And of course you think, 'well I'd do it for that', but that's not the point. They needed a big name to play the female role, but the studio seemed OK with me being cast as the male lead. "I choose to give truly of myself, entirely of myself, to the people I choose to do that with, and I can't do that with everyone."The paradox is that, the better his acting, the less likely he is to get the brand recognition of a Tom Cruise or a Bruce Willis; and the studio system being what it is, that means he is sometimes denied the very parts he would play most brilliantly. "I came across a very smart, very bright little independent movie a while back, and I'd met the writer and director years ago.
Most people adore talking about themselves, even to journalists; for Northam it's excruciating "I've never had a huge circle of friends. I can't spread myself that thin and go 100 million miles an hour all the time," he says. His conversation is full of immense pauses and "ums" and "ers", while he ponders how to respond honestly without compromising himself, and of excursions into general topics from which, had I not been so mesmerised by his Jeremy Northam-ness, I should really have hauled him back. It's not that he's anything less than sweet and cooperative and friendly, just that he can't bring himself to "put out", if that's not too vulgar an expression. "Lots of actors are actually extremely shy." Is he shy? "I have shy areas," he says guardedly. And at some level the audience senses that his inner self is being withheld, that in fact he doesn't want to be worshipped for himself, but respected for his work, and is piqued.So the man I meet, of medium height and build, in pre-gym sweats, with a day's stubble and grey at the temples, could be anyone, and (excuse the gag) frequently is. In Cypher, I'd watched him transform himself from twitchy nerd to tanned sex god; but Northam the man was no more inclined to play the celebrity than he would be to suddenly "switch on" his Dean Martin (a man he impersonated so expertly in an American TV movie that the critic David Thomson says he watched the film expecting to see the real Jerry Lewis suddenly appear next to Northam's "real" Dean).His evident dislike of being interviewed meant that much of our conversation consisted of a kind of meta-interview about interviews, and about the publicity commitments every actor must meet to "sell" his film "I've never had a desire to be famous," he says.
A star, even a great star like James Stewart or Clark Gable, essentially plays him or herself, and we love them for it not just because their personality is intensely endearing, or charismatic, or powerful, or sexy, but also because we allow ourselves to believe that we've been given access to their real, true, authentic self.But Northam is too good an actor, and too private a person, to do anything but vanish completely and compellingly into the part. I mention this because Northam's relative lack of fame, considering that he's made 21 films and starred opposite a succession of super-famous leading ladies, Gwyneth Paltrow, Uma Thurman and Sandra Bullock among them, has always puzzled me Here was the answer. And even though I knew that I was meeting an actor, not Mr Knightley or Ivor Novello or even Cypher's Morgan Sullivan, it was unexpectedly disconcerting not to find at least one of them waiting for me at the bar. Cypher is actually somewhere between a paranoid thriller and a satire on the nature of identity, but it was still Northam's total fanciability which had made the most significant impression on me. So it was with heart aflutter and mascara hurriedly repaired that I entered Blacks, a cool, dark, faded private members club in Soho where he had suggested we meet.
I met Jeremy Northam 10 minutes after the extremely romantic nature of the conclusion of his latest film, Cypher had made me cry. "I think people are just being too critical of him," Black muses "He can't please everybody.. I still think he has a lot of great movies left in him.". Whatever the case, he is touchingly protective of his fellow New Yorker. "It's about a guy who thinks his life will change and his luck with women will change if he can get a script to Woody Allen," he explains. The moral of the story is that the hero can find a girlfriend even without getting his script to Woody Allen - as long as he learns to love himself.Black doesn't know whether Allen has watched his short. Although Allen has yet to call him back, Black insists that this brief encounter gave him the inspiration to complete his own film.
