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    An amazing Jeremy interview Archived Message

    Posted by AngiLu on March 29, 2010, 3:11 am

    Just posted on the Jeremy Northam info here: http://jeremynorthaminfo.com/index.php?showtopic=266&st=0&#last


    Saving lives in the 'golden hour'
    By Nancy Mills, Edmonton Journal
    England's Jeremy Northam is a trauma surgeon in Miami Medical

    Miami Medical series premiere

    Time and channel: Friday at 11 p.m. on CBS

    "English people who look and sound like me are going to get cast as bad guys," Jeremy Northam says. "It's inevitable."

    The 48-year-old actor did indeed make his American-film debut terrorizing Sandra Bullock in The Net (1995), and since then has played more than his share of villains. So when the offer came to play a noble trauma surgeon on Miami Medical, a CBS series scheduled to debut this Friday, Northam quickly signed on. For once, his character would be trying to save lives rather than to end them. Miami Medical is built around the premise that

    the 60 minutes following a critical injury may offer the only opportunity to prevent death. That's why a team of surgeons at a top trauma facility in Miami is always on call to treat patients with life-threatening

    injuries. The show views the city as a battle zone and the surgical team as medics, and Northam credits Robert Altman's MASH (1970)

    as a major influence. "Before we started shooting," he says, "one of the things we talked about was the influence of MASH.

    MASH is one of the seminal films of that period. It confronts people with the notion of brevity of life and the brutality of saving life.

    "I have a friend who's a surgeon," the actor adds, "and he has a very robust perspective about what he does. Doctors have to, surely."

    Speaking by telephone from his home in the English countryside, Northam admits that he himself is a little more squeamish, though he hasn't yet fainted on set.

    "There were a couple of moments where I thought, 'I'm feeling a bit hot and unnecessary,' " he recalls. "It happened when I was dealing with an episode with cutting a skull and taking a piece out."

    Not that he thinks his experience is anything like that of a real doctor.

    "We're not doctors," he says. "We're aping them. From our point of view, it's all prosthetics and people with squeezy bottles. You have to laugh."

    Northam's surgeon is a far cry from Mr. Knightley, the ultimate good guy whom he played in Emma (1996), opposite Gwyneth Paltrow as the titular Jane Austen heroine. Nor does he resemble the chipper Welsh singer/ songwriter Ivor Novello, whom Northam played in Altman's Gosford Park (2001). But at least he has retained his English accent.

    "Initially the character was a guy, not from Miami, but American," Northam says. "I talked about playing it English, and they were quite happy with the notion, because they wanted a person from somewhere else.

    "That somewhere else can incorporate elements of past experiences in his life, both good and bad," the actor continues, "not the least of which is the scar on his chest and what that's doing there. Obviously he's undergone something traumatic physically, and he's made a choice to go to a different place and start all over again."

    The same could be said of Northam himself. "A few years ago I was living in a slightly different

    world," he says. "One year just bled into the next. One hotel, one airport, one set just bled into the next, inexorably. I didn't know where the hell I was, and I decided that that life was not for me. I couldn't do it."

    Northam's 2005 marriage to Canadian makeup artist Liz Moro had ended, and he wanted a change. An American television series seemed to be such an opportunity. That was his motivation, he says, not any effort to raise his profile in Hollywood.

    "No," he says firmly. "I like to go to work, and then I like to come home. I really don't have a plan. I like to try to have a life that's entirely apart from work."

    Northam, whose father was an Ibsen scholar who taught acting at Cambridge University, became interested in the profession through school productions.

    "I thought, 'Oh, wow,' " he recalls. "But I wasn't doing that much -- the odd play -- but I was increasingly seeing a lot of plays."

    When he was 11 his family relocated to Bristol, in western England.

    "I was a perennial underachiever," says Northam, the youngest of four children. "People always thought that I was smarter than I in fact was. I loved sports and running around."

