From Bullet Media
Film & TV / Winter 2012
Sam Riley’s Paradise Found
His band had recently broken up when, lost and dejected, Sam Riley was tapped to play the haunted post-punk icon Ian Curtis in Control. It’s a tough role to beat, but he’s done just that with his portrayal of Jack Kerouac’s drifting alter ego, Sal Paradise, in On the Road. Deenah Vollmer meets the English actor in Berlin and discovers that he’s got nowhere to go but everywhere.
This summer, Riley filmed Maleficent, a reimagining of Sleeping Beauty starring Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning (see page 148), with an estimated $200 million budget. He describes his Disney debut in relation to his previous roles as “more or less the same, only I don’t smoke or die.” As a raven named Diaval who sometimes appears in human form, he plays the sidekick to Jolie’s evil queen. He shakes his head, recalling with disbelief his first day on set. “They said, ‘Angelina is ready,’ and all I could see was the back of her head with these huge horns on it. I thought, Fucking hell! What am I supposed to do?” According to Riley, Jolie was “quite subversive,” even when playing by the rules of such a large production. “She’s doing Disney but she doesn’t want it to be too safe,” he says of Jolie, who allegedly fought for him to get the part after he was ruled out for not being “Disney material.” Before Maleficent hits theaters, he’ll star as a vampire in Neil Jordan’s latest film, Byzantium. “I have the complexion of a vampire,” Riley says drily. He has other undead characteristics, too—a widow’s peak, arched brows, and canines angled like the ends of an upside-down canoe. “I always thought I was overdoing it, but how can you not when you’re changing into a vampire?”
You can read the rest at bulletmedia
Marc Malkin lifts from the same article without crediting the source.
From E!
What Do Kristen Stewart and Angelina Jolie Have in Common? A Man!
Dimitrios Kambouris/Stephen Lovekin/Dave Hogan/Getty Images
Sam Riley is a lucky man.
Not only does he costar alongside Kristen Stewart in the just-released On the Road, but he also plays the sidekick Diaval to Angelina Jolie's evil queen in the Sleeping Beauty flick Maleficent.
He got a taste of K.Stew's fame when On the Road director Walter Salles put the cast through "beatnik boot camp," where they were given dialect lessons, listened to jazz and watched Jean-Luc Godard and John Cassavetes movies at a Montreal hotel.
Find out what K.Stew has to say about making her fans "angry"
A car pulled up in front of him one day and the driver asked if Riley could walk down the street again so he could get a better photo of him.
The actor thought he was someone from production, but quickly realized it was a paparazzo waiting for Stewart. "At 19, I think I would have wanted to be that famous, but now that I'm older and settled, I wouldn't like it at all," Riley says in the new issue of Bullet magazine. "Actually, I wouldn't mind the money."
As for Jolie, Riley says she was "quite subversive" when they were making the movie. "She's doing Disney but she doesn't want it to be too safe," he said.
As if Angie's ever safe.
Riley isn't the only thing Kristen and Angelina have in common. Check them out in our Stars Who Got Naked for Good Movies photo gallery.
