuff. I really don’t.  I’d go mad if I worried about… The same thing with sort of Stephen Maturin.  It’s a question that I often get asked. I mean, is there a responsibility, you know? It’s got a great readership and it’s happened, The Da Vinci Code and Silas happened inside six million readers’ heads or however many people. You know, they read it and it’s happening. Whatever the words they are reading and the composite image of the human being, it’s happening in their head and I can't possible give six million different versions. I'm left with my version and it’s the only version that I could frankly do anyway. You know what I mean? It’s very hard to do somebody else’s version of it.

Q:  What was the challenge with that ferret?  Eliza said you got the worst of it?

Paul Bettany:  I did get the worst of it.  It’s a real big tradeoff. And here's the thing about ferrets is that male ferrets are very docile, so that's the one that sits on your shoulder like this. And that it sounds hugely un-PC, but we are talking about ferrets. The female ferrets are vicious.

Q:  Really? 

Paul Bettany:  Vicious.  And so they put a bit of baby food up here (behind his ear) and then they show the female ferret the baby food, and it’s like ah-ah-ash-ah. And then they run off.  And they let it go and it goes hell for leather towards you and you sit there going, “Oh jesus!”   And it runs up here and then they grab it and then they put the man back on, the male ferret back on who’s like that.

Q:  What if they don’t grab it off you after it grabs the food?

Paul Bettany:  I would have thrown that thing. An animal would have been hurt while making the movie. 

Q:  To think, after all your actor’s training to do that.

Paul Bettany:  But it’s a real tradeoff because the thing with the dudes, and this is very similar actually to human beings, is that the female ferrets they smell fine, and the male ferrets…

Q:  Oh no.

Paul Bettany:  Oh my god.

Q:  Funky?

Paul Bettany:  Oh funky.  And they have this tiny little penis here. A tiny, little penis that’s…

Q:  I wonder how you know that?

Paul Bettany:  Well because it’s right by my face. And it emits so much smell for such a tiny, little thing.  Oh, oh, and it gets worse as the weather gets hot. 

Q:  Were there any groomers?

Paul Bettany:  Groomers?  No, you can't deal with the little… It’s very hard to wash your ferret.  “Did you have my ferret’s penis scrubbed?  I'm not going to work with him unless…”

Q:  You didn't put that in your contract.

Paul Bettany:  “Penis scrubbing.”

Q:  Did you develop a special relationship with your ferret Wrangler?

Paul Bettany:  No. 

Q:  And what about Fire? 

Paul Bettany:  Fire?

Q:  I mean, was that all CGI?

Paul Bettany:  All CGI.  The ferret, I keep telling the truth about it and I shouldn't but…

Q:  No, you should say you did it.

Paul Bettany:  I did, weirdly I did do it but I did it two days before we shot it. The insurance company weren’t letting them set fire to me.

Q:  Were you familiar with the series before you did the movie?

Paul Bettany:  No, my son happened to be reading the book but of his own volition. It wasn't the book I was reading to him in the evening.

Q:  One of the most overlooked performances this year was your performance in Secret Life of Bees, which I thought was incredible. You were wonderful in it. 

Paul Bettany:  Thank you very much.

Q:  And I know you did the voice in the Iron Man.  Are you doing anything in Iron Man 2, have you been signed up to do anything or…?

Paul Bettany:  Oh yeah. No, that was a very peculiar experience because I know Jon Favreau and he said, “Do you want to do this thing?” and I said yes.  So I turned up, he was in LA and I turned up in a recording studio, the dubbing studio in New York City, and all I remember doing was laughing for about two hours and eating some croissants and then going home.  And then somebody said to me later, about six months later said, “Are you the voice in Iron Man?”  I went, “No.”  And they went, “Really?”  And I went, “Oh no, no I, no I am.  Yes, I am, yes.”  So I just, yes, no, it was sort of done for fun.

Q:  So you're not officially attached to part two yet then? 

Paul Bettany:  Oh yeah, no, I am.

Q:  Oh you are, OK.  Well great.  And tell us about Creation. How did you guys get into this and what attracted you to that? And will it be picketed when it opens by all the Creationists?

