30 Jan 2010
Colin Firth - A Single Man
A Single Man stars Colin Firth as George Falconer, a gay British university professor living in Southern California in 1962, who after the sudden death of his partner tries to go about his typical day in Los Angeles. Below are some excerpts from an interview he did recently with Irish cinema site Movies.ie
For many, Colin Firth will always be their perfect romantic lead, their own little secret Mr. Darcy, come to carry them away from this dreary, everyday life. These same individuals believe Firth was born to play the lead in Jane Austin's Pride And Prejudice, so, lucky for them, he did. In 1995.
"Well, I was thirty-five by then, and already, I thought I was growing out of the age where I would ever get cast in romantic stuff. But he's actually a character role. He's a pretty screwed-up, complicated person. He's not just a sighing young callow youth. He's not Romeo. Or Ferdinand in The Tempest."
Perhaps that's what makes him so attractive?
"Maybe. The point is, he's actually a surly, social dysfunctional. And that was interesting for me to play as an actor. Much more interesting than anything I would have been given at twenty-one. Then as it goes on, you talk about A Single Man or Dorian Gray - those guys are older. Lord Henry is, for whatever reason, someone who likes to take a pure, unbroken young boy and mess with him, for fun. And actually destroy him, for fun. And do these horrendous things, vicariously, and then go home and wash his hands of it. He's a pretty despicable guy. To get into someone who's as, you know, unbalanced, if you like - as dark and disturbed as that - is fun.
"And, you know, with A Single Man, that's something different. This is a man with a past, and now I have one. I'm going to be 50 before long, and this is about... There was so much texture to what was on the page. That guy goes through so much in one day - he has despair and heartbreak, his whole past, which he's missing, and things he's lost, but then he goes on to hilarity, and lust. They don't give that in roles to people who are twenty-five. Well, not to people who look like me, at twenty-five."
So, why take on something as big and cumbersome and, ultimately, heartless as Robert Zemeckis' A Christmas Carol? One for the boys, Luca and Matteo?
"Yes and no, actually. I didn't do it for that reason. I'd done family films because of my own children in the past, and I realised that that's maybe not a reason to do them. Because suddenly you bring them and their friends into the world of a daddy who does movies. My young children are six and eight, and I think that a film like A Christmas Carol probably does play to just about any age. Which is why I signed on."
In an episode of the very fine American sitcom 30 Rock, the main character, Liz Lemon, has an adoption agency calling around to check her out, and she decides to hide all her Colin Firth movies, in case "they class it as erotica". Firth has always dismissed his sex symbol role (as has his wife, Livia), but there must be a part of him that's chuffed as hell when it's mentioned...
"Oh, God," he laughs, "I'm trying to drag it out as long as I can. It's definitely a thing to enjoy, for as long as it lasts."
A Single Man is at Irish cinemas from Feb 12th 2010