Yet it wasn’t always so. In fact, it’s kind of a miracle that it is now. Because there was a time, at the dawn of the ’90s, when Clive Owen was well on his way to becoming the Don Johnson of the UK (or Philip Michael Thomas, take your pick). A couple of years out of drama school in London, Owen landed the lead in the British TV show Chancer, a piece of intellectual cotton candy about a slick, seductive financier. Seventy percent of the show’s 9 million weekly viewers were women. Owen was idolized, the repository of the Isle’s every female sigh and swoon, poised to make a mint. But then, after two seasons, he opted to tear it all down and start from scratch. That is to say, he quit the show to make Close My Eyes, a film in which he ardently and repeatedly put it to his sister. (A lot of Clive’s bits and pieces on display in that one.) Imagine Don Johnson quitting Miami Vice just before the ’86-’87 season to make such a movie and you can pretty well imagine how Owen’s decision went over in Britain. On a June afternoon in London’s Highgate section, on a day off from the set of The Golden Age, in which he plays Sir Walter Raleigh to Cate Blanchett’s Queen Elizabeth I, Owen explains himself. “I was kind of on a train to becoming this prime-time TV actor, and I needed that train to…crash,” he says, with an enigmatic smirk. “I needed to say no.” There it is, the basic building block he’s used to erect the edifice of himself: No. Owen’s made a career of saying no, of not giving what others want and expect him to give, in terms of the roles he’s chosen (and refused—repeatedly in the case of James Bond), in terms of how he’s inhabited those roles, and in terms of how he talks about those choices and performances. A typical exchange that contains the story of the whole: How do you feel about the fact that your movie stardom hasn’t come as it comes for most people these days, in their twenties? No, I’m glad, I’m glad. Nothing there, really. Still—what to make of that peculiar “no” with which he begins his response? On its own, it’s hardly worth mentioning. But it’s not alone. It’s everywhere. It’s a thing with Owen, a tic, the way he often begins a response with a “no” and then a comma, even when he’s asked a yes/no question and the answer is “yes.” That little no, that little default pause, laces his psychological vocabulary, defines his sensibility as a man and as an actor; nothing he says and does, on-screen or off, throws itself open for easy inspection. When it comes to persona, he is the least promiscuous male movie star of his generation. In fact… So now you’re a bona fide movie star… No, no, please, no. That’s not what I am. I am not a movie star. ***** No, Clive, you are. So many scenes to pick from, so many moments in which the way Clive Owen speaks or looks or moves—or doesn’t—arrests you. Should we start with Closer? No—too tricky, too tentacled. Save that for later. Here, the point is to establish that Owen’s both a movie star and a great character actor, often simultaneously. If forced to choose the moment that most efficiently proves the point—a good standard, since his means as an actor are so strikingly effcient—we have to go with the barbering in 2004’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. Owen plays Will Graham, a gangster turned lumberjack who returns to the big city to find out why his kid brother has cut his own throat after soaking in a tub, fully clothed, for twelve hours. (Answer: a punitive ass-fucking courtesy of Malcolm McDowell, which often has that effect.) For much of the film, Will is a hooded wraith, so negligible that even dogs fail to sense him. Hunched and hidden under an untidy beard, he looks sickened, eaten, as he drifts about the streets of London, seeing blood where there isn’t any and vomiting for reasons we can only guess at. A star turn? You forget you’re even looking at an actor. But when Will discovers the why and the who, the protocol of vengeance requires him to don the old uniform and all its trappings: the suitcase full of cash, the bespoke suit, the vintage Jag. The script for I’ll Sleep called for Will to shave and barber himself. Owen argued for something more efficient and won the day: A barber is summoned; Will sits, leveling a numb, indecipherable stare at the mirror; then, in a quick, seamless cut, the barber’s cloth is tossed over his head and whisked away, revealing…Clive Freakin’ Owen! The death mask remains, but the hair is now short and slicked, the skin is taut and braced, and the bones of jaw and cheek stand out in bold relief. A shocking image, not only because it’s sleek and sexy but because it’s cold; because we know that Will has knowingly set his own death in motion—and that what we are beholding is a gorgeous and icy cadaver. “I think that shot—both the shot itself and Clive’s suggestion that we do it that way—shows two very important things about him,” says Mike Hodges, who directed the film. “The first is the precision of his craft, his gift for figuring out ways to convey information quickly, without fanfare, and often by deciding not to do something. The second is that without being at all narcissistic, Clive is fully aware of the effect of his face. “That is a face, isn’t it?” Hodges continues. “I have experienced an effect like that with only one other male actor, thirty-five years ago. When I was making [the original, 1970] Get Carter, I remember looking through the lens for the first time at Michael Caine and thinking, My God, that face just fills the screen. And all those years later, the first time I looked through a lens at Clive Owen, I had that same uncanny thought. That face just fills the screen. Does that come from his acting or his looks or both? I can’t say. All I know is that as soon as I focused my camera on that face, it froze me.” It so happens that this month, Clive Owen and Michael Caine will be on-screen together for the first time, in the semi-futuristic thriller Children of Men, in which the human race has inexplicably lost its capacity to reproduce. Owen bodyguards the planet’s last pregnant woman. “The character is totally different from Dalton,” Owen says, referring to his turn earlier this year as the serenely confident bank robber in Inside Man. “The guy I play in Children is very reluctant, very nervous, very gangly with his body. He’s the kind of guy you find in a world where hope has ceased to be pragmatic.” Owen speaks with notable excitement of director Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá También) and of a sequence in Children in which “the camera follows me through a scene of war and carnage for almost twenty minutes. You can’t see how Alfonso does it. It’s absolutely seamless, all these invisible cuts—it goes against the conventional wisdom that to create excitement you have to quick-cut and jump all over the place. There’s nothing manipulative about it. Nothing that makes you think, Oh, this is virtuoso filmmaking. You just feel like you’re in the thick of it.” It’s telling that the most revealing thing Clive Owen says about his own talent and method as an actor is couched obliquely, as a comment about someone else’s directing skills. For the full article, pick up the September issue of GQ. Andrew Corsello is a GQ correspondent. |