Clive Owen Starring Anti-PC Cartoon
Clive Owen has just delivered a baby in an abandoned warehouse. The newborn sits in his arm, smeared in a coating of blood and vernix, while the mother lies beneath him, legs apart, face lathered in sweat. Owen is satisfied, but one thing remains – the umbilical cord needs to be cut. Not hesitating for a second, he reaches into his coat, pulls out an enormous gun and, much to the protestations of the terrified mother, simply blows the cord in two from point-blank range The scene is from the opening of Owen’s new action movie, Shoot ’Em Up, and is emblematic of much that follows – violent, provocative, risque and, well, violent. In fact the film, which describes the adventures of a weapons expert called Mr Smith (Owen), who spends 90 hyperkinetic minutes planting furious lead into an ever-replenishing army of cockeyed Mafia henchmen (they’re after the baby, but this hardly matters), might well be the most violent movie that Owen has made, and perhaps just a tiny bit offensive because of it.
“I hope not,” says the 42-year-old actor today, a vision of masculinity in suit and open-necked shirt, reclining on a vast couch in a Central London hotel room. “The violence is so heightened and cartoonish that you just can’t relate it to reality. And you can’t deny that a well put-together action sequence, if done with wit and verve, can be entertaining.”
If Owen seems untroubled by the prospect of becoming the sole poster boy for contemporary screen violence it’s possibly because he’s also starring in the upcoming period drama The Golden Age. The film, a sequel to Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth, stars Owen as the swaggering, piratical Sir Walter Raleigh, the sassy foil to Cate Blanchett’s uptight monarch. The role, he says, required a lot of research, including “reading two huge biographies”. It was also, he says modestly, and with a certain resigned finality, a lot of fun.
Owen shot to fame as the gambling guru in the 1998 thriller Croupier, and has more recently aced a string of heavy-hitting roles, some Oscar-nominated, that have included the screen adaptation Closer,the dystopian sci-fi Children of Men, and the impeccable heist movie Inside Man. He does deep soulful stillness to perfection, and is the swoon-inducing first choice for big-money blockbusters seeking credibility – and that includes interballistic headwreckers such as Shoot ’Em Up.
“Look,” he says, grinning slightly, “when I was pitched the film, I have to be honest, I thought, ‘This is not going to be for me.’ But then, after reading the first page, I was chuckling. I was like, ‘This is so wild! So deliberately un-PC. I have to do it.’ ” This, you quickly learn, is a typical Owen moment. He’s a tricky fish, and a conundrum of sorts, but in the nicest possible way. He has a reputation for seriousness and deflecting journalistic inquiry, yet he does so with disarming joviality, and a booming laugh. He won’t talk about his private life, and yet he mentions his wife and two daughters with ease. He has rejected LA in favour of his home in Highgate, North London, even as he reveres the glamour of Hollywood. And, most importantly, he groans at the mention of his place in the postBrosnan James Bond succession debate, despite having made numerous Bond-style commercials for BMW, and a Bond-like cameo in The Pink Panther. Even his Shoot ’Em Up director and producers consistently refer to his part in that movie as a “blue-collar James Bond”.
“The only similarity between the movies, really, is that the main guy is going to deliver during the shoot-outs,” he says, before adding, categorically, that despite the media speculation (one newspaper poll said he was 90 per cent favourite for the role) he was never actually offered Bond, and if he was, he probably wouldn’t have taken it anyway. So, is he saying that not taking the role that he wasn’t offered was a good move? He laughs, three big booms. “What I’m saying is that if you look at my career, I’ve tried to keep it as varied as I can. It’s a healthy thing to do.” Owen’s career began in 1977 at Binley Park Comprehensive, in Coventry, during a school production of Oliver! He was the fourth of five brothers raised by his working-class mother and his stepfather (his biological father, a country singer, left home when Owen was 3). He describes his childhood as “rough”, yet refuses to play the sympathy card and describes acting as a last resort for a troubled soul. Instead he says that playing the Artful Dodger in Oliver! somehow made sense, and so after leaving school he joined a youth theatre, and spent two long years on the dole. “I learnt that life can be f***ing hard,” he says, laughing again. “It was the toughest time. The work had all dried up, and I thought, ‘Is this ever going to happen?’ ”
Thankfully, he won a place at RADA, where his contemporaries included Ralph Fiennes and Jane Horrocks. He met his future wife, Sarah-Jane Fenton, soon after, at the Young Vic, where the two were starring in, appropriately enough, Romeo and Juliet. Both were young firebrands, but when success came calling for Owen, Fenton duly stepped down, and is now the devoted wife and mother who appears on Owen’s arm at premieres and awards. I ask him if they had, back in the old days, a secret Blair-Brown type agreement about which one would step aside if fame came calling? More booming laughter. “No, it was never like that. The only notable thing about it was that the relationship took a bit of time to come together, and we were doing a seven-month tour of Romeo and Juliet all over Europe. And there was an apprehension there about getting involved, because if it went wrong it would have, er, ramifications for the whole production.”
