James Purefoy talks about his James Bond audition - `Brosnan lite`

James Purefoy is sitting at our table outside a smart London restaurant in an immaculate white shirt - reports The Times - with matching teeth and Ray-Ban Aviators, pouring a precise dose of lime cordial into his Perrier as the sunshine blesses an unfeasibly benign Richard Curtis world. People smile at him for no reason; when a traffic warden demands he move his motorcycle, our fellow patrons almost cheer him on; waiters fuss and cosset. Purefoy is used to all this. He greets the world with the easy bonhomie of one who has been habitually liked and admired. At 42, he still has his boyish looks, his thick, dark hair, his unlined skin (enhanced today by a hint of tinted moisturiser?) and the air of a man for whom not much has gone wrong in life. It would be a miracle if he weren’t vain, but he’s also funny and gossipy — have I seen that Princess Di’s butler is at the next table? — and wanting to entertain.
He is home for a snatched break during filming in Italy of the second series of HBO’s Rome, in which he plays Mark Antony and to which he has pledged five years of his life. Since his vainglorious general is also the pin-up of the piece, he is keeping in shape, ordering gazpacho, refusing bread, laughing that the scrutiny of producers has finally made him empathise with those actresses terrified of putting on a pound. He has just taken his nine-year-old son, Joe, surfing in Cornwall (he split from Joe’s mother, the actress Holly Aird, four years ago), and will soon fly back to Rome to be reunited with the young art-historian girlfriend with whom he is “madly in love”.

Meanwhile, he has two other historical roles to promote: the 18th-century dandy Beau Brummell and the pirate Blackbeard, both for the BBC. One part turns on his self-professed “camp” qualities (“Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve done an Italian cookery course,” he chuckles), the other on repressing them completely. Brummell’s biographer gave him a tour of his subject’s London, including the clubs where he stood savaging the attire of passers-by and his wine merchant, Berry Bros, where he weighed himself obsessively, losing a stone with the arrival of the waltz. His exquisite Brummell advises and exploits the Prince of Wales, falls for bisexual Byron and suffers the sort of crisis that often afflicts handsome actors: does their work really matter? “Byron was a poet, the prince was the prince — what was he? The inventor of the trouser? He felt he should be more than that.” Sometimes, Purefoy admits, he can sympathise: his job is fun, but hardly neurosurgery. What the heck, he loves it.

For the wrinkled, hirsute villain Blackbeard, another swashbuckling role to add to his soldiers and knights, his barking, drawling voice was based on the father of an old Somerset girlfriend; the beard and eyebrow wigs took an hour and a half to be applied by two make-up artists every day in the searing heat of Malta. “I’m not a big method actor,” he says, “but as the beard went on, I became obsessed with details, asking the costume people to explain where every stain on the extras’ costumes came from. I drove them insane.”

Hiding Purefoy’s handsome features, Blackbeard gave him a rare chance to transform himself, and is thus one of the few roles he will be able to watch with interest rather than vague embarrassment. It also marked a realisation that he can make himself heard on set. “In America, I am plankton,” he laughs. “Maybe slightly bigger plankton now Rome is there. But here, I am a carp, and it’s fine to use that, as long as you are not being a tosser.” He also acknowledges that leading men are better paid, more widely known and more pampered, luxuries he would doubtless miss. “I fit into a certain stereotype,” is his view of his looks. By rights, Hollywood should have snapped him up, but I’m not sure Purefoy has enough killer ambition for Tinseltown.

Essentially, he is chasing a happy, balanced life in which he can still carouse with his friends, play poker, see plenty of his little boy. “If I’d played Blackbeard in a $50m movie rather than a £2m BBC film, would I have got more satisfaction?” Besides, he sometimes balks at the liberties big-budget scripts take with fiction. He wasn’t satisfied with his Rawdon Crawley, in Vanity Fair, because he couldn’t play him dull and stupid enough for his betrayal by Becky to be inevitable, as Thackeray intended. “It was too leading man-ish,” he says. “They needed him to be a match for her. Now I’ve stopped reading the novels before I do the film.”

The new series of Rome imposed no such compromises, only the mild shock of going from Beau Brummell’s 12-strong crew to the first day as Mark Antony, with 14 HBO producers conferring quietly behind the monitor. The atmosphere on set, full of tested British talent such as Lindsay Duncan and Kevin McKidd, soothed his nerves and his distrust of actorly ego. “It’s like doing a British Council tour of Julius Caesar with a $130m budget. The actors are all no-fuss — we don’t talk about it much.” To research his character, he read Plutarch and Caesar’s journals, discovering not quite the brave, loyal friend of legend, but an opportunist who fled Rome on the night of the assassination and returned to dine with Brutus and Cassius. “He is proving to be the ******* of all *******,” he says gratefully. “I’m feeling more and more like JR Ewing.”

