The Geordie actor on thieving kids, Daniel Craig and crap dancing
It’s nine years since Billy Elliott. Are you getting £1 million a movie yet?
Maybe. But I can’t discuss my salary with you!
We’re writing down ‘yes’. What’s the biggest paycheque you’ve ever had?
They’re all different. And let me tell you, playing a perverted kid who wants to have sex with his mother in Hallam Foe doesn’t pay.
You should have said you get £5 million per film to set a marker for future work.
Like I’m Shia LaBeouf? I’m afraid he’s in a league of his own.
But isn’t he only doing so well because he’s mates with Steven Spielberg?
Well, that is useful. But one can’t deny he’s good at commanding audiences in big movies.
Okay. Your new film, Defiance, is about some real life Jewish brothers who hid from the Nazis in some Eastern European woods. No ‘surfing in Hawaii’ scripts knocking around?
I know what you mean. We shot it in Lithuania so it was tough, really hard. Eventually the cold bites through and those period-style shoes don’t isolate you from the freezing ground-frost. But it was felt that anyone who went back to their trailer… well, nobody did that.
So no weather-induced Hollywood strops, not even from Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber, who play two of your brothers?
The conditions were ripe for a bout of, “I’m not fucking doing this!” but the closest we got was Daniel standing up for me one day in the rain at the end of October, it was absolutely freezing. My body started to lose control, going into hypothermic shock, I think. He said, “We have to stop, he’s starting to freak out and he’s going to die.” He used his Hollywood power for good.
So you didn’t try to man-up and impress James Bond?
Well, it’s daft, because you do have to be butch in the presence of Bond, but Daniel has a really good heart and said, “You need to take a second and then come back.” He’s very much the leader that he portrays in this film. And I give him a lot of credit for going training every night after being in the forest for 10 hours, freezing his arse off.