Jamie Bell continues to be dancing.
Twenty-five years in the past, an 11-year-old boy from northeast England filmed a small film a few coal miner’s son who wished to bounce ballet. Three years later, that boy, a 14-year-old Jamie Bell, stood on a BAFTA stage holding the prize for finest main actor, the youngest particular person ever to win it within the class. Stephen Daldry’s “Billy Elliot” stays the sort of debut most actors spend a profession attempting to get well from. Bell, now 40, has been working steadily ever since to ensure it isn’t the one factor anybody remembers.
“Nothing is a given,” Bell tells Selection, sitting in a Los Angeles airport terminal, on the brink of get on board again to London. “When you come out of the gate with something that is so loved in that way, it’s a great gift, but it can also be a bit of a curse, because you have to carry that around with you and you almost have to live up to it. It’s a responsibility to go and have a great career, but it’s easier said than done.”
The profession that has adopted has been the uncommon one which survived a child-star debut with out ever congealing into the apparent subsequent factor. Ones just like the motion movie “Jumper,” the interval drama “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” the fantasy-musical biopic “Rocketman” and the emotional ghostly drama “All of Us Strangers.” And now, most just lately, the HBO restricted collection “Half Man,” wherein Bell performs a person nose-diving by his personal life. It’s a towering efficiency that has reset the dialog round what he’s able to as a dramatic actor in this Emmy cycle.
Written and directed by Richard Gadd, the identical singular voice that outlined the Emmy-winning “Baby Reindeer” discovered its method to Bell’s orbit in items. He says he learn the sixth episode first, earlier than he had any sense of what the present could be. When he learn his character, Niall, doing what he calls “nose-diving his life,” that was sufficient to get him on board.
“He’s just choosing the wrong decision at every possible turn,” Bell says of the position. “It’s this dark downward spiral of self-hatred, self-loathing and self-destruction. And clearly, a man who has been given every opportunity to succeed. He’s experiencing success almost for the first time in his life, and he doesn’t know what to do with it, and doesn’t acknowledge it.”
Courtesy of Canneseries
That is the sort of position that doesn’t exist for actors who haven’t been paying consideration. By his personal account, Bell has been paying very shut consideration. He credit a supervisor he labored with for 20 years for instructing him to remain conscious, curious and sincere about his craft. It’s change into considerably of a life mantra for him.
“You have to love it to live the life,” Bell shares. “There will be a lot of rejection and hardship, and you have to learn more about yourself as you go. You can only grow as an actor as you grow as a person. If you’re not growing as a person, you can’t really grow as an actor.”
The checklist of filmmakers Bell has spent his life studying from reads like a wish-list for any aspiring actor, and but, he’s lived it. Steven Spielberg (“The Adventures of Tintin”), Clint Eastwood (“Flags of our Fathers”), Peter Jackson (“King Kong”), Edward Zwick (“Defiance”) and Bong Joon Ho (“Snowpiercer”). “You’re just watching them and learning from them,” he recollects. “So much of it is risk-taking. I think you have to have fearlessness about it, because you have to dive in and be brave and make choices.”
The movie he’s most excited for folks to see is Paul Greengrass’ “The Uprising,” wherein he performs radical preacher John Ball, reverse Andrew Garfield, for Focus Options. The movie dramatizes the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt — what Bell calls “England’s first revolution” — when peculiar folks organized towards a punitive ballot tax imposed to fund what they understood to be an infinite battle.
“The English monarchy tried to raise a poll tax on the people, and they thought that was unjust,” Bell explains. “They thought that the people would be exploited and used and abused to fund a never-ending war. And the people said, ‘We’ve had enough,’ and they organized and rallied together and descended upon London.”
Working with Greengrass has been a long-held ambition. Bell noticed the 2002 docudrama “Bloody Sunday” when he was 14 and has been searching for that have ever since. The fact of being on a Greengrass set, he says, lived as much as the expectation.
“The way that he shoots is unbelievable. There’s no real coverage, the cameras are just floating around somewhere, and you’re just always on. Sometimes he’s like, ‘Yeah, do the script, don’t do the script, but this is the scenario that I need you to interact with, and I’ll give you a couple of pointers, but if you feel like you want to add things here and there, please do.’”
Outdoors the Greengrass movie, Bell is at present capturing the “Peaky Blinders” sequel collection, which continues the universe. The schedule has been demanding in ways in which battle together with his said priorities: his household.
“You only get to raise your kids once. So, being away, shooting a whole show for so long, it takes its toll on me. It takes its toll on my family, as it would on anyone. In the immediate, it’s just like getting the show done, going home and being a dad.”
That very same work-life math can also be the impediment between him and the position he has wished longer than nearly every other. Bell, who got here up by dance earlier than he ever stood in entrance of a digicam, was as soon as near taking part in Fred Astaire in a long-developed characteristic undertaking that in the end didn’t occur. The frustration has not light.
“It is certainly a dream role. It’s one of those things,” he says. “It’s very difficult to crack. What’s the angle here? What’s the story we really want to tell? It’s obviously still very much on the table. I know there are a couple of Fred Astaire projects in the ether as well.”
He has stopped treating the Astaire undertaking as his singular ambition. What he actually desires to make, in its absence, is a dance film of his personal design.
“More than anything, I just want to do something with dance again. I’d love to do something that lets me be physical and use my dance experience. Certainly tap. Tap is just my favorite thing to do.”
What he’s sketching in non-public is quieter and extra particular.
“I’d really love to do a contemporary tap-dancing movie that was mostly focused on process. I find movies about rehearsal spaces fascinating: how things come together, what it takes to pull it off, and the thought behind it all. The meticulousness that goes into crafting something like that, I have a real fascination with.”
Within the fast, although, the work is concentrated on “Peaky,” the Greengrass movie hitting theaters in 2026, and his household. He’s, as he factors out, not the boy from the BAFTA stage.
“Turning 40 is a big thing for me as well,” Bell displays. “I tell people I’m 40 years old and a father of three. I think it freaks them out more than it freaks me out.”
He laughs.
“I’m everyone’s reminder of how old they are.”
