For a while they came in pairs, as if progressing toward some unseen thespian ark: Daniel Day-Lewis and Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, Ralph Fiennes and Hugh Grant, Joseph Fiennes and Jude Law. Every couple of years, Britain offered up another incipient movie star or two, and an Anglophilic American public responded enthusiastically. Often starting as ensemble players at London’s fringe and state-financed theaters, they would emerge out of that egalitarian climate, with its deliberately alphabetical billing, and go on to leave movie audiences weak at the knees — and asking one question.
“Everyone wants to know who the latest one is,” said James Frain, the 32-year-old Englishman who plays Natalie Portman’s American boyfriend in the new film “Where the Heart Is.” Referring to the current appetite abroad for his own countrymen, Frain added, somewhat wryly, “Hollywood is a very impatient town.”
Where once international stardom was the preserve of a lucky few — Olivier or Burton, Finney or Hopkins or O’Toole — these days everyone wants in on the act. The result is a new generation of Britboys, many of them still sufficiently unknown that you might spot them on the London subway. But you’d better look fast before they enter the land of the limousine.
The difference between this latest crop and previous ones lies not in quality but in numbers: instead of pairs, think clusters; no, better yet, packs. Britpacks. However invidious it may be to name names, it’s hard to resist the temptation. Frain, Dominic West, Jason Isaacs, Dougray Scott, Ioan Gruffudd, Daniel Craig and Kevin McKidd. To which one could just as easily add Rupert Penry-Jones, Ben Chaplin, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Ed Stoppard, James Purefoy and Paul Bettany. Not to mention Christian Bale, although his revelatory performance in “American Psycho” sets him apart. For the moment, at least.
“There are a lot of good actors over here,” said Jason Isaacs, a relative unknown whose glistening eyes could become identifiable catalysts for fear once “The Patriot” opens on June 30. The film is a Hollywood period epic set during the Revolutionary War in which Isaacs plays a British colonel who becomes the relentless nemesis of Mel Gibson’s American rebel.
Judging from a 40-minute teaser for the movie, one gets the impression that screen evil may not have reached quite such well-spoken proportions since Ralph Fiennes delivered his career-making performance in the 1993 film “Schindler’s List.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody as evil as I am,” said Isaacs, who in conversation couldn’t be warmer or more open. “I kill everything in my path. I think I cross every boundary known to man.”
Now on location filming yet another American movie, “Sweet November,” directed by Pat O’Connor and starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, Isaacs seems to have crossed that most important boundary: a role to lift a good company player, of which Britain boasts literally hundreds, into the next echelon of fame.
Characteristically, Isaacs headed out to the San Francisco set of “Sweet November” immediately after completing a run in a London play. In Gary Mitchell’s “Force of Change,” at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theater Upstairs, Isaacs earned warm reviews — and $400 a week — for adopting a Belfast accent to play a member of that city’s Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Similarly, Joseph Fiennes went from his own Royal Court play, “Real Classy Affair,” by Nick Grosso (the fellow Britboy Nick Moran, from “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” appeared with him), to film renown in 1998 courtesy of “Shakespeare in Love.” “For a lot of British actors, the theater is home,” Fiennes said. “It’s what they did before you knew them, as it were.”
Frain, for instance, completed his own Royal Court play, Christopher Shinn’s “Other People,” earlier this year before heading back to Los Angeles. But despite appearing in “Reindeer Games,” “Titus” and “Hilary and Jackie,” he still manages to avoid many of the annoyances that accompany celebrity.
“I don’t get recognized, which is fantastic,” said Frain, who will next be seen in the Istvan Szabo film “Sunshine” with Ralph Fiennes.
Then there’s Dominic West, 30, currently on view as Sandra Bullock’s charming if dangerous boyfriend in “28 Days.” (The role perpetuates the image of the Briton as lethal seducer fondly remembered from, among others, Jeremy Northam in the 1995 Bullock film “The Web.”) But keen London theatergoers in 1997 could have seen West in a variety of roles at the Old Vic Theater as part of the director Peter Hall’s repertory season.
“People regenerate or rejuvenate themselves in theater,” said Ismail Merchant, the producer who over the years has given early employment to British actors like Hugh Grant, James Wilby and Rupert Graves — all alumni of the Merchant-Ivory movie “Maurice” in 1987 — as well as Ben Chaplin and James Purefoy, both of whom appeared in the 1995 “Feast of July.” “Theater gives these actors a boost,” said Merchant, whose latest film, “The Golden Bowl,” stars Northam, part of a previous crop of British talent, “and then Hollywood is eager to devour them.”
Kevin McKidd, 26, first came to attention in “Small Faces” and “Trainspotting,” both set in his native Scotland, and appeared last year in the American director Rose Troche’s “Bedrooms and Hallways,” playing a bisexual Londoner. In an interview, McKidd, who made his American stage debut last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the Racine play “Britannicus,” agreed with Merchant: “You have to go back to the theater just to check in.”
In the theater, he added, you can get feedback: “You want to feel what the audience is feeling. If you don’t, you start to lose a bit of the skill.”
McKidd’s most recent stage appearance, last fall, was in a London revival of “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” the bloodthirsty Jacobean drama by John Ford. Leading that production was Jude Law, just before his role in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” brought him an Oscar nomination and a British Academy Award, raising his movie fee to what is said to be the $5 million level.
So are the Brits just better? They’re certainly better schooled in the craft, which in turn opens up broader career possibilities.
“That’s why they’re so used,” said the director Mary Harron, who put Bale, 26, a Welshman, at the murderous center of “American Psycho.” “These guys are really character actors, whether they’re good-looking or not. I don’t think you would ever go see a Christian Bale performance the way you would, say, a Ben Affleck performance.”
She elaborated on the point: “I like Ben Affleck, but I wouldn’t cast him in anything that involved total transformation. American acting is very, very personality-based.”
That’s where training comes in.
“Very often,” said Ellis Jones, vice principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, the prestigious London drama school, “right from the first audition, you think, `OK, fine; all we’ve got to do is get the actor to speak properly and point him at the casting director.’ There are a lot of very strong young males coming through at the moment. I don’t know why.”
By way of example, Jones cites Geoffrey Streatfeild. Streatfeild, 25, was plucked from the academy’s three-year program early to start filming a television movie, “Sword of Honor,” based on the Evelyn Waugh trilogy, for Channel 4. The film’s producer, Gillian McNeill, spotted Streatfeild in a student production of the 18th-Century British comedy “The School for Scandal.”
“We’re spoiled a little bit in the U.K.,” said McNeill, whose television film stars Daniel Craig, yet another Britboy several years older than Streatfeild. “There’s such a lot of good talent.”
Along with that talent, fortuitously, comes an ever-expanding film market, with the result that the two feed off each other. “It’s a result of the widening global marketplace,” said Debra Zane, an independent casting director in Los Angeles, whose resume includes casting a then barely known Ben Chaplin opposite Uma Thurman in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs” in 1996.
Americans remain fascinated with all things British, which can translate to mean classy and even exotic. “Producers certainly are intrigued by English talent,” said Zane, “and they always want to find that fresh face.”
