An Interview with Colin Firth

Colin Firth is about to hit the cinemas with the hotly awaited new Brit flick, Love Actually. We chat to him about his acutely romantic character in the film and his sex-symbol status in real life...

What is it about Richard Curtis's writing that made you want to play in Love Actually?
Richard really does have this fantastically intelligent and self-deprecating wit that you associate with the films he writes. He is doing something that, however mainstream, is quite different from what other people do, and actually, I think that it is only mainstream because he single-handedly made it so. It is quite hard to write about middle-class professional people - usually the stuff of sitcoms - but Richard manages to get some drama out of it.

Did you worry about the overly nostalgic and sentimental side of the film?
That was Richard's intention and he is quite open about wanting to be embracing that aspect of humanity. Great drama comprises both comedy and tragedy, and I think Richard has been able to enmesh both and bring a genuine humanity to his work.

You shot most of your scenes very early on in the production, didn't you?
Yes, even though the production was much more complicated for the other cast members, for me it was a simple pleasure from beginning to end. I think it was easy to say that because in some ways I could just jump right in and feel so little pressure as I'm not carrying the film. My whole story line could have been a total catastrophe and it wouldn't be the end of the world.

How did that affect the way you approached your character?
I decided to see what would happen if I just allowed myself to be carried by someone who has proved himself to be a master of this form. Also, when my stuff was confined to the South of France, the schedule started with my scenes, so it felt like it was my little movie for a while. Thus it was just easy to have a good time and get things right in three weeks.

Bridget Jones's Diary was a major boost to your career as a film star. While the film was shooting, did you know the role was going to have such an impact?
I thought I had a huge advantage as Mr Darcy playing Mr Darcy and as a much more immediately likable figure. But it's always difficult to do justice to a novel that was so closely followed in England and achieved its own cult status, because you wonder whether you've been faithful to the perception of the original work. There was also a fine line to be observed in terms of how sentimental and cute you can be. But I thought that if you have a film with Hugh Grant and Renee Zellweger in the lead roles, Richard Curtis doing the screenplay, and all the publicity of a bestseller behind you, there's a good chance that you're going to have a hit, even though the critics might be ready to pounce.

Obviously, you must be aware that roles like this one and the coming Bridget Jones sequel are only going to raise your sex-symbol profile - which began with Mr Darcy - even higher?
It's simply not something I ever think about, even though the Darcy mystique doesn't go away. I am very surprised now, almost 10 years later, that it is still so present. I'm surprised it was a success at all at the beginning and then I was surprised that people were still talking about it after six months.

Certainly all the attention has been of enormous benefit to my career. I laugh when I think I turned down the role several times. Some of my friends had been warning me off Pride And Prejudice, saying that I could never muster the smouldering sexiness and all that. But then I took that as a challenge and so I've always seen the success of the role as a form of personal vindication.

Do you find your sex-symbol image amusing, peculiar... how do you see it?
Everyone likes to be flattered but it is weird because there is no one way that you feel about that. You do wonder, I suppose, especially as your career has to continue, what it is going to mean and yet I don't think it has meant that much except that I have talked about it in most interviews.

It's utterly bizarre to hear people discussing me in sexual terms. It's not something I'm used to. As an actor, I'm far more used to experiencing failure, rejection and failed expectations. I'm just glad that I didn't achieve my so-called hunk status until I was 35. I know it would have been very difficult to deal with if it had happened in my first film.

Do you view yourself in much less glamorous terms?
Yes. It's the strangest thing to be considered as some sort of sex symbol, like a Warren Beatty. The truth is that, until I met my wife, at 35, I only had two girlfriends. I remember when I was visiting my wife's parents in Italy, before we were married, and I mentioned half-jokingly that I was something of a sex god in England. They both burst out laughing!

Were you ever resentful of your Darcy image the way other actors have come to distance themselves from certain key roles in their past?
No, I was delighted that my career had received this enormous jolt of energy, but it took me so by surprise and I couldn't really make sense of it. I had never focused on playing romantic characters, so I actually felt like it was happening to someone else, and I didn't quite know how to answer for it.

When journalists asked me about the experience, I tended to sidestep it and immediately that became identified as an attempt to shun it. I became, 'the reluctant heartthrob'. It's not that I hated it. I just didn't feel as if I owned it.

Do you ever speculate what would have happened in your career if you hadn't popped out of the water, soaking wet, in that famous scene?
What's extraordinary about all the mythologising that's gone on about Darcy is that, as an actor, you essentially cut yourself off from the character the day you leave the set and move on to your next project. So I find myself dealing with the persistent Darcy aura from a distance - there's a strange disconnection at work just like there is when I hear people referring to me as a star. I still see the same fellow who struggled earlier on in his life.

I still find it amusing that what the public doesn't know is that the original screenplay [for Pride And Predjudice] called for Mr Darcy to jump into the pond nude, which was a scene we couldn't shoot because it was for the BBC.

For some reason it became a huge event, even though there was nothing in the way the scene was shot or scripted which gave anyone the slightest suspicion that it would be seen as sexy. And then, of course, I found myself being waved at and followed down the street in London!

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