Northam is dashing, suave...and he acts, too ***

Jeremy Northam acted on the London stage for 10 years before he broke onto the Hollywood scene in his role as Jack Devlin, Sandra Bullock's charming nemesis, in The Net. If that performance made audiences sit up and take notice, his next one -- as Mr. Knightley in the new film adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma -- has the potential to make him a household name. A&E talked to him about the various women in his screen life. On Emma: I can't say I'm an avid reader of Austen's work, but I can say I'm a fan of Emma -- although I didn't fare well with it in school, as a 14-year-old boy. In fact, I loathed it with a vengeance. I think I entirely missed its sense of humor, which became quite clear when I read it last year and found myself chortling away as I read it. I hadn't realized how b###hy and acid [Austen] is. I hope we've reflected that in some way in the movie because it's a difficult authorial voice to replace, so much a part of the framework of the book. On Jane Austen: I hope people can see past the Austen bit. I think our look and tone is very different from Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility. On one hand it's very handy that people go, "Oh, good, another Jane Austen novel," but o n the other they go, "Oh, ####, there's another one." But they're different books, they're going to be different films. I don't think for a minute Douglas McGrath thought, "Oh, let's do a Jane Austen film, it'll be good in the box office." I think he want ed to do Emma because he loved the book. On Gwyneth Paltrow: Very daunting to work with the woman dating Brad Pitt]. Enough to make you want to wear a paper bag over your head and start taking anti-aging vitamins. Or just become entirely reclusive and make sure you have reasonably smelling breath or something. I did meet Brad, and very personable he seemed, too. They're a very lovely couple...a very beautiful, young, beautiful couple. And they're very happy. And I hate them both! No, but Paltrow was perfectly nice to work with, very fun. She's got a sort of New Yorky, very urban sense of humor, which always goes well with, first of all, 18th-century bonnets and hairdos. And then you throw in a cellular phone and put us in the middle of a field in damp Dorset. It's quite funny, really. "What the h**l!" she would say, or "Ewwwww." What is that? How do you spell that?

The Knightly News (People Magazine)
By Andrea Troyer 9-30-96