Ben Wishaw Interview, Bright Star

MoviesOnline sat down with Ben Whishaw to talk about his new film, Bright Star, directed by Jane Campion. One of the most highly praised films at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Bright Star is a portrait of love and loss between the 19th-century Romantic poet John Keats and the 18-year-old muse-next-door, Fanny Brawne. The film's title comes from a love poem for Brawne, which Keats wrote in the flyleaf of his copy of the works of Shakespeare.

Jane Campion's return to the big screen features outstanding performances from Abbie Cornish (Stop-Loss, Candy) as Brawne, Ben Whishaw as Keats (Stoned, I'm Not There, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer), Paul Schneider (NBC's "Parks & Recreation," Lars and the Real Girl, The Family Stone), as Charles Armitage Brown and Kerry Fox (Intimacy) as Mrs. Brawne.

In London, 1818, a secret love affair begins between 23-year-old English poet Keats and Brawne, an outspoken follower of fashion.  This unlikely pair starts at odds; he thinking her a stylish minx, she unimpressed by literature in general.  But when Keats's younger brother falls ill, John and Fanny are drawn together. Keats, touched by Fanny's efforts to help care for his brother, agrees to teach her poetry.

By the time Fanny's alarmed mother and Keats's best friend, Mr. Brown, realize their attachment, the relationship has an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in one another, the young lovers are swept into powerful new sensations:  "I have the feeling as if I we're dissolving," Keats writes to her.  Together they ride a wave of romantic obsession that deepens as their troubles mount.  Only Keats's fatal illness proves insurmountable.

Ben Whishaw came to the fore early in his career playing the title role in Dom Rotheroe’s My Brother Tom, for which he was named Most Promising Newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards in 2001. He then went on to train at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 2003. Ben has appeared in Roger Michell’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love and Matthew Vaughn’s Layer Cake before taking the lead role in Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: A Story of a Murderer, for which he was nominated Best Actor at the European Film Awards and for the BAFTA Orange Rising Star Award in 2007.

In 2005 Ben starred as Rolling Stones singer Keith Richards in the biopic Stoned, before going on to interpret the venerable Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’ award-winning I’m Not There. Ben, together with his co-stars, won a 2008 Independent Spirit Award for this role. More recent credits include Brideshead Revisited directed by Julian Jarrold and Tom Twkwer’s The International. He will next be seen on screen in Julie Taymor’s The Tempest.

Ben Whishaw is an amazing actor and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about “Bright Star”:

Q: Can you talk about what it was about your character that resonated with you?

BEN WHISHAW: I really, really learnt to love him as a man and as a human being. What I loved most was, as I could gather from his letters and from his poetry, was that he was someone of immense sensitivity, but also someone of kind of robustness and common sense and straightforwardness, so he was kind of ethereal but also of the earth. That really appealed to me.

Q: There must be hundreds of books on Keats, were you a fan of his poetry before you began this, what did you know about him? I didn’t know much about him.

BEN WHISHAW: I’m the same as you, I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t know any of the details of his life, and I really didn’t know much about his poetry either, so for me it was a journey of discovery, a journey into the unknown, and there’s so much been written, which just scratched the surface of, but I didn’t just read the Andrew Motion biography, I read several others, which was really interesting, because you realized that everybody has a slightly different take on who he was and I think that gives you a sense that your take is valid as well. That was good to reading that.

Q: What was the biggest surprised that you discovered about him?

BEN WHISHAW: Well, I think it relates to what I was saying earlier really. I think the thing about the letters is that he was so human and really experienced every kind of emotion very intensely. He had jealousy and a capacity to lose his temper and be furious, he could be very funny, he could be very bawdy, some of these things are not [what] the film goes into, but they were exciting to discover, just because I think that’s not the image that’s been handed down to us. And I spoke with a poet when I was preparing, and we were reading some of Keats’ poetry together and discussing him and this poet said that there’s no way that Keats could possibly have been this kind of delicate, sickly person, lying about all the time. To produce that amount of work, he must have been furiously alive and active and full of vitality, because he produced so much and he was dead by the age of 25. You remember that fact it’s truly astonishing.

Q: How did you research the mannerisms of the period?

BEN WHISHAW: We didn’t really have anyone come in and teach us or advise us on any of those things, I think the costumes contribute something and the sets contribute their own kind of something-or-other, some atmosphere which makes you behave differently, and then I think we just had to bear in mind the social etiquette of the day. I remember there was a scene Abbie and I were doing when we sat next to each other on a window ledge, and there were some other men in the room, and Abbie and I instinctively rested our hands on each other’s knees, and Jane was like, ‘What the hell are you doing? No, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that.’ You just had to bear in mind those things. You couldn’t express you as fluently as you can now.

