Spare a moment for the degree of difficulty encountered by Jamie Bell as he grappled with the character director Andrew Haigh had written for him on the pages of All of Us Strangers. How does a 37-year-old actor, best known to audiences for his role as a preteen ballet prodigy, wrap his head around playing a father to the 47-year-old Andrew Scott, resurrected from an era before Bell was born? And how does he navigate not only paternal responsibility, but also the complication of being, impossibly, a generation younger than his own son?
“I’ve been doing this for so long now,” says Bell, referring to the profession that found its way to him. “But I still have no f*cking idea what I’m doing.”
This is who Jamie Bell is, determined to pass any sense of accomplishment onto others. Claire Foy was in the same boat as him, he notes, playing Scott’s younger mother, and both actors helped him get there, along with Haigh. “When you go to work with such brilliant actors who do know what they’re doing, and they have a measure of control, technique and ability to fall back on, which you don’t have, they help you figure it out.”
Bell is, obviously, being too humble, and few who have seen the finished film could doubt his achievement. Haigh chose Bell for the role — the only actor he considered — for two reasons. One was that subverting the image of a man best known to us as a boy, the star of Billy Elliot, appealed to him. The other was that there are few actors with so much insight into the vagaries of fatherhood. “Fathers and sons is a theme that has been integral to my work,” Bell notes. “The sense of parental disunity is something I’m always going through subconsciously, because I was raised without a father.”
There’s a scene in the film where ‘Dad’, as Bell’s character is simply known, tells Scott’s Adam that he’s sorry. “That’s the conversation I’m always waiting for,” says Bell. “It’s the thing you’re always subconsciously endeavoring to get. So, if you get to do it in your job, of course you’re going to bring all of this sh*t you’ve been thinking about for 20 years. It’s always kind of there.”
Bell also became a father when he was 27 — he has three children now — and recalls a scene in the film that reminded him of his own parenthood. “When I tell Adam it’s time to go now, Andrew reaches out and puts his hand on my mouth to stop me from speaking. My four-year-old does that. She thinks, if you don’t speak it, it won’t happen.” It’s a moment that wasn’t in the script. “That was just Andrew being brilliant. And you immediately go, ‘OK, I’m going to hold his hand now, because that hand is precious to me.’ It fuels you, and that’s what’s wonderful about working with great actors.”
This stuff affects Bell; he can’t help it. He still signs texts to Scott, “Love, Dad,” because the scenes got under his skin. On the film’s set last year, in a strange London diner, I watched Bell, Scott and Foy author the scene that would be their final encounter. With Haigh’s encouragement, they played through each take in full, iterating on it each time, lifting it from the page into such a real, emotional crescendo that even members of the typically stoic British film crew were fighting back tears. “It was so meta for me,” Bell says now. “So profound and impactful.”
And material like this just seems to find him. “I feel like it’s the universe,” he says. “I don’t look for it. I don’t want to be dealing with my daddy issues in my career. But it’s just the best part of me because it’s the most honest. It’s the rawest and the most revealing, and it’s eternal. The story that you’re trying to move on from is the one that you keep coming back to.”
The good news is he finds catharsis in it. That scene in the diner was also the last scene he and Foy shot for the film. “We said goodbye to Andrew in that diner, and then we left,” he says. “Me and Claire just disappeared. There was closure to it, both in the moment and in the story. But there was closure for me too. Of course, you always carry those memories to some degree, but the work does help. I think about this movie all the time when I think about being a parent. I think about something Andrew [Scott] says, which I’m going to steal, when he talks about the ‘accidental cruelty of families’. It’s such a brilliant way of putting it, because it’s not intentional but it is so defining when it comes to how we perceive ourselves. Even helping can be distancing.”
Bell found his vocation at 13 when Stephen Daldry picked him, from a field of more than 2,000 boys, for the role of Billy Elliot. He grew up in a working-class part of England with his mother and sister, and had picked up ballet when his sister brought him along to her after-school classes. Opportunities like Billy Elliot weren’t meant to come to kids like him, but he seized it when it did. His performance won him a BAFTA for Leading Actor — he joked in his speech that he was asked by Russell Crowe, nominated alongside him for Gladiator, to thank him if he won.
“There are so many kids who never got that phone call [for Billy Elliot],” he says. “Kids who were just as talented, maybe even better dancers, maybe even better actors. I think about those kids all the time, and how fortunate I was to be the one that the decision fell on. That’s really what it comes down to; just luck. What you do with it after is obviously up to you.”
For Bell, this meant persevering. In the near quarter-century since Billy Elliot, Bell has forged an acting career most would envy, having worked with directors like Thomas Vinterberg, Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood and Bong Joon-ho. He is motivated by how the work makes him feel, not what it will do for him. On the day we meet, the Independent Spirit Award nominations have recognized All of Us Strangers in several categories, but the person least interested in Bell’s own omission from that list is Bell himself. “It’s just brilliant that the film has been recognized,” he insists, and he means it.
“All I really hope is that I’ve used the opportunity I was given 20 years ago in the best way, and that I’ve done some interesting work and worked with some interesting people,” Bell says. “For me, it was always about learning, constantly learning. Learning what this artform is and what this medium can do. It’s an unbelievable privilege to be any part of it. It means a lot to me. It’s not life or death, but it kind of is.”
Bell has dabbled with music sporadically since, dancing sweetly with Annette Bening in Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, and most notably singing in Dexter Fletcher’s Rocketman, but he’s hopeful that he’ll soon return to that original passion. He’s attached to produce and star as Fred Astaire in a biopic of the iconic dancer’s relationship with Ginger Rogers (curiously, Tom Holland, whose first role was as Billy Elliot in the stage musical adaptation of the film, has a competing Fred Astaire project on his docket). “I’m so passionate about Fred Astaire and his work,” Bell says. “We’re close to moving forward on it, and I’m just so excited to be putting on the shoes and going for it. It’ll be a massive challenge that’s going to require me to break my body apart and put it back together, but I really feel like I’m up to the task.”
And after that, he thinks, acting might take a backseat. When he made Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool, he met Bening’s partner, Warren Beatty. After a long discussion — a conversation Bell still talks about in reverential tones — Beatty told Bell: “Start directing.”
“I took it as a compliment because he clearly understood that there was something in me that wanted that. I think that ambition has been growing in my mind, subconsciously, for many years. He told me, ‘As an actor, you’ll only be allowed to do so much. It’s clear you’ve got these other desires and interests, and you must start working on that right now. Just start.’”
So, he has been writing, “And writing is incredibly complex, and complicated, and lonely and isolating and horrific… but I love the puzzle. I love it when things click into place, and you start surprising yourself.” If he can survive the rigors of playing Fred Astaire, he says, he’ll know the time is right to step behind the camera. “I might fall flat on my face with it. But I’m just now ready to start speaking it: I want to direct.”
But Bell has never fallen flat on his face as a performer; why would directing be any different? “Yeah, maybe,” he says. “I’ve got to start trusting myself a bit more. It’s time to start backing myself, I think.”
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Source: DLine
