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COLIN
FIRTH is uneasy. Habitually, fortuitously so. At the
moment, the actor is uneasy about his career choice: “Do
grownups say, ‘Yes, the thing I most want to do is put
on a frock and mince around pretending to be someone
else?’ I don’t know.” It was adolescent unease that got
him into the profession and proprietorial unease that
nudged him into a role where he was crowned a certain
sort of a king: Mr. Darcy.
It’s the
emotion he excruciatingly manifests in his latest
project, a movie about the distress of an adult son
facing his overbearing, imperfect father’s death.
“It’s
very rare that you see something which is so
unsentimentally frank,” Firth says of the allure of
When Did You Last See Your Father? “And I think I
was just grateful to see that.”
Firth
first encountered that frankness in Blake Morrison’s
memoir of the same title, years before there was talk of
turning it into a movie. “It was one of those books
which seems to come every 10 years for me, which stands
out and you want to evangelize to everybody,” he says.
Through
strained bedside interactions and flashbacks to
childhood, Firth’s character wrestles with his outsize
image of his father, the secrets that formed fissures
between them and his standing in the ailing man’s eyes.
“I just
don’t trust anything that proposes solutions,” says the
actor, known for his mastery of the brooding malcontent.
“Any positive place [the movie] gets to has been
hard-earned by facing conflicts.”
The
47-year-old Brit decided he wanted to act at age 14, at
least partly out of contempt for academia. “I just had
this incredible sense of liberation from schoolwork and
everything else I was doing—being bad at math and
chemistry,” he recalls. “Suddenly I had this alibi: ‘I
don’t need this; I’m going to be an actor.’”
And he
was, quickly landing stage and film roles after drama
school. More than a decade into his career, a producer
sent him the script for a six-part television adaptation
of
Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice.
“I had
no interest whatsoever,” Firth recalls. With the support
of his advisers, he turned the role of Mr. Darcy down.
“Everybody at my agency [said], ‘Don’t do it. It’s a
step down.’ There was one camp saying, ‘I’ve been in
love with Mr. Darcy all my life. Don’t do it.’ And there
was another camp saying, ‘The part is unplayable. He
belongs in literature.’ “
Literature that Firth had never even read before the
part was offered. But he did read it, and while the
surly aristocrat grew on him, he continued to say no.
Until one morning, he says, he woke up with that
familiar unease and “suddenly decided it would feel very
odd watching someone else do it.”
The
miniseries debuted in 1995; Darcy has been fixed to
Firth ever since.
“I’ve
run out of things to say about it. And I don’t have any
feelings,” he says of his fictional shadow. “I’ve even
gone beyond answering questions about how it feels to be
answering the questions. I don’t know what to say. I’ve
gone into a state of numbness, you know.”
Firth
has played into the joke, appearing as strait-laced Mark
Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, and then tried to
shake it. (He’s not exactly a proper gent in 2005’s
NC-17 Where the Truth Lies.) Even as he has made
peace with the Darcy factor, the actor perpetually finds
himself asked to play to a type he doesn’t much like.
“A guy
who’s basic job is to ache over a girl is not the most
interesting thing for an actor to be faced with,” he
says. “Romantic by itself is insipid. I think the reason
why Darcy works, if he works, is his first job is not to
be romantic.... He’s a misanthropic [jerk], really.” In
the past two years, Firth has made something like 10
movies, including
Helen Hunt’s
Then She Found Me, the upcoming movie musical
Mamma Mia! and Easy Virtue, a comedy based on
the
Noel Coward play
to be released next year.
“I’m
getting this
James Brown,
hardest-working-man-in-the-business-thing at the
moment,” Firth says. In fact, he adds, “I have been
doing nothing—certainly nothing related to the
business—since February. Where are we now? In June? That
does not make me feel overworked.”
Which is
as he wanted it. The father of three says he has been
itching to take a break from acting, spend some downtime
with his family. “In some ways I feel like I’m stuck
with a decision I made when I was 18, being an actor,”
he ruminates. “I don’t think it’s the decision I’d take
today.”
So today
he’s uneasy. Tomorrow? Perhaps the next brilliant turn.
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