The Return of Ben Chaplin

Anyone who saw Ben Chaplin in the romantic fatty tale The Truth About Cats & Dogs back in 1996 is probably a little surprised that he isn't famous today. As the guy who romanced both Uma Thurman and Janeane Garofalo, Chaplin exuded effortless charm and nifty comic timing, and he managed to make a bout of phone sex seem like the screen's most suave seduction since Paul Henreid simultaneously lit cigarettes for himself and Bette Davis in Now, Voyager.

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But few of the moviegoers who picked up on Chaplin in Cats & Dogs went to see his follow-up film, Washington Square, an adaptation of Henry James's novel that ended up, through no fault on Chaplin's part, quickly forgotten. Terrence Malick's hallucinatory 1998 art-house epic about the battle of Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line, should have reassured Chaplin watchers that a major screen career was indeed in ascension. As a private who holds body and soul together with visions of his wife back home, Chaplin provided a badly needed emotional anchor in a movie given to long, abstract flights of visual poetry. But The Thin Red Line came and went without doing much to turn Chaplin into a star, and the actor has kept such a low profile on-and offscreen since then that he's not much better known these days than he was at the beginning.

Now that he has a new film, Lost Souls, in theaters, the 30-year-old Chaplin is finally back in the spotlight where he can, perhaps, explain what he's been up to. I meet him in a European-style cafe in Pacific Palisades, California, a moneyed L.A. suburb that's home to the Cruise/Kidmans, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and many other members of the Hollywood elite. Not one, but two smiling waitresses are bringing Chaplin his lunch with lavish attentiveness that he accepts with abashed, gracious diffidence. "That was very flattering," he grins when the young women have finally left. "Hike a double team, don't you?" Then, casting a dubious glance down at the broccoli arrayed on his plate, he notes, "It looks like a green brain. Or something there might be worms in. Or something that should be on little legs in an episode of 'Star Trek.'"

Once Chaplin has come to terms with the rest of what's on his plate, he takes on the question I've asked him: where has he been hiding? "I don't like to talk about my personal life, but I've had a really bad year," he begins, "Pretty much from July to July. My dad died. And workwise, it's been a hard year, too. It's all right, it's life. It's been a good time for realizing that when one door closes, another opens. Let's say it's been my growing-up year or, at the very least, a lot of things have happened and now I feel I can grow." He pauses, then grins, adding, "I'm particularly suspicious of actors using terms like 'grow.' They look terrible on the page, don't they? As in: the actor said quietly, 'I feel like I've grown this year.'"

Since Chaplin is eager co deflect the seriousness of what he's been through, I ask him to tell me about Lost Souls, the Satan-on-the-loose thriller that he shot over a year ago with Winona Ryder and cinematographer-turned-director Janusz Kaminski. The buzz on this film has been sketchy, and its delayed release has raised the usual doubts. Apart from the watchability of Winona Ryder and Chaplin him-self, is it worth seeing? "I saw the cut before the final version, and I don't really know why it hasn't been released," he replies, "except for the glut in supernatural thrillers. During the delay, they've done fixes on story elements that didn't quite work, but I honestly don't know much about it. I can say that I enjoyed making it and I enjoyed working with Winona Ryder and Janusz Kaminski a lot." And why did he choose to do Lost Souls to begin with? "I needed a job," he says. "Winona wanted me to do it, and that was a big attraction. She knew me because Michael Lehmann, who directed The Truth About Cats & Dogs, had directed her in Heathers and she'd heard through him about this odd, unknown English person. We met at a party several years ago. Janusz Kaminski was keen on me, too. It's a big role, and it was something I'd never done before. I can't say much about my character, because it will spoil things, except that I play an American true crime writer, a bit like a young Dominick Dunne."

When I remind Chaplin of all the breathless copy generated by his heartthrob performance in The Truth About Cats & Dogs, he recites in hilariously gushing, fan mag style, the phrases employed to describe him in that film: "I was, let's see, 'a Brit of all right,"' he laughs, "and 'Britain's answer to Antonio Banderas," a babe,' and a ..." He takes special sarcastic glee in intoning the adjective most commonly used to describe him--"hunk"--as if it were an expletive. "If I was a 'hunk,'" he grins, "it was only because they never saw my legs. If they had, I'd have lost my fan base right there. I'm allergic to shorts for that reason--I will never wear them in a movie."

Chaplin had a major brush with sex symbolism before experiencing the Hollywood version. Having been raised in a middle-class family in Windsor, England (father a businessman, mother a teacher), he began getting noticed in stage and TV productions in the early '90s, which led in 1995 to his becoming a star and a British heartthrob when he played a sexy, cocky, misogynistic, homophobic, agoraphobic stud on the sitcom "Game On!" Meanwhile, the small role he'd had as a sensual footman in the Merchant-Ivory film Remains of the Day led to a larger one as the childlike Con Wainwright in the same tony team's Feast of July, on which he fell in love with the actress who is still his girlfriend, Embeth Davidtz. He was looking for an agent to represent him in America, following an acclaimed performance in Sam Mendes's West End revival of The Glass Menagerie, when he unexpectedly landed the role in The Truth About Cats & Dogs.

"The meetings, the parties, the hype--all of it was bizarre and great fun, I didn't believe a single word of the hype. With me, it's like courting disaster to believe any of that. I got a whole lot of, 'You're going to be a star. You know that, don't you?' It's a question without an answer. I said, 'If I am, I am, and I'll deal with it.' How can you prepare for a train crash? What does one do, practice? I'm never terribly unhappy when I get a big role, but I'm never terribly happy, either. Not that I'm some kind of Prozac robot--it's just I don't believe the good stuff any more than I believe the bad. I just try to enjoy it all."

None of the enjoyment in the post- Cats & Dogs days tempted Chaplin to go for a big payday with any of the slew of Hollywood films he was offered. "After Cats & Dogs, I got big huge offers to do what I thought was the same role," he explains. "Some of the parts were in scripts that weren't actually as good, but some were in scripts that were as good and better. I just thought, 'If I do another role like that...,' I thought that repeating myself would be disaster for me. That means I've had to take a longer way around, but hopefully it's a road that won't run out as quickly."

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