Paul Bettany:  I really don’t, I really, I don’t think so.  I don’t think so. Surely not.  Although if you go on the internet, there's some incredibly vicious things that people have to say about this man who’s well dead and has been dead for a very long time, and was by all accounts a very sweet human being.  I mean incredibly sweet.  And I always find sort of vicious, violent attacks, you know when people get violent in their arguments it usually means that their argument's not very strong.  He didn’t ever get violent in his arguments and he was a social conservative who had a really revolutionary idea and it’s something that sort of came to him. It’s not something that he sought to prove. You know, this idea came to him and he went, “Fuck!”   I'm sure Darwin didn’t say fuck, but the way I play it he does.  And I think everywhere he looked he saw his sort of blueprint fit, and it was very difficult. He came home from the Galapagos and he sat on it for 20 years and partly because of his wife, partly because he was a social conservative and he moved at a sort of glacial pace.

Q:  His wife influenced him for twenty years like that?

Paul Bettany:  Not, not quite like that. They lost their child and she was a fervent Christian and, in some respects, he was sort of robbing the comfort that she would receive. So he sat on it for 20 years and only was forced in to publishing when somebody else, a man called Wallace, had the almost exact same idea.

Q:  What did it do to his wife when he finally did it? 

Paul Bettany:  They dealt with it.  They had this incredibly peculiarly modern relationship in which, I mean except for the fact that they were writing letters, but there's these beautiful letters written to each other even from very early on, you know, about her faith.  She lost her sister and she became much more involved with her church. And then when their daughter died, it pushed Charles one way and that he simply stopped going to church. And it pushed her another way. She continued with her faith and they lived in disagreement about that subject. 

Q:  Will Young Victoria be coming out before Creation or after?

Paul Bettany:  I don't know.

Q:  Oh.  Which one should be first?

Paul Bettany:  Oh, I did Young Victoria ages ago.

Q:  And that's about Queen Victoria?

Paul Bettany:  Yes.

Q:  Who is Queen Victoria?

Paul Bettany:  Emily Blunt.

Q:  Do you see yourself sitting behind the camera, is directing something you want to get into?

Paul Bettany:  Yes, one day.

Q:  You don’t have any projects in mind you want to direct?

Paul Bettany:  No, not now. It's not something that I am consciously seeking out, but it’s something that I could see myself doing one day.

Q:  Because you like to give orders to people or…? 

Paul Bettany:  Yes, because I'm an incredibly vicious dick.  No. I think that it’s a director’s medium in actual fact. It sort of looks like it's an actor’s medium because of the celebrity and all of that nonsense, but actually it’s a director’s medium and it’s the job to be in. And I think it’d be nice to just sort of be somehow slightly more pragmatic about it rather than [makes a choking noise], you know? 

Q:  I was just going to ask how you cope with the celebrity.

Paul Bettany:  We don’t really have much to deal with because we don’t... If we’re somewhere, it’s because somebody's up for an award or it’s the movie premiere. But we don’t do any sort of celebrity circuit.

Q:  And where you live in Brooklyn people treat you just like another family on the block.

Paul Bettany:  No, they don’t. But we don’t live in Brooklyn anymore. 

Q:  Oh you don’t?  Was that because of that?

Paul Bettany:  No, not at all.  It was to do with the shape of the house, which was very vertical and if you have children and you…

Q:  Climbing, climbing.

Paul Bettany:  Daddy, I want juice. 

Q:  Those stairs get steeper and steeper. So you're in a one-level house now? 

Paul Bettany:  Yes, we’re in a loft.  Which is fantastic because also there's things like you go down and you go, “Oh, do you want a cup of tea?”  And you go, “What?” “Do you want a cup of tea?”  “What?”  “Do you want a cup of tea?” “Why are you shouting at me?” “I'm not shouting, I'm just asking if you want, but you didn’t hear me.”  And, “I don’t know why you've got to be so aggressive about it.” “I'm not. I'm just asking you if you want a fucking cup of tea.”  And so I think that sort of cuts all of that stuff out.  But unless you have servants, I think five floors are just ridiculous with children.

Q:  So no Angels and Demons because you are dead, right? 

Paul Bettany:  I'm dead.

Q:  Is that sad, because that's going to be a big movie?

Paul Bettany:  It’s always sad not to work with Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman. It was lovely going to make that movie and it was like we had - I mean bearing in mind the material -  we had so much fun and just making each other laugh the whole time.