    He began to focus more on acting while working on his degree in English literature at the University of London.

    "My dad appreciated acting," Northam says. "I think he did a fair amount of it himself as a young man, and he directed the odd thing later in life."

    Moved from theatre to film

    Northam went on to study acting at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, and then spent several years working in regional theatre before settling in London. His big break came in a 1989 production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, in which he was playing the minor part of Osric while understudying Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role.

    One evening, Day-Lewis collapsed during a performance and Northam took over. He played the part a number of more times.

    "The first night was blind terror," Northam says, "and then it turned into a very odd experience. Every night I'd come to the theatre and not know if Daniel would be going on. Ian Charleson was taking over the role anyway, so during that time I was also rehearsing Laertes to his Hamlet."

    The following year, Northam won the Olivier Award as most promising newcomer for his performance in The Voysey Inheritance (1989). He could have had a long career on the stage, but he was looking elsewhere.

    "I was beginning to feel typecast in theatre," the actor says. "I did lots of very wordy classics."

    So Northam switched his focus to films and television. After The Net and Emma, he appeared in a string of period films, including Carrington (1995), The Winslow Boy (1999), An Ideal Husband (1999), The Golden Bowl (2000) and Enigma (2001), and also played a very convincing Sir Thomas More in the Showtime series The Tudors (2007-2008). He played Dean Martin in the television movie Martin and Lewis (2002) and golfer Walter Hagen in Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius (2004).

    His three most recent films are set in widely varying eras: Dean Spanley (2009), a comedy about the relationship between a father and his son, is set in the early 1900s. Glorious 39 (2009) is a family drama set immediately before the Second World War. Creation, which opened earlier this year, is set in 1859 as Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) formulates his revolutionary theory of evolution.

    The visibility is higher on the big or small screen, Northam says, but the work isn't much different from his days in the theatre.

    Acting not all glamour

    "Acting is a practical craft," Northam says. "I always admired the day-after-day professionalism of the working actor. The actual experience of being an actor is not necessarily the way it's been portrayed. There are mundane elements to the work which require a lot of concentration and a fair amount of sacrifice. You've got to really want to do it and be committed to it and be able to do it.

    "I've always liked that you really have to be able to do it."

    Traditionally movie actors are viewed as less hardworking than their theatrical counterparts, but Northam has found that not to be the case.

    "It was an eye-opener to work with Sandra Bullock," he says. "She worked so hard, nonstop, around the clock, seven days a week, and she maintained this fantastic energy and good humour. She must be very driven, but she has fun all the way.

    "Gwyneth Paltrow was very young when she played Emma," he adds, "but she had such poise and the chops. She knew what she was doing and how it was going to work for her. Again, she had such fun doing it."

    Another impressively hard worker was director Steven Spielberg, for whom Northam played a judge in Amistad (1997).

    "I only had a very few days on that movie," he recalls, "but I'll never forget them. Steven was cutting The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), shooting our movie and planning Saving Private Ryan (1998), all at the same time.

    "He was doing 30 setups a day," Northam continues. "Working very fast on a feature film, you might do 15 or 18 a day. I remember saying to him, 'I've never seen anyone work so fast.' He said, 'Sometimes I'm too fast.'

    "I asked, 'What do you do then?' and he said, 'Reshoot.' "

    For his part, Northam says, he lacks that self-assurance. In fact, he still suffers the occasional crisis of confidence, even after 15 years of success.

    "Healthily, there has to be an element of self-doubt," he says. "It's like when you're a kid with an exam coming up -- if you're not frightened, it's probably bad news. Every night before a new job starts, I'll get ready for bed early, having done my exercise, and, if I'm to be up at 5 in the morning, I'll be lying there at 2 going, 'Aaaah!'

    "I've been having a mid-life crisis for the last 20 years," Northam says, laughing. "I think I went straight from puberty into the mid-life crisis. That's what acting brings on."


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