Jamie Campbell Bower interview with Askmen!

There is so much information on Duke of Oxford from letters, lawsuits and court papers. Did you research him or stick to the script?
Jamie Campbell Bower : I looked into it. I think you’d have to be a fool not to look into it with such information available. I did background research and I did that before the audition just so that when I went I would know who this guy was. Even with all the info you’re given there still has to be a character. Also this is Rhys’ character, above anything. We decided that Oxford progresses during the film. He goes on his travels and spends money and starts losing it all because, as a young adult, he was lavish. You only have to look at the costumes that he had.

Didn’t he spend most of his money, around 80% of it, on clothes?
JCB : He did, yes, a lot. He loved the fine fabrics from the Orient. Also you have to understand he was incredibly well traveled, so along with the kind of person he was, there was an air of arrogance about him that Rhys brings beautifully to the role. I suppose he’s both vulnerable and arrogant. His desire, passion and love was put under so much pressure by the court, which in those days ruled everything. So toward the end of the film he’s just a shell of the man he once was.

How did you access him aside from the materials? Through your own instincts?
JCB : It was his arrogance and cockiness that I attempted to bring at the beginning to his life. He was a genius, and with genius there is always that aloofness with people. I find that friends of mine who are the brightest people I ever had the pleasure of meeting have this otherworldly quality about them. I tried to bring that to the role.

Jamie Campbell Bower talk about his Anonymous co-star Rhys Ifans.

He said: “We sat down beforehand and had a chat briefly. But I think it’s a testament to the casting.”

and Vanessa Redgrave plays Queen Elizabeth I as an older woman while Joely, her real-life daughter, plays her in her younger days.

“Vanessa and Joely have said throughout this experience that you’re not the same person when you’re 17, 20 as you are when you’re 52, 60, 70 or 80,” Jamie said.

“But if we can try and validate a character and make him relevant by showing different stages of his life and an audience can relate to that then I think that’s the main thing.”

Thestar.com make an exclusive interview with Jamie Campbell Bower in titled “The young man who would be king”

Despite the title of his latest movie, Jamie Campbell Bower isn’t going to be Anonymous for very long. In fact you could argue that, at the tender age of 22, he’s already appeared in enough pop culture phenomena to qualify as a fledgling supernova.

He began as the juvenile lead, Anthony, in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, when he was only 18, then went on to roles in the Twilight series (as Caius in New Moon), the final two Harry Potter films (as Gellert Grindelwald) and Tuesday at 9 p.m., he launches the new CBC miniseries called Camelot, playing a very young King Arthur.

“I know people have a preconceived notion of the role,” he says, messing his long blond hair even further as he stretches out on a hotel room sofa during the Toronto International Film Festival.

“They’ve seen Sean Connery, Clive Owen, all those older guys. But there’s no factual evidence this guy ever existed, nobody that can be exhumed, no DNA test we can do, so why not go back and discover the core of who this person was? I mean, what’s the point of doing 10 hours of the same linear bulls–t, when you can try to offer people a three-dimensional progression?”

Bower has already learned that getting to the essence of a character is what this business is all about, at least for him.

“For me, the moments I shine as a performer are the ones where I don’t have to do anything, just be there and exist in the moment. That’s why I found working with Joely (Richardson) so intense, but beautiful.”

He and his Anonymous co-star both play younger versions in flashbacks of the film’s leading characters, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I (played later by Rhys Ifans and Vanessa Redgrave, Richardson’s mother.)

Many people will see the film as a literary whodunit, working on the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a fraud and that de Vere really wrote the plays. But during the moments when Bower and Richardson are onscreen, it’s hard to think the film is about anything other than their love.

“Elizabeth loved him because he stood up to her. She was used to everybody bowing down and licking her arse all the time. Along comes this boy who’s well-read, well-travelled, well-dressed, but he doesn’t give a toss about any of it.”

That sounds so autobiographical, one has to ask Bower what he was like in his youth.

“What was I like as a kid? I’m still a kid. I always wanted to be the centre of attention. Mom tells me that once I interrupted one of her dinner parties because no one was listening to me. I stood up on the table, dropped my pants and mooned everyone.

“I was by no means the popular kid at school, but I was always passionate about performing for the exploration of myself, not the enjoyment of others.”

He was just out of school when he landed the role in Sweeney Todd, opposite the likes of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.

“It was pretty terrifying. I’m not going to lie; it was scary, but it was a life experience I cherish today.”

He appeared in the second of the Twilight movies and has already filmed the fourth and fifth. Like most people involved with it, he finds it “a unique experience, where you’re laughing one minute and shuddering the next.

“And then there’s the fans. Let’s not forget that the word ‘fan’ comes from ‘fanatic’ and the Twilight devotees certainly fit that description.”

Asked for the most outrageous example of adulation he can recall, he gets a wicked twinkle in his eye.

“A girl once sent a bondage collar and some cheese, along with a very explicit note, to a hotel I was staying in. It was a wheel of brie. I do like a bit of brie, but I didn’t eat it for fear there was some glass or something in it.

“There are crazy people out there, but f–k it, I’m one of them.”