Q:  Flagellating yourself.

Paul Bettany:  Well apart from that scene.

Q:  And who were you in Young Victoria?

Paul Bettany:  I was Lord Melbourne who was her sort of confidante and Prime Minister.

Q:  Of all the characters you've played, what did you enjoy the most about playing Dustfinger in this? 

Paul Bettany:  Well I liked his sort of ambiguous nature. You don’t know if he’s a goodie or if he’s a baddie. And I think it’s an enormous amount of pressure to put on kids in this world in which you're either impossibly good or you're awful, you know? You're Darth Vader, if they do one thing wrong. “Oh my god, I'm Darth Vader!” You know what I mean?  It’s really hugely unrealistic and I don’t know when we got started being so overly protective of our children.  I was scared to death by the Wizard of Oz, scared to death by the witch of the Wizard of Oz, and it was great and it was exhilarating.  And going, “Children, come out, children.” It was so frightening and, “Oh god!” but exhilarating.

And why we don’t allow our children to cry in cinemas anymore, why is there a problem if they do, you know?  You do these things in sort of safe environments. You read a book about something sad and the child is safe. They're all there sitting in a dark room with their parents sitting on either side of them eating popcorn and it’s sad.  I mean what is the problem? What is people’s problem?  It’s ridiculous. I mean I've heard this stuff about the dog dying at the end of Marley and Me and parents are up in arms about it.

Q:  Yes. 

Paul Bettany: “You made my kid cry!”   Yes, it's a fucking movie.  I mean honestly and truly. And also part of the reason one has a real pet, the last lesson that that pet… The pet teaches the child many things about affection and love and responsibility and all of that, but the last lesson it teaches the child is about death, you know, before they have to face it in a very real and human and awful way.  And I think it’s important to sort of protect your children but at least allow them to live in a real world.

Q:  And that brings up the children who read Nickelodeon Magazine, which is the last question. Do you have a favorite cartoon now or when you were little? 

Paul Bettany:  Well I, because I'm, do you mean like an animated movie or you mean like…?

Q:  Or a TV series or maybe a cartoon character that you just liked? 

Paul Bettany:  Yes, and this is going to sound sort of shameless but I'm going to say it anyway. My wife made a kid’s movie called “9.” It's an animated movie, you've probably heard of it, and it's going to come out. I think Elijah Wood is in it.

Q:  Oh yes.

Paul Bettany:  And I've seen it a lot in its sort of process going through and it’s absolutely brilliant and it’s so exciting. And so, it was a shameless plug for my wife, really, but I really do like it.

Q:  Why do you like it?

Paul Bettany:  Well, I really liked the aesthetic of it. It's these little sort of post apocalyptic rag dolls. It’s really great.  But, I mean, I guess when I was a kid it was all about Tintin and Asterix, and so when I was a child, that's what I was reading.

Q: Wasn’t “9” originally an animated short directed by Shane Acker when he was a UCLA film student?

Paul Bettany: Oh yes, it’s brilliant. It’s exactly that. He made a short movie and this is the long version of that and it’s brilliant.

Q: Is that a studio film now?

Paul Bettany: Yeah, it’s with Focus Features.

Q: What does Jennifer do in it?

Paul Bettany: She’s one of the rag dolls, but I don’t remember what number. (Note: IMDB says she’s the voice of “7”)

Q:  It seems to me that in a lot of these large-scale films you and Brendan Fraser bring the same kind of grounded humanity and in the context of overblown, you know, pyrotechnics or whatever.  Did you guys have to get out of each other's way on this film?

Paul Bettany:  Oh my goodness, I don’t know. All I remember was having fun.  I mean, really we had so much fun making the film, and I do think you can see it. It was a real family atmosphere.  I think Iain is a great director. He’s also an exquisite host and is a great cook and chooses beautiful wine, and the days became the evenings in a very sort of peculiar, normal way.  We all went out for dinner or we went round to Iain’s house and we played guitar and or played piano. My children were there and his children were there. It was a film in which nothing felt difficult or pushed. We just had a giggle.  It really was. It was so lovely. You're in northern Italy. I mean who can't have a good time? It’s a fantastic country.

“Inkheart” opens in theaters on January 23rd.