It is not often that one finds oneself sitting in London’s chic Claridge’s hotel pretending to be Tom Hanks. Nevertheless, this, curiously, is where we find ourselves today. These are, however, extenuating circumstances: since its inception, the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s preposterously successful Catholic conspiracy novel, The Da Vinci Code, has been the subject of so much anticipation and controversy that its producers have swaddled it in secrecy and refused advance screenings, even as they offer interviews with its stars.
In the light of this fact, discussing the film with one of said stars, Paul Bettany, could well prove a little tricky. Hence I propose to Bettany that we act out his favourite scenes, he in his part as Silas, the murderous albino monk, and I will play Hanks’s role as Robert Langdon, the Harvard professor of symbology charged with unravelling the riddle of a clandestine Catholic society.
”That would be a bad one to choose,” Bettany laughs. ”Because that would be me running at you, throttling you and then punching you in the stomach.” I see. And what, precisely, would I be doing during the running, throttling and punching? ”Looking butch, but shocked,” he advises, with a smirk.
Bettany has the type of bleached-out colouring that makes looking at him something like blinking through the midday sun. On screen, this can be used to convey a peculiarly wholesome prettiness — as Tom, in Lars von Trier’s Dogville, or as a faded tennis player in Wimbledon — or to unsettling effect, as a struttingly brutal upstart in Gangster No 1, for example, or now, in The Da Vinci Code.
It is the bad roles that Bettany reli-shes. ”You know what? I had so much fun doing it,” he says of playing Silas. ”It’s just having something meaty and complicated, but sort of clear. He starts his life being called a ghost by his dad. Ends up killing his dad. Goes to prison. Escapes prison. Is saved by this bishop called Aringarosa who he in turn saves, and he calls him an angel. And suddenly there’s a purpose to who he is and how good he is at hurting people. I actually felt invigorated by the part. It felt good. And I enjoyed acting again, ’cause I haven’t for a couple of years.”
Does he tap into an inner well of nastiness when playing violent men? ”Well, I’m not a psychopath,” he says soberly, ”which should thrill you, bearing in mind you’re alone in a room with me.” Indeed, the worst he has ever physically hurt anybody has been in common or garden punch-ups ”with my fists. I’ve kicked and I’ve punched, but I’ve never stabbed. Or garroted. Or electrocuted. None of that stuff.”
Bettany was raised in the United Kingdom as a Catholic, though his church attendance drifted after his confirmation. It was, he says, ”incredibly” strange to be back in churches while filming The Da Vinci Code ”because now I only got to churches for funerals. But I feel truly wowed by the architecture and the meaning of the architecture if you get lost in it and think about the man hours in the smallest little chapel, and the love involved. God, it’s fantastic.”
He was surprised by the uproar and offence to his fellow Catholics caused by the film. ”I’d love to make a movie that shakes the world and offends people, but really,” he says, ”I didn’t think it was going to be this one. I think next to The Last Temptation of Christ it’s Tonka Toys. Nobody seemed to get offended by Martin Scorsese’s movie, no one seemed to get offended when Francis Coppola made a movie where he suggested that the Mafia and the Vatican were in cahoots. Nobody picketed that. I play a monk who murders people, but it’s no more a comment on monks than it is on people who wear sandals. Or big, long, brown dresses.”
He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, actress Jennifer Connelly, their son Stellan and her son Kai. What, particularly, rankles about the American way of life? ”Apart from foreign policy? Cars. We have a Prius and everybody thinks I’m such a girl ’cause every-body there has big butch cars.” And food. ”In America, bread lasts so long. You buy bread and then it’s bread forever — it’s Forever Bread!
He insists he and Connelly are not competitive about their careers. ”We don’t compete for the same roles,” he explains. But he loathes how Holly-wood treats its female actors. ”In general, it’s so much more of an objectification. You know the drill, it’s a true story. For instance, if I am being asked to have a picture taken on the cover of a magazine, maybe they’re wanting me to look sexy, maybe they’re wanting me to look rugged, maybe they’re wanting me to look fragile. With a woman, they want you to look available, essentially, that you are in some way inviting. And that’s just fucking depressing.”
He recalls once attending a photo-shoot with Connelly where she was asked to wear just a bra. ”And she said, ‘No, not gonna do it.’ So they asked her to wear a man’s dinner jacket. And I’m thinking, ‘How many times have I seen this, you unimaginative bastards?’ So she does it, and then the magazine cover gets pulled because she wouldn’t wear the bra. That’s what men’s magazines that are sort of soft porn want. They’re more insidious than porn magazines.”
He’s fired up now, frantically chewing gum. For a fleeting moment the kicking, punching Bettany breaks through his sun-dappled warmth. ”It’s fucking revolting.” — Â