sin the Los Angeles sunshine with a t-shirt and sweatshirt, Ben Chaplin has a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette between two fingers in the other. He’s more excited this morning, albeit a little cautious about technology, after an accident last year.
“My first thing with Zoom was also my first dinner at Seder,” says the 51-year-old actor. “My girlfriend is Jewish and I was feeling like a complete charlatan, that goy, among all his elderly relatives.” Suddenly, the screen went blue and a curved white line appeared, guided by an invisible hand. “This older voice asked, ‘What’s going on?’ And then you start to see the classic cartoon penis. I’m ashamed of how funny I found it. I thought, ‘Are they going to draw hair on the balls?’ But then he stopped. Apparently, a boy from one of the families was responsible. Good for him. Haha ha! “
Chaplin has a natural exuberance, although on screen he is capable of delicacy in a variety of records – from the thorny comedy of Birthday Girl, in which he played a fugitive St Albans drug dealer, with Nicole Kidman as his fiancée mail order, for the tense suspense of the BBC drama One Apple Tree Yard, famous for its sex scene with Emily Watson in a broom closet in the House of Commons.
In his last role, he adapted to a more refined climate: he plays archaeologist Stuart Piggott in the fact-based drama The Dig.
He’s not the leader here: the stars are Carey Mulligan, like the widow whose property Sutton Hoo is the site of the Anglo-Saxon relics, and Ralph Fiennes, who begins to excavate them as World War II approaches. It is in Piggott’s story, however, that much of the film’s emotional urgency lies. His wife and also an archaeologist, Peggy (Lily James), sees him making googly eyes for a colleague and intuits that the old treasure is not the only thing that was buried.
“The movie is beautiful,” he says. “It’s all about minutiae, isn’t it? The individual’s legacy, our brands. You could argue that it’s in the nose, but I’m glad it is. There is a universality, an immensity in the themes. “
He chose not to dig too deep into Piggott’s real past. “When I was young, I made the mistake of researching something crap and thinking, ‘Well, what did that do for me?’”, He says. “So again, I’m from the non-transformational school.”
That was the complaint at Guildhall, the theater school in London, from which he was expelled, albeit temporarily. “The official reason was that I didn’t change enough,” he says. “I was playing King Lear at 19 – what did they want me to do? This is not an exaggeration, it is torture. “
The youngest of four children, Chaplin was raised in a village near Windsor. From his mother, a teacher, he inherited his passion for reading. From his father, a businessman, he inherited a love of cinema. “The room has become our cinema. If I spoke, I was expelled, so I shut up and paid attention. ”His father died 20 years ago, when Chaplin’s Hollywood career was in full swing. “I’m sure he died without worrying about me, thinking that my place was defined.” He laughs. “Little did he know how demanding and clumsy I would be.”
An earlier mourning hit Chaplin especially hard. “My older sister. She was tough, obstinate, brilliant. She died when I started to get along. I had just done The Remains of the Day and she never saw it. I remember thinking that she would be proud of me for that. ”He says that her death has changed him deeply. “Appreciating the impermanence of life at this age is a gift. It made me kinder, more tolerant, a better actor. But sadder. I have a darkness that I didn’t have before. It has certainly been a less joyful life ever since. “
Chaplin experienced mainstream success as an agoraphobic Jack-the-lad on the BBC’s Game Game flatshare, and then left after a series. He went to Los Angeles to spend time with his then partner, Embeth Davidtz, star of Schindler’s List, whom he met when they played lovers in the adaptation of HE Bates’s Feast of July. While there, he auditioned successfully for The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a cheerful Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Uma Thurman, who became a surprise success. A year later, he was the rotten one dating Jennifer Jason Leigh in a beautiful Washington Square movie by Henry James.
It was at this time that doubts arose. “You don’t know that you don’t want to be famous until you are,” he says. “I felt ashamed to have flown on business or first. You think, ‘I didn’t win this!’ Wherever you go, the attitude towards you changes. ”It didn’t help that he was away from home. “I found myself existentially alone, in a way.”
The theater has always provided him with ample consolations. “When you’re in the zone, you lose time, you defeat mortality. All you can see is the face of the other actor. Someone I was on stage with said, ‘You’re going the other way, aren’t you?’ I never heard that before. I said, ‘Yes, I want to.’ “
This absorption became more difficult to achieve during the fragmentary process of film production. An exception was The Thin Red Line, in which he threw a grunt fighting in the battle at Guadalcanal. There was war wherever he came back – explosions, planes flying overhead – while the director, Terrence Malick, kept the cameras running. “We shot a million and a half feet of celluloid,” says Chaplin. “There are about 50 films there.”
He ended up being one of the protagonists of that film, which had its share of victims in the editing suite: Mickey Rourke and Bill Pullman were among the actors completely extirpated. Chaplin returned to a minor role in Malick’s upcoming film, The New World, although his role as an abusive father was cut from The Tree of Life.
Her acting coach on The Thin Red Line was the late Penelope Allen, better known as the bank’s chief cashier on Dog Day Afternoon. I tell Chaplin what she once said about him: “Ben liked to be the ‘cute boy’, so he didn’t want people to see him as the cute boy; he wanted people to see him as the wonderful actor he is. “
When I look up, he’s wiping his eyes. “Oh my God,” he says. “You’re making me cry.” I apologize – I didn’t mean to upset you. “No, it feels so good,” he says. “I’m so flattered that she said that. I was ashamed to call myself an actor before I met Penny. I loved it, but it seemed frivolous. She made me proud of it. I miss her and you just brought her back to me. Thanks. That hit me right in the heart, that one. “
Was she correct in discerning a self-awareness about her appearance? “I wanted to be a serious actor, but I was always called a ‘British heartthrob’,” he says. Then he adopts an offended mocking tone. “Frankly, Ryan, I felt objectified.”
How did he rank? “I never considered myself a beautiful boy. My brother made sure of that when we were growing up – I received a lot of criticism, which was probably good for me. But, also, I was very small until I was 14, so I was shorter than all the girls. I didn’t feel attractive. I didn’t think he was a minger, but I didn’t have the concept of being beautiful. “
Any concern about his appearance arose out of fear of being stigmatized. “I refused some films. The last thing I wanted to be was the new Hugh Grant, which is how they were trying to paint me. I wanted it to be about my acting. “
His Hollywood career did not work out as many expected. But Chaplin is optimistic. “I was very lucky. I worked with some great ones. In fact: Francis Ford Coppola (who cast him as the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe in Twixt), Richard Linklater (Me and Orson Welles), Oliver Stone (Snowden). He is waiting to resume production on Joss Whedon’s fantasy series, The Nevers, hence the temporary move from his London home to Los Angeles.
“I always had the ambition to be better,” he says. “I was obsessed with that. I probably should have done more work that would have consolidated me as a better-known actor, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to take a cruise. As he says this, his hand illustrates a wavy line in the air, like a schooner happy to have reached calmer waters.
The Dig is on Netflix from January 29