![]() ![]() The scab-picking, I try to say, is just part of the artist’s curse (which is made so much worse by people who describe it as anything so silly as ‘the artist’s curse’). “And it’s like: What am I doing? What am I doing! What the hell am I doing! Sat here in front of a graveyard, thinking about dead people in my life?” For the Uncle Frank scene I mentioned, which is devastatingly brilliant, Bettany has said in interviews before that he kept his younger brother’s sweatshirt with him on set in order to bring up that body-shaking sorrow. “And I’m just not good enough to do that.” So instead, Bettany explains, “if I find myself in a scene that requires that, I find myself picking at scabs that I’d rather not pick at,” and he mimes a nifty scab pick with his forefinger. “Some people have amazing access to their emotions, and can switch them on like that,” he explains, sitting some 3000 miles away in a cabin near his house in Vermont. Have you ever wondered, as I did - through onion-chopping-and-dead-childhood-dog tears - how the actor could weep so heart-rippingly authentically in that graveyard scene in the film Uncle Frank? Or about how an actor - any actor - can actually set something like that onto cold, hard celluloid and make us all want to call our parents out of nowhere, or laugh out loud, or smile at our warring spouse, or quit our jobs on the spot? In Bettany’s case, the answer’s simple. But from behind the always-artificial setting of a promotional interview, plenty of human bits began to naturally emerge - no testament to my rather clunky, nervy, Hugh-Grant-in-chubby-prosthetics interrogation style, I can assure you but a good indication of the way Bettany is, I hope, both on and off set. I sensed, at various points during our hour-long Zoom call to discuss The Collaboration and a few other things, that it would have been simpler for the actor if he had just stayed in the lane of Junket-Tron-3000 - stock answer pleasant platitude ‘fell in love with the script’ mandatory plug. The man cannot be machine-like even if he wished to be. Or really not Andy Warhol, if you’d rather. That’s just sort of how acting works, and quite right too.īut what I mean to say here is that Paul Bettany is really not Andy Warhol. Bettany isn’t, you might also rightly argue, the purple alien AI thing he plays in Marvel’s WandaVision or the big-serving tennis professional Peter Colt he appeared as in Wimbledon. “I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” The actor Paul Bettany is not Andy Warhol, who he plays in a new film called The Collaboration based on the stage production of the same name. “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine,” the artist said. L et’s start with a quote from Andy Warhol, because that’s the sort of magazine this is these days. ![]()
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