Purefoy had no childhood desire to perform. The son of a wealthy Conservative agent and a mother with her own business, he grew up, one of five, in Martock, Somerset. Expelled from Sherborne public school (for consorting with girls in the early hours), he had felt trapped in a system that prepared boys for life only as generals, lawyers or bankers. “You never got a nice jacket for playing Hamlet, only for playing rugby, and I was too scared of that after my nose was broken. It was, ‘Not the face, love.’”

He came home and worked as a hospital porter in Yeovil, which he loved, being drawn to life-and-death reality after those cloistered school years. But for his father’s insistence that he take A-levels, he would have qualified as an operating-theatre assistant; instead, he went to technical college, choosing drama only because there were 16 girls and three boys in the class. His Marxist tutor soon radicalised his politics (he is still a member of the Labour party) and suggested he might have a future in acting. To get his Equity card, he toured in a van, making his first stage entrance aged 17 in Equus, naked and performing in a converted barn during a snowstorm. “I was hung like a raisin and trying to do something with it with a hairdryer.” Then there was drama school (Central), the RSC and eight years of theatre, which he imagined he’d do for ever.

Instead, he has become an expert in derring-do, fencing, riding, fighting and winning (though he is more usually pursued by) the girl. He was taught horsemanship by stunt riders before making George and the Dragon, and can run alongside a horse, jumping over it and back again, circus-style. There have been no heroics since he nearly died on a nag called Nutty Ned while playing Lancelot in what he describes as “the worst film ever made”; its back legs slipped down a ravine, with a foaming river and probable death below. “I am a great believer in letting the stuntmen do their work,” he says firmly. “I only did that scene because they told me it would look sexy. What a sucker.”

Only the ultimate daredevil character eludes him, and, had it not been for his contractual commitment to HBO, he might have found himself playing his boyhood hero, James Bond. “Bond is my childhood. Live and Let Die was the first movie my dad took me to. We watched it two and a half times in a Dublin cinema.” His initial interview in the Bond offices overlooking Hyde Park Corner makes him wince to recall, but he is English enough to love telling a funny story against himself. “The room is very Bond-esque: wood panelling, big table. You sit there trying to be as serious and panther-like as you can, just letting them look at you. They asked what I thought should be changed, and I was eight minutes into my soliloquy when I noticed they were all staring at my legs. Being a ludicrous, overexcited boy of 42, I was kicking them like a child. I realised there was no hope.”

Actually, they asked to see him again, but work on Rome precluded further meetings. Did he mind? He shrugs. “I’d love to do it, but can you be James Bond and live in a little London street two minutes from your kid? It’s too life-changing.” Maybe when his son is older? “I’ll be too old: 45 when Daniel (Craig) has done his three films. Anyway, I’m sure they thought I was Pierce Brosnan lite.”

As he moves though his forties, however, he is counting on the swaggering roles giving way to more mature, “pedestrian” work. “I want to wear a suit in a part, a pair of jeans. I’m doing a British film next year about a lawyer.” Then he grins mischievously. “I’d love to play Raffles, the gentleman thief. Sunday-night telly, done with style. I’d watch that.”

His idols at drama school were the working-class rebels Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, but, coming from a privileged background, he knew he would never be hired by Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, of whom he is a huge fan. “He came to the screening of Beau Brummell, and I wanted to say to him, ‘If ever you have a part for a middle-class man...’ but, of course, I didn’t.” To be honest, he isn’t bothered if the political auteurs find him too posh and pretty: he loves the challenges, and the spoils, of mainstream success. Our conversation about Rome the drama slips seamlessly into one about Rome the glorious city, his sumptuous apartment near the Via Veneto, with several terraces, and how he knows where the sun falls on which tables in which fabulous restaurants.

Not that he has any intention of leaving Shepherd’s Bush; his son, now thankfully recovered from a serious blood disorder, is at the heart of all his planning. Would having 007 for a father be healthy, he muses, since so many sons-of-Bond have had problems? Probably not, we decide. Asked if Joe is proud of his dad, Purefoy rolls his eyes in mock exasperation. “He doesn’t give a monkey’s. I’ve spent the past five years doing parts for his benefit in which he is totally uninterested. I feel like tying him to the chair and saying, ‘You watched Johnny Depp playing a pirate, now you can watch me.’ But, you know, I think secretly, he’s proud.”

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