Dominic Cooper on The Devil's Double, Dual Roles and Finding the Fun in Uday Hussein

The last seven days have been almost insanely kind to Dominic Cooper: Just a week ago, the 33-year-old British actor appeared as Howard Stark in the high-performing Marvel offering Captain America: The First Avenger. In the time since, Cooper has been lavished with praise for his stunning dual role in The Devil's Double -- and deservedly so.

Set against the backdrop of Iraq's '80s- and '90s-era wars with Iran and the United States, Double features Cooper as both the sadistic Iraqi scion Uday Hussein and his war-veteran doppelganger Latif Yahia, whom Uday enlists ("kidnaps" might be the more apt term) as his bodyguard/decoy/"bullet catcher." Thus commences Latif's witness to some of the most depraved decadence and savagery of the 20th century -- a "gangster regime" led with black-eyed portent by Saddam Hussein and stirred mercilessly below the surface by his cigar-chomping, virgin-defiling, torture-deploying eldest son. Under direction from Lee Tamahori, Cooper plays both men as utterly separate beings melding into the same paranoid psyche; that they share a lover (played by Ludivine Sagnier) only compounds the intrigue and intensity of Latif's quest to break free from Uday's crazy-making grip.

The characters took their own toll on Cooper as well, belying the ease with which he seems to disappear into each. It is one -- or they are two, really -- of the year's best performances, and you'll be hearing about Devil's Double well into awards season. For now, though, Cooper is enjoying his ride to the top. Movieline met him en route -- literally, on the roof deck of the Soho House in Manhattan -- to talk it over.

How are you?

Really good! It's exciting. You never really have any idea what people will think, so...

Let's go back to the beginning at Sundance, which was quite the coming-out party for this film.

It really got people to see it. You never know how people will end up seeing these films. You work on them, and they're chaotic independent film sets. It's exhilarating, but it's never in your head how it's going to work out. You're just in the moment, trying to make it the best you possibly can.

What did you think the first time you saw it?

[Pauses] I was quite amazed by it, actually. I'd watched very few rushes, and again, it was so chaotic on set that you could hardly ever see playback. We had to try and see something, because we had to figure out where I stood in one of the scenes, and where I needed to react to and get eyelines. But seeing it all put together -- there was a lot of post -- it was quite incredible. What I feel most proud of is that I did what I set out to achieve, which is to make two distinctly different characters, so the audience was always aware of who they were watching. When people who've seen the film thought it had been two actors, that, for me, is the biggest compliment. To me, it means I met the goal I set out to achieve. To actually see it played out, though? It's very hard watching yourself under any circumstances, in any film. Seeing yourself twice is really disturbing. But I was very pleased that I could see who each one was.

What was your first awareness of the real Uday Hussein?

I think this is what excited me about the project in the very beginning: I remember, growing up as a kid, the war being very present in my life but feeling very removed from it -- it had very little effect. But I was scared by it, and I knew that the people around me had very little voice or say in it. Therefore you heard the rumor before the war that removing Saddam was a dangerous thing because this guy who was his son was even more dangerous. And I remember being scared by that as a youngster. Genuinely scared! "Someone worse than Saddam?" That's all I knew of him. And so to discover this story about this man's life -- this man who was thrown into this hellish world that he had no choice of getting out of? I found it completely mesmerizing and compelling. All these issues it brought up: disguise, deception, and the true horror of this man who was capable of carrying out these atrocities against fellow human beings. Which also raises the question of how on Earth I could ever play someone who I thought was such a monster.

We've heard all the comparisons to Scarface, at least when it comes to Uday's madness. But I'm particularly interested in how you modeled Latif, and in turn, Latif playing Uday.

Well, I met Latif. I know early on that we weren't making a detailed biographical account of him or his life, which gave me an immense amount of freedom. That's the most important thing, because I didn't feel responsible -- a responsibility to have studied him and watched him and gone into the Method space where I spend time with him and his family. That could have been the pace, and I'm sure I could have done that. But it didn't seem essential. It didn't seem like I need to pry too much with aspects of his recent past. There were horrific experiences that I didn't need to know about. So I just got a real basic understanding of him as a person -- what he stood for, and what he should stand for in the film, how different that is. Actually, it was about making distinct separations between the two.

So then I started thinking about very basic things that Lee helped me a lot with or the dialect coach helped me with. The way they speak was different; they have very different upbringings. Uday would speak very, very quickly. He was more educated; he could formulate sentences more quickly. On the other hand, Latif was a military man. Much more still, much more considered. Regarded everyone carefully. It was the complete opposite end of the way a man like Uday would behave, where he's completely in charge, and it doesn't matter what he says or what he does or how he's perceived. A vocal tone to separate them both. A physicality: There are images of Uday, who was very proud. He stood in a very particular way. He was a very menacing character. Latif I wanted small, focused and considered. Then there was the mindset of the men. I had to find something in Uday I could respond to. Not "like," because I despised him. Everything I found out about him I hated. But I had to understand the root cause of why he was who he was. It gets Freudian. You look at his parenting: He had deep love for his mother. He hated his father's treatment of his mother. He had this dictatorial father who didn't consider him capable of taking over his leadership. That's humiliating in that culture. He witnessed horrific scenes at a young age; at that age of 4, his father showed him videos of torture.

Is The Devil's Double ultimately kind of a backdoor way of making an Uday Hussein biopic? It's just called Latif's life story because Uday is so unlikable that no one could possibly care about him?

I suppose it is, yes. That's a clever way of looking at it. I think it's interesting for us to understand the inner workings of that gangster regime and how that family operated. And you're right: You can't just make it about him, because he's too vile.

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