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."
If you look at the films Chaplin has chosen to do--all arty fare except for Cats & Dogs--you could argue that he might have thought more about balancing out his work. "I'm meticulously choosy," he asserts. "In the end, I sometimes wind up suddenly having to do something because I've been so choosy for so long. I'm choosy about how I'm perceived in the business, about my station. I can't help it. If I could help it, I wouldn't be."
After The Truth About Cats & Dogs, Chaplin made another American film, Henry James's Washington Square, with director Agnieszka Holland. Holland, best known for Europa Europa, Olivier, Olivier and The Secret Garden, as well as for one of Leonardo DiCaprio's more lamentable adventures, Total Eclipse, is not the director you go to for big box office results, and Chaplin didn't get them. He did, however, relish working with his costar. "I really liked Jennifer Jason Leigh. She's genuinely shy, but when she comes out of her shell, when she warms up to you, it's fantastic--like a wonderful reward."
Chaplin wasn't after big box office with the next film he did, either, but he was definitely after something big, "I remember Mike Medavoy, a great man having me in for one of those business meetings that I'm so terrible at, asking, 'What do we have at Phoenix Pictures that you'd like to do?' I said, 'I've heard that Terrence Malick's going to do a film and I'd like to work for him.' Mike giggled because that was so unlikely." But Malick did choose Chaplin over hordes of other actors to star in The Thin Red Line. And unlike Bill Pullman, Mickey Rourke and Lukas Haas, who got axed entirely, and George Clooney and John Travolta, whose roles were practically cameos, he emerged with a tremendous amount of screen time. Did the prestige give Chaplin a boost? He says, "It was a director's piece, really. It's weird, but people almost didn't think of the actors in it, or didn't think us as actors. I got some nice praise, but there wasn't a flock of offers from it. I always felt that might be the case. It wasn't going to be about personal gain. Making it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I am genuinely proud of that movie--so much so that I'll never be able to be objective about it. It was all about the experience, not the result. That job was like my American family." Has anyone in that family kept in much since the shooting stopped? "I've got friends I'll still be speaking with in a decades time, in particular John C. Reilly, Dash Mihok, Adrien Brody and Jim Caviezel. And I consider Terry a real friend, like family. He was the very first person to call when my dad died.
"I do want success," Chaplin continues, "but I don't have the killer instinct. I expect success to a certain degree. My attitude is, if it's meant to be, it will be."
Having resolved to do Lost Souls partly because of Winona Ryder, did he and Ryder get on as well as he had hoped? "The thing people don't know about her is that she's actually very funny," he says. "She's quite a clever girl, and quite naughty in her sense of humor, too, once she lets down her guard. She's been famous so long, I'm sure she feels she has to be guarded, but she didn't seem that way with me at all. She does amazing impressions of people, and she's especially funny doing the sexy ingenue. What you see of her in Heathers or Reality Bites, where she's looser--that's more like how I saw her. I love her in The Crucible, too, which is a much better film than people give it credit for."
Chaplin believes that his good relationship with Ryder translated into screen chemistry, but that, in general, chemistry is mysterious and a bit arbitrary. "You can't invent it. Two really good actors can have no chemistry. And you can find someone attractive, yet actually despise them. Chemistry is getting on with someone and you don't know why. It was there with Janeane Garofalo, when we worked on The Truth About Cats & Dogs." And with his other costar, Uma Thurman? "Well, I wouldn't pick Uma, though I think she's gorgeous," he says, "and Uma wouldn't choose me either. My dad was so funny about that movie--he said it didn't work for him because he thought there was no choice but Janeane. Good for him--he wasn't attracted by the glamour."
Chaplin is confident of his chemistry with Nicole Kidman in the upcoming Birthday Girl, and happy about the project as well. "That's a really good film and I think we genuinely have chemistry," he says, grinning. "The whole experience was great. I simply met with the director, Jez Butterworth, and he wanted me to do it. I didn't have to audition or test. I play a clerk in a below-standard high street bank who's been there since he left school, probably. He's a real character, rather than a hunk! He has no living relatives, and doesn't appear to have any friends. He basically wants someone to talk to and he orders a mail-order Russian bride through the Internet. Nicole Kidman arrives and she speaks no English. So he learns a lot of lessons. It's a sweet love story, but it's slightly deeper and odder than the average commercial love story. Nicole is s-o-o-o good in it. She's a real actress who works very, very hard and I never had a bad moment. I looked forward to going to work every day and I think that shows."
I tell Chaplin that, because he's had more on-screen romances with realistic-looking women like Janeane Garofalo and Jennifer Jason Leigh than with beauties like Kidman, lots of women think of him as a man who can get beyond surfaces and not be caught up in beauty. Then again, the one known long-term relationship he has had since hitting Hollywood has been with Davidtz. Where does he stand? "I don't think I could have an ugly girlfriend," he admits. "I haven't had a girlfriend that other people would think was ugly."
While we're dispelling fantasies, is there any other misconception he wants to disabuse adoring fans of? "I've certainly got my dark sides. I think I can be very ugly inside and out. I've got a bad temper. Not dangerous. I'm an ostrich-in-the-sand type who lets things fester. It blows up and it's gone. Not when I'm working--I don't smash up trailers or anything. I'll just break some bizarre little sugar container that I haven't liked for a long time. But I haven't hurled anything for a long time." For all those who still think they're the one who'd know how to handle Chaplin, he has further revelations about himself: "I work really hard. Acting is not something that comes easily to me. In fact, when I'm working, I don't function very well outside of that environment. I can't--my mind is too taken up with it. I don't think I'm meant to be good at more than one thing at a rime. I can't chew gum and walk at the same time."
In view of all Chaplin has said, you might be able to guess whether, in his past romantic exploits, he's usually been the dumper or the dumped. "I think it's much harder to dump than to be dumped," he says. "That's probably my weakness. I've never dumped." While we're on the subject, is show business fidelity an oxymoron?
"It's hard to have relationships because of the nature of the job, with its prolonged absences and the intensity of the work. I don't have affairs, never have, but, as I explained, I don't do other things well when I'm working. Either you spend months apart and you're both having totally different life experiences, or you're both doing nothing. That's the struggle."
When I ask Chaplin if he has some favorite Hollywood anecdotes saved up from his career so far, right away he says, "The weirdest one took place with an American director in a hotel in London. I won't describe it other than to say it was very much like a TV role I did a few years ago in which I played a new-wave, Method-y sort of actor who was about to portray Leonardo da Vinci for a big American director. In that piece, the actor goes to a hotel and it's quite surreal, with two naked women, one of whom masturbates using his hand, and meanwhile the director is dead in the bathroom with a knife in his stomach. Now, in my real-life story, nobody masturbated on my outstretched hand but the whole thing had the same nauseous/dream-like feel, I didn't get the role, by the way. Somehow, I don't think I quite got into the spirit of the proceedings."
After the release of Birthday Girl Chaplin has no further films on the way as yet. The London stage project he'd considered didn't pan out, and he'd like to pursue another one. "But I'd love to do something outrageous on-screen," he says. "I'd look absolutely terrible as a woman, bur I'd love to try playing a transvestite. Or I'd love to play a tongue-in-cheek classic lover like Casanova. I'd also love to find a genuine, character-based comedy, which is some-thing I haven't done on film. I'm doing now what I always wanted to do and I'm having a great ride. I just want to keep working as an actor and whatever that requires, I will do. Not murder, of course. Although ..."
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Stephen Rebello interviewed Joseph Lawrence for the October issue of Movieline.