Jeremy Northam: No More Mr. Knightly

"Now you're in Mimic, in which you and Mira Sorvino play a pair of scientists who think they've controlled a virus, but have only succeeded in almost ruining the planet."

"Mimic touches on man's arrogance in thinking we have controlled nature. I heard on the radio the other day that these scientists are out trying to spot the spitting earthworm [the Mongolian Death Worm] in the Gobi desert. They've never caught one and all the nomads in the desert live in total fear of this thing. Don't they think that might start some trouble?"

"OK, three major films under your belt, and now you're working on Steven Spielberg's Amistad with Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey."

"Yes, that was a surprise. It came up very suddenly. I have a very small part as a judge in the 1800s, and I only worked on it for a few days. The story is about slaves who rebel on a ship. It was a wonderful experience."

"Are there any differences between British actors and American actors?"

Northam nods. "American actors seem very easy with the camera, and they know what works for them, and they know how to use it. I don't know any of those things. I can't bear to go to the dailies. I can't stand watching myself when I know I can't change anything because it's already on film. But maybe that's something you learn with time."

We both stop to watch a young girl who has at least 50 piercings on her face.

"I don't get it," says Northam. "I keep thinking that snot is going to come shooting out through the holes in the nose. And now people are doing scarring with razor blades and stain. What do they call that?"

"Modern Primitivism."

"Yes. There's this case [the Spanner Case] in the U.K. now, a group of people who were into self-mutilation, or mutual mutilation, and they had been demonstrating and I think they just lost their case in the European Court of Human Rights."

"What did they want?"

"They wanted to be able to nail their foreskins to a plank of wood."

"You need a law for that?"

"Well, I guess the law felt that they had a responsibility to protect, but my attitude, I'm afraid, is if people want to do that to themselves, let them."

"I don't have one, and neither does my boyfriend, so I don't know-- are foreskins really sensitive?"

"Why are we talking about this?" Northam wants to know. I remain silent. "Well, yes, the foreskin has a lot of feeling."

We both sit quietly for a minute, thinking this over. "So now you know I have a foreskin," Northam says.

"Believe me, I am doing my damnedest not to imagine it."

He laughs. "I hope you're not going to put this in the story."

Of course I'm going to put this in the story, but Northam looks so nervous all of a sudden I decide to tell a story on myself just to make him feel better. "Years ago ...," I begin, and then I launch into a genuinely embarrassing foreskin encounter of my own.

"My God, Martha, you probably fucked that guy up. He's in therapy right now. But you're not going to tell that story in the magazine. You're just going to have me talking about nailing the foreskin to a board, right? Well, please make it plain that I'd rather be talking about--"

"The theater?" I ask in my best British accent.

Northam smacks my arm. "I'll tell you, doing movies is easier than doing the press for them. But that's because I feel like all this stuff is too private and personal."

"Don't worry, honey," I tell him. "It's just between us."

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Martha Frankel interviewed Rob Lowe for the June '97 issue of Movieline.

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