Helena Bonham Carter: California Dreaming
"I once saw an article where you said you wouldn't work with Ken again," I say, which, given the disaster Mary Shelley's Frankenstein turned out to be, seems a lot more understandable than not going to the Oscars together.
I think what I said was that I wouldn't go out of my way to look for a project for the two of us," Bonham Carter says. "But The Theory of Flight was something that I knew I had to do the minute I read it. The script was so funny and so smart, and I couldn't believe that it was being offered to me--that I didn't have to audition or beg to be seen. About a week after I read it I was banging on to Ken about how excellent the script was. Ken picked it up and read it and said, 'Oh, this is excellent.' I said, 'Yes, that's what I've been saying.' And he asked if the boy had been cast."
The boy?" I interrupt. "I love that. In Hollywood, they always refer to the woman in the film as 'the girl,' but I don't think I've ever heard an actor refer to himself as 'the boy.'"
Bonham Carter blushes. "Well actually, Ken didn't say it like that. He probably said,"here she lowers her voice to imitate Branagh'"Has the male lead been cast yet?' I doubt he used the term 'boy.'
"It's funny," she continues. "We're forever 'the girl' out here in Hollywood, and then we're the mother. It's like there is no womanhood for an actress. But anyway, Ken was sort of hinting around about the part, and I said, 'Do you think you're right for it?' Because I thought there was another actor who was more right for the part. What we did was, we auditioned together, so we could see how it would work. We also thought that maybe we knew each other too well and that we wouldn't be able to believe the lie with each other. But of course we just laughed all the way through the audition, because we found it very funny. He was obviously very right for it. And everybody else was absolutely, categorically sure that he was right for it. My only worry was that our relationship would upstage the film, that there would be more written about us working together rather than about the film itself."
"Well," I say, "there's a lot to talk about with the film because the subject is taboo. Your character is in a wheelchair with Lou Gehrig's disease, barely able to speak, but still wants to lose her virginity, right?"
"My character is dying, and she knows it, and she wants to have sex before her life is over. And Ken's character wants to fly. It's an unlikely friendship that forms between them, but I can't stress enough that this is a funny, unsentimental movie. It tackles tough subjects, but it does it with a really deft hand. Ken's the lead ..."
"Wait," I say. "Are you saying you're 'the girl'?"
Bonham Carter turns red. "I guess we're both the leads. The Theory of Flight is about how gravity is tying them both down. I don't want to give away too much, but I am very excited about this film."
With that, Bonham Carter gets up and moves to yet another seat at the table because the sun is following her.
"Ohh, look who's there," she says, pointing behind me.
I look over to see Howard Stern slinking toward a table with his wife, Alison, and I signal Bonham Carter with my eyes, saying nothing. Stern sits with his back to us and slouches in a way that says he doesn't want to be disturbed.
"Do you know him?" Bonham Carter asks, visibly excited about this sighting.
"I interviewed him about a year ago," I tell her.
"Go over and say hello then," she says.
"No way," I say. "Look at him, he doesn't want anyone near him. Back to The Theory of Flight. Your father is in a wheelchair, the result of surgery on his brain that caused him to have a stroke when you were 13. Is that one of the reasons you took this role?"
"No," she says. Then she seems to change her mind. "Well, it's not like I thought I could bring something to the role because of what happened to my father. But I think because of my father's illness, I am more open to certain things. I understood what it would be like to have your brain functioning 100 percent like my father does, but to have your body fail you. I guess when I read this script, I thought, 'Yes, there's something here that I could tap into.'"
Let's talk about some of your earlier films," I say, wondering where on earth to start. Bonham Carter began acting at 18, when she passed up university in favor of starring in Lady Jane opposite Cary Elwes. It was not until she was cast as the repressed but curious Miss Honeychurch in Merchant Ivory's wonderful A Room with a View that she was noticed, and she went on to do her second Merchant Ivory film, Maurice. Next, she played Ophelia in Mel Gibson's Hamlet, and then she did her third Merchant Ivory film, Howards End with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Next came Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, which led to The Wings of a Dove. Since then she's made yet another period film, A Merry War, an adaptation of George Orwell's 1936 novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
"So tell me about your first film, Lady Jane."
"Nobody had ever seen it," she says, "and then they started playing it every few hours on HBO. Now I get all these teenage girls who just go mad for it because she's a perfect heroine--smart, and dead at 15."
"After that you worked with Daniel Day-Lewis in A Room with a View--"
"And I was so scared because the second I laid eyes on him I knew he was going to be a huge star. And I didn't think for one minute that people would believe that his character would fall in love with mine. But Dan is very sweet. He used to walk around singing these Irish ditties, and he made me feel comfortable. I'm a big fan."