As John Keats in Jane Campion's Bright Star, 28-year-old Ben Whishaw plays a most unconventional romantic hero: a poet, yes, but one who relies on his lover to save him, instead of vice versa. His Keats is a fragile man, bedridden by sickness, who finds color in his cheeks only when administered to by Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), quite literally the girl next door.
In real life, Whishaw exudes the same sort of unconventional romantic pull: He's a tangled mess of skinny limbs and lanky hair, but he's got a quiet charisma that can't help but compel. (It's no wonder that Julie Taymor wanted him to play Peter Parker.) I talked to Whishaw about giving a physically limited performance, Bright Star's most painfully deleted scene, and the love offerings he received every day from Cornish while shooting.
How much did you research John Keats for this role, and how much did you simply try to stick to Jane's cinematic vision of him?
It can get in the way, and it's a question of how you use the research, isn't it? Jane encouraged me to become an expert on John Keats as much as possible, but another thing that Jane said frequently was, "Forget the plan. I don't want to see what you've prepared in your trailer. Forget the plan, drop the plan. See how it lands, let it blow in." You have to absorb as much as you can, then be prepared to let it all go.
Did it ever get in the way?
An example of perhaps knowing more than was necessary for the film is that there was a scene that Jane cut quite late from Bright Star, where Keats gets very angry and very jealous of Fanny. Anger and jealousy are currents that run very strong through his love letters, but it's not something we go into in the film. I got frustrated with Jane for a while because I felt very strongly that it was a part of Keats that we couldn't ignore, that it had to be in the film. But of course, I was blind to the fact that it wasn't right for the story that Jane was telling. It started to lead us down a path we couldn't follow, and I see now that Jane was absolutely right.
What's the least amount of prep you've ever done for a role? Do you ever just dive right in?
I think that sometimes in theater, I don't prepare much beyond going to the rehearsals. In film, I find it very useful always to do some preparation before you start rehearsals or start shooting, because there's so much that's against you on a film set.
How do you mean?
Just in terms of the environment that you're battling with. These bite-sized takes, the hours of waiting around, the hours it takes to light you beautifully. It's very hard, then, to get to a place where you can do your work. So I think it's very important in film to prepare yourself for that, whereas theater is much more conducive to really doing actors' work. It's all about the actor.
It would seem from my perspective that Bright Star might have less of those interruptions. It's a very still film, and it doesn't seem to have a whole lot of setups. Could you run through an entire scene in a way you might not have been able to do in a film like, say, Perfume?
I think the directors of both of those films were very keen to give the actors as much "flow" as possible. But sure, just because of the kind of physical nature of telling the story in Perfume, it was different, whereas Bright Star happened in these little rooms that we could keep clear of crew. It was much more intimate, I guess that's true.
You're physically immobile for a large portion of your performance. For an actor, when you have your movement and stage business reduced to that degree, does it provoke you in any way?
To do the sick stuff?
When your performance is just your face and your voice. Right now, you're curled up on the couch as you talk to me. You're obviously used to expressing yourself physically.
It's an interesting question. I don't know. [Long pause] I never felt totally immobile, really. It wasn't my experience of playing the character, even when he couldn't move or was in bed. It didn't feel that limited, or at least, I wasn't aware of it that way.
So much of this film's success relies on your chemistry with Abbie Cornish, but is there anything you can or did do to augment that?
It's kind of a mysterious thing to me. Really, either chemistry is there or it isn't, and there's nothing you can do about it if isn't there. I do think it's a mysterious and intangible thing, because sometimes something can happen onscreen between two people that isn't happening in reality, and likewise, we all know that sometimes there's something going on between two people in real life and we don't see it at all onscreen. All I can say is that I know when I met Abbie, for a day or two we were like cats, wary of each other. Trying to sniff each other out. Once we'd gone through a little of Jane's rehearsal process, we very quickly were in tune with each other.
What did Jane do to tease that chemistry out?
Jane would encourage us to look out for each other and take care of each other and to love each other. What we did in rehearsal was that she wanted us to bring in a love offering every day. It could be a letter, a poem, a flower, or a piece of music...but we had to express our love for each other as often as we could through some sort of gift. That was a really clever thing for Jane to do, and it did kind of foster an attitude between us.
Do you two still have each other's love offerings?
I don't know whether she's still got mine, but I've got some of the things she gave me, yeah. [Laughs] Like a CD she made, and she did some sewing for me.
So you had never read with Abbie or even met her before you were both cast?
Yeah.
That's quite a leap of faith on Jane's part!
I know! I think it says a lot about Jane. She's just got really amazing instincts about people, in a way I've never really come across before. She has intuitions about things that are kind of uncanny. She can see into people, I think, and anyway, she must have had some intuition that we would get on well. She never even seemed to doubt it.
Had you met Jane before you went in for this film?
No, but she set me at ease right away, right in the audition. She was a bit unnerving at first, just because she kind of fixes you with her stare, but she's actually incredibly soft and gentle and easy on people. There's something about her that's very direct -- she told me, "Don't be polite with me. John Keats was not famed for his politeness. We've got to speak the truth to each other, so you can just leave that outside."
Do you feel reticent sometimes with directors?
I don't ever feel reticent, but I think I was brought up to be polite to people. We were trying to talk about something with the character, and I was kind of tiptoeing around the issue, and Jane said, "Let's just talk about it plainly. It's not helpful to us to do otherwise." I've always felt that that's been a sort of block of mine, you know? And she immediately said, "Let's get rid of that."
What issue were you discussing with her?
I can't even remember. I think she asked me the question of had I felt betrayed before. I was kind of pussyfooting around the answer.
You have Kill Your Darlings on deck next, where you play Lucien Carr, who brought together Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and John Kerouac but also found himself entangled in a murder. When does that shoot?
We were gonna start in June, we were gonna start in August...I don't know exactly now, but I'm fairly certain it will happen. Maybe not until next year. It's such an exciting story, though, kind of a film noir. It's definitely not a biopic of Ginsberg or Lucien Carr or William Burroughs or anyone else. It's very much using those characters to explore themes and ideas.
Keats and Carr are both figures that have written and been written about, but Carr's story is much more ambiguous. How do you actually make decisions about how to play the mystery of the character, especially when he's a real person who died only recently?
It's a good question. I guess I don't know yet, is probably the answer! [Laughs] It's a bit like Bright Star in that there's this game you play with fiction and reality. Your performance has to lie somewhere in between.