Saturday, May 24, 2014













theguardian

Sam Riley interview: 'It's going to be fun being in a film people might watch'

Engaging, polite but gloriously off-message, British actor Sam Riley is about to star alongside Angelina Jolie in the Disney blockbuster Maleficen

Tom Lamont, Saturday 24 May 2014


Sam Riley: when I heard you'd been cast in Maleficent, a live-action retelling of the 1959 Disney cartoon Sleeping Beauty, I thought… "You thought," Riley interrupts, "I would have been playing Prince Charming. Surely."

 "I don't think I have the teeth," Riley says sadly, opening his mouth to show a crowded lower deck. He explains that in Maleficent he plays a henchman, servant to the wicked witch of the title, played by Angelina Jolie. "I'm her lackey," Riley says, "her gobshite."

 The film is called Maleficent, by the way, and not Sleeping Beauty because of a shift in focus on to Jolie's character. A $200m kids' film, its 3D effects still being tweaked some two years after Riley filmed his scenes, it isn't quite like anything the Yorkshire-born actor has made before. To date he's tended to appear as frowning thinkers, handsome and nicotine-bathed and doomed: Curtis in Control, Pinkie in an adaptation of Brighton Rock (2010), Sal Paradise in an adaptation of On the Road (2012). In the new film, says Riley, "I don't smoke, or die, or have sex with anyone. So it's kind of new ground."

Why this job, why now? "I audition just to remind people that I still exist sometimes. I have to do it occasionally, otherwise the casting directors forget who you are. That's what my agent tells me anyway. I liked the sound of the part, it sounded fun. And obviously working with Angelina was an attractive proposition. Now I'm a father, it's nice to think my son'll be able to see something I've done before he's 18."

It was curiosity too, Riley says. "What's it like to do a movie of this scale? They took over seven or eight studios at Pinewood. Usually you walk from the trailer to the set, but here it was golf buggies. I had to wear a net over my head in case anyone was watching. You know, secrecy and that. I looked like Michael Jackson going shopping."

This actor has an appealing unruly streak. Every so often – as we sit in a part of a London hotel that has been taken over by Disney, for the purposes of promoting their expensive new film – Riley looks over his shoulder, in case he should be overheard saying something wrong. For instance, calling his character in a Disney film a "gobshite", or for having to fudge details of the narrative. "When she's 16, obviously, she's put in the… uh, the sleep, the sleepy thing," is his outline of the Sleeping Beauty plotline.

He is carefully respectful of his co-star, several rungs higher on the fame ladder. Jolie tends to be referred to, with muted voice, as "her" or "she", as if she might be listening for her name on the other side of the door. "All my scenes are with her," says Riley. "We bicker and banter like an old married couple. It came very naturally to both of us – she's always bickering with Brad, I imagine. She's really good fun. That always sounds like a lot of bollocks, doesn't it? But right from the get-go she was a very approachable and kind and nice colleague to have."

One day during shooting, Riley says, his parents visited him on the Pinewood set. He took them by golf buggy to meet Jolie, and they were "uber-charmed," Riley says. "They floated back to Leeds…"

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