Q: What was it that attracted you to this role in the first place, other than the chance of working with Jane Campion?

BEN WHISHAW: I think I was really excited to tell this love story, I suppose. I’ve not really done a love story that was – this is a very tragic, very sad love story, but the love is reciprocated and it’s passionate and it’s intense and I was really kind of curious about that. And that, combined with Jane’s script and Jane as a director, and then Abbie, it was just an irresistible combination.

Q: As an actor, there’s a level of pressure that goes along with playing non-fictional characters. Do you prefer those roles or do you prefer creating something on your own?

BEN WHISHAW: I don’t prefer having that pressure, but for some reason these characters have come my way and I think that you have to be as prepared as you possibly can be, and then just let go of that other stuff. And, it has to be an imaginative exercise, I think, because we don’t particularly – with someone like Keats, we actually don’t know what he did day to day. A lot of it is recorded in letters, but there’s a lot that we don’t know. We don’t know how he looked exactly. We don’t have video footage. We don’t know how he sounded. So, there is a poetic license, but it’s also really great to not have to invent things, to be able to go, ‘Well, there’s this amazing resource that is his letters and his poetry.’ I don’t have to make anything up, it’s all kind of there for you to – I don’t have to invent a biography for the character. It’s all there. That’s very exciting, and some times real life is much more peculiar and interesting than what your imagination can invent.

Q: Was the rapport between you and Abbie instant or did it develop on the set?

BEN WHISHAW: I feel like Abbie’s a really interesting creature. If she decides to trust you and let you in, you get absolutely a hundred percent of her and you feel incredibly safe. There was no doubt that we trusted each other entirely, and she’s incredibly generous. We were very professional. Abbie was working so hard. She’s in every scene of the film, so we didn’t really get to hangout or spend time together apart from the set, so it was something that evolved through rehearsal, but largely it was something that happened in front of the camera.

Q: In the film, when you read Keats’ poetry, how do you make it feel like you wrote it? Also, what about Keats’ relationship with Mr. Brown, it’s kind of unusual and I wondered if there was anything homosexual in it?

BEN WHISHAW: I’ll answer the Brown one first. I personally don’t think that there was anything, definitely not on Keats’ part towards Brown. I don’t think there’s any evidence in the letters or in anything else that that was the case. Although I think much more than today, men formed these boys’ clubs kind of thing and the poetry was a male activity, so there was very intense male bonding. I don’t think it was homoerotic or homosexual. I just think it was strong in defining kind of relationships.

Q: He seems jealous of Fanny.

BEN WHISHAW: I think it’s more kind of, Paul will explain this to you very well, but I think it is more that they’re best friends. They hang out together all the time, they wrote poetry together, and suddenly there’s this girl and Charles Brown doesn’t have all the attention anymore. It’s that kind of complication, I think. And about the poetry, I got asked to read some more of Keats’ poetry just six months ago, for like a recording, and I found I totally couldn’t do it. I had a totally different kind of attitude towards it. It seemed it was just the period that we were filming when I was really kind of living and breathing it and thinking about him every day, when it came very naturally. But suddenly six months ago I was trying to speak the poetry again and it was like sort of lumpen. Nothing came, and it was just awkward, so I don’t know. I think Jane sometimes has that kind of magic that she can cast a spell on you and you feel like you’re – and then when she lifts the spell you’re not quite the same person.

Q: How was the shooting experience itself?

BEN WHISHAW: It was a nine week shoot. It was just a joy. I absolutely – I loved it, it was the happiest experience I’ve had of work and I really, really grieved for it afterwards.

Q: How did you get the role?

BEN WHISHAW: Jane sent me a note with her script, saying, ‘I’ve seen some pictures of you and I hear you did Hamlet in London, and I think you might be interesting in this role, so why don’t you read it and then we should meet.’ So I did read it, and I wrote her an email back saying that I loved it, talked a bit about what I understood about Keats from the screenplay and how my imagination had been ignited and I wanted to know more. And then we did an audition in London, and it was a fairly straightforward audition, except that I was about ten minutes or fifteen minutes in, I was reading with an actress who was auditioning for the role of Fanny, and I just became utterly convinced that Jane was interested in her and not me, and that the whole audition was about this actress. So I kind of remembered thinking, ‘Oh well, fuck it. It’s not going to go my way. It’s okay, it’s fine, it’s Jane Campion, I’m here, it’s great.’ Maybe that was why I was relaxed and kind of resigned to failure. Maybe that helped me get the part, I don’t know.

Q: It wasn’t Abbie?

