(Originally published on Little White Lies)
Paul Bettany must be the kind of co-star most actors dread. Not bolshy or flamboyant in a quest to get noticed, just a bona-fide scene-stealer. He’s done it to Russell Crowe. Twice. Now in the low-budget Brit drama Broken Lines Bettany gives another standout performance, this time playing an ex-boxer trying to deal with the after effects of a stroke with stunning authenticity. Bettany sat down with LWLies recently to talk about the role that brought him back to his hometown London and the challenges of getting films out there these days.
LWLies: How did you first get involved in the film?
Bettany: I got sent a script by my friend who said, ‘Would you do us a favour and read it, and if you like it there’s a part in it for you.’ And I read it and very quickly realised that it was him doing me a favour and that he’d thrown this great part my way. So I said absolutely, I’d do it. So it was a very simple process.
Were you always in mind for the part?
It was a very long process writing the script and I think it went through many different stages, so I don’t think he wrote it with me in mind. I think they came to a point where they felt they had finished this script and he sent me it with this rather lovely offer. I was so gobsmacked by how great I was, the pair of them had been beavering away for a couple of years on this thing and then suddenly it’s there and it’s beautiful.
What attracted you to the part of Chester? He’s a pretty raw, intense character.
Well, I mean… that, really. It’s nice to do things occasionally that feel they’re about stuff. They seem to be few and far between nowadays. I think that there’s a dreadful sense of shame in Chester and I found that really moving. There was something that I could comprehend in that.
And what kind of research did you do?
I did a fair amount. I did a lot of reading of different firsthand accounts from stroke survivors. I live in New York and I didn’t want to talk to stroke survivors there because there is a real stoic national characteristic that British people have, a reticence. So what I did was I got the filmmakers to interview British stroke survivors on film, hours and hours of footage of these really frank, moving interviews. I watched them, and their responses to the predicament in which they found themselves were really varied, as varied as human beings are.
But, and I speak for myself here, I thought there were some unifying things that all of these people felt which were overwhelming frustration and anger at their body; a fury at having to re-learn simple things; a terrible sense of injustice; and a shame surrounding feelings of dependency. I thought in somebody like Chester that would be so compounded because he’s lived an incredibly physical life, an almost exclusively physical life, and now he is left with an almost exclusively cerebral life and his mind is not a place where he feels comfortable.