Owen had a famous false start as the smoothie hero of the yuppie-era TV drama Chancer, but then later, after lots of theatre work, seemed to emerge fully formed as an Alist star in Mike Hodges’ Croupier. The film, neglected in the UK, was championed in the States by Stanley Kubrick’s former marketing man Mike Kaplan. Owen thus became the archetypal overnight sensation, cast as the scene-stealing hitman in The Bourne Identity, a Chandler-esque tough guy in Sin City, and a raging dermatologist in Closer. In the latter film his expletive-filled rant at co-star Julia Roberts (“Because I’m a f***ing caveman!”) has already become a modern quotable classic.
Always quick to deconstruct his own image – his other roles have included a bisexual, an incestuous brother and a gay concentration camp victim – Owen can nonetheless flex his Alist screen persona at will, and effortlessly wrestle scenes from the likes of Denzel Washington in Inside Man, despite being obscured by his character’s face mask. “It was strange,” he says. “Because you finally get to act with someone like Denzel, and yet you can’t even look him in the face. But then halfway through the scene he says to me, ‘This is weird, I can’t f***ing see you!’ But, still, it worked.”
As for the future, once the Shoot ’Em Up and Golden Age hoopla has faded, he is to play a widowed dad in The Boys are Back in Town and a financial investigator in the paranoid thriller The International. After that, he’s not sure. He might do some theatre – or maybe not. In any event Owen-watchers should expect the unexpected. “I generally don’t get attracted to the more obvious leading man roles,” he says, “because, really, there’s nothing more boring than a very wholesome, straight, uncomplicated leading man.”
Shoot ’Em Up is released nationwide on Friday
THE CHANCER WHO HIT THE JACKPOT IN CROUPIER – CLIVE OWEN ON SCREEN
CHANCER (1990-91)
That jaw and baritone proclaimed themselves to Britain’s housewives when Owen played a beguiling conman in this ITV series. Beginning in the chirpy confines of a car dealership, Chancer got steadily darker. Owen honed his trademark glower as his character battled prison, death and personal demons.
CROUPIER (1998)
After a few wilderness years following his role in the 1991 incest drama Close My Eyes, Owen’s big-screen break came playing yet another morally dubious type. “He’s not really a good guy or a bad guy,” he said of the writer-turned-casino worker he played in Mike Hodges’s neo-noir. “But people generally aren’t, are they?”
CLOSER (2004)
Owen had already appeared on stage as the wimpy Dan in Patrick Marber’s savage deconstruction of sexual politics. In the film adaptation, Jude Law took that role and Owen played the inscrutable dermatologist Larry. The switch paid off, as he earned an Oscar nomination, a Bafta and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.
CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)
Having hefted his sword in a period piece (2004’s King Arthur), Owen dipped his toe into sci-fi as a world-weary civil servant in Alfonso Cuaron’s dystopian drama. Who better to brood about a future in which suicide is rife and the human race has become infertile than Britain’s king of photogenic gloom?