BEN WHISHAW: No, it wasn’t Abbie.

Q: Was Abbie attached to it when you got the script?

BEN WHISHAW: No, no.

Q: What’s the difference from playing someone like Keats who you don’t have any visual record to go to and someone like Keith Richards or Bob Dylan?

BEN WHISHAW: I don’t really see a great deal of difference beyond the fact that they’re still alive and Keats’ is dead, and there’s a bit more to draw on. But as I said earlier, the same kind of thing applies is that you’re telling a particular story about that person, and that person fits into that story in a particular way and you’ve got to honor that. Even with this film, I did all of this reading and I knew so much about Keats but there was only a fraction of it that was appropriate for our story, and you’ve got to honor the story that you’re telling and particularly with an artist like Jane, I think it’s Jane Campion’s Keats and Jane Campion’s Fanny Brawne. And I felt very much that I was fulfilling her vision.

Q: How were Keats and Brown involved with each other – were they family friends?

BEN WHISHAW: I don’t think they were family friends. I think that Keats was a part of a circle of poets and writers and thinkers in London, and there were evenings where people would get together and read poetry and talk and discuss ideas and discuss current events and so on, and I think that they met at one of those and became friends. I’m not exactly sure of all the details, but I think that’s what happened.

Q: In all of the readings on Keats, did you find anything that gave any answers to the question as to why Keats destroyed Fanny’s letters to him?

BEN WHISHAW: That’s a really good question. He had a kind of panache for burning things anyway, like he’d burn his own – he wrote in a letter to somebody that, ‘I’ve just started a conflagration and I’ve thrown all these poems on it,’ because he was always kind of getting rid of things. I think that those particular letters from Fanny, my understanding is that it was just too painful, because he knew he was going to die. I think he was overwhelmed by that horrible sense of injustice at the world, at 25, why he had to be separated from this woman he loved, and I think he says in a letter that even the sight of her handwriting is unbearable to him. He felt it so keenly, and when he traveled to Italy to die, she wrote letters to him and he didn’t write anything to her. He’d write to his mother, which is what is presented in the film. He wouldn’t even open her letters, didn’t even read them. And I think they are unopened and buried with him. So I think it was just the pain of it, and also this burning thing, and I think that comes from a sense of transience, which is another thing I think he felt very keenly. Everything is going to pass anyway.

Q: What would you like the audience to take away from the film as to the character of John Keats?

BEN WHISHAW: I would like I suppose – what I feel about him is that he was a very rare human being, that he was a very good person. He had a kind of nobility about him, I think, a nobility of spirit and a generosity. Jane talks about him almost as if he were like an angel, a divine being. I think he was very human as well, but he had some kind of quality of divinity. Another thing I would like the audience to be aware of is this kind of capacity he had to channel something higher than himself. When you look at the manuscripts of the poems, like Ode to a Nightingale, people who studied the handwriting say that he was not writing laboriously, he was writing at a high speed, almost as if he was possessed, and he channeled whatever it is, inspiration, or whatever, was very clear. And that’s something I would hope perhaps comes across.

Q: Can you tell a little about The Tempest and what it was like working with Julie Taymor?

BEN WHISHAW: Yeah, I think it’s going to be interesting. I think Julie’s a great visionary director and she’s actually been very faithful to the play, but she’s cast Helen Mirren as Prospero and called her Prospera. So it’s got this kind of feminist angle which actually I think is really, really a smart idea.

Q: When is it set?

BEN WHISHAW: It’s kind of non-specific, because the play could be set really at any time. It’s obviously not now. It’s obviously a time when there were still islands in the middle of oceans that hadn’t been discovered. It’s kind of a timeless.

Q: Can you talk about yourself and how you’re different from Keats and in what ways you feel you’re similar?

BEN WHISHAW: I’m definitely not a poet, I don’t have that skill at all. I’ve never even really attempted to write a poem. But I do feel an affinity with him in some ways, as I can understand him, what he was. I think I may be even a little more introspective than John Keats. John Keats was really actually a very sociable person. I don’t know whether that’s – maybe it doesn’t come across in the film, he was actually very – he loved being in company and he loved people, not that I don’t, but I think I’m just feeling that way because I’ve done all of this talking for a week, and I don’t want to say another word. So, yeah, I think there are similarities and there are differences and it’s always a bit of a mixture.

Q: What are you doing in your down time?

BEN WHISHAW: Recently I’ve been doing a lot of traveling and seeing nature and being in nature, and I’ve been doing a bit of writing recently, not poetry, but I’m trying to write a screenplay, or the beginnings of one.

“Bright Star” opens in theaters on September 18th.