(Story by Kevin Maher)
Biography
Early life
Owen was born in Coventry, West Midlands, England, the fourth of five brothers. When Owen was three, his father (a country and western singer) left the family. Owen was raised by his mother and step-father, a railway ticket clerk, and only met his father again at the age of nineteen. While initially opposed to drama school, he changed his mind in 1984, after a long and fruitless period of searching for work. Owen graduated from RADA in 1987 in a class including both Ralph Fiennes and Jane Horrocks. After graduation, he won a position at the Young Vic, performing in several William Shakespeare plays. In an incident he later described as “very schmaltzy,” he met his future wife Sarah Jane Fenton.
Career
Initially, Owen carved out a career in television: in 1988 Owen starred as Gideon Sarn in a BBC television production of Precious Bane and the Channel 4 film Vroom before the 1990s saw him become a regular on stage and television in the UK, notably his lead role in the ITV series Chancer followed by an appearance in the Thames Television production of Lorna Doone.
He won critical acclaim for his performances in a 1991 Stephen Poliakoff film called Close My Eyes, about a brother and sister who embark on an incestuous love affair. Due to personal conflicts with the press, Owen decided not to appear in television programmes for a while. However, he subsequently appeared in The Magician, Class Of ‘61, Century, Nobody’s Children, An Evening With Gary Lineker, Doomsday Gun, Return Of The Native, The Turnaround and then a Carlton production called Sharman, about a private detective. In 1996 he appeared in his first major Hollywood film The Rich Man’s Wife alongside Halle Berry before finding international acclaim in a Channel 4 film directed by Mike Hodges called Croupier in 1998. He played the title role of a struggling writer who takes a job in a London casino as inspiration for his work, only to get caught up in a robbery scheme. In 1999 he appeared as an accident-prone driver called Split Second, his first BBC production for a decade.
He then starred in The Echo, a BBC1 drama. He also starred in a film called Greenfingers about a criminal who goes to work in a garden, before appearing in the BBC1 mystery series Second Sight, in which he played DCI Ross Tanner. In 2001 he provided the voice-over for a BBC2 documentary about popular music through the years called Walk On By, as well as starring in a highly-acclaimed theatre production called The Day In The Death Of Joe Egg, about a couple with a severely handicapped daughter. He then appeared in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, alongside an all-star cast including Helen Mirren and Ryan Phillippe. He has also appeared in The Bourne Identity, along with American actor Matt Damon. In 2003 he starred in other films including Trevor Preston’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead and Beyond Borders before taking on the title role in King Arthur. He took horse-riding lessons for the latter role.
He has since appeared in the comic book thriller Sin City as the noir antihero Dwight McCarthy; as a mysterious bank robber in Inside Man and as Sir Walter Raleigh opposite Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth I in the film Golden Age.
He also appeared in the West End and Broadway hit play Closer, by Patrick Marber, which again became a film which was released in 2005, before he starred in Derailed alongside Jennifer Aniston. It is interesting to note that he played ” Dan” in the play “Closer” but was “Larry” the dermatologist in the film version of the play. His blistering, darkly comic portrayal of Larry in the film version earned him a lot of recognition as well as the awards mentioned above.
In 2006, Owen starred in the highly acclaimed Children of Men. He received widespread praise for his role as the former political activist-turned-reluctant hero Theo Faron. The film was nominated for various awards including an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; Owen worked on the screenplay, although he was uncredited. He noted that the expectations of him since the Oscar nomination have not changed the way he approaches film-making.
I try, every film I do, to be as good as I can and that’s all I can do.
He became well known to North American audiences after starring as The Driver in the BMW films. Despite public denials, Owen had long been rumored to be a possible successor to Pierce Brosnan in the role of James Bond. A public opinion poll in the United Kingdom in October 2005 (SkyNews) found that he was the public’s number one choice to star in the next installment of the series. In that same month, however, it was announced that British actor Daniel Craig would become the next James Bond. In 2006 Owen spoofed the Bond connection by making an appearance in the remake of The Pink Panther in which he plays a character named “Nigel Boswell, Agent 006″ (when he introduces himself to Inspector Clouseau he quips that Owen’s character is “one short of the big time”).
In November 2006, he became patron of the Electric Palace Cinema in Harwich, England and launched an appeal for funds to repair deteriorating elements of the fabric.
He was mentioned by Karl Pilkington in a podcast and named him as ‘Clive Warren’ by accident.
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