The Bridget Jones star
may be a heartthrob, but he's ready to break up with his romantic
image. (It's not you, it's him.)
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“That was a great
interview,” coos Colin Firth, shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest,
hair touseled, mod teal suit snug on his 6’2” frame. He nuzzles close
to the reporter, a pretty young thing, and pours a sip of champagne
into her mouth, then slips in a small pill, another sip.
It’s not easy being a journalist when you’re watching another
one—albeit a fake one—get the seduction treatment from Firth, the actor
responsible for more than his share of swoons and weak knees from those
with a libido and a Pride and
Prejudice DVD.
But drugging a college reporter? Dressed in a sleazy getup? This is not
the Colin Firth who’s launched a thousand websites, whose dreamy Mr.
Darcy turned the BBC miniseries of the Jane Austen classic into period
porn. This is definitely not the reluctant romantic he’s perfected time
and again in Bridget Jones’s Diary,
Love Actually, Girl With a Pearl Earring, and, yes, even What a Girl Wants.
Probably because—and brace yourself, women—Colin Firth is not Mr.
Darcy. And right now he’s making that very, very clear.
Channeling debauchery looks disturbingly easy for Firth, 44, here on
the London set of Where the Truth
Lies, a psychological thriller from director Atom Egoyan (Ararat) in which he plays a
Vegas-style performer who will keep a devastating secret about this
particular coed. But last October, Firth showed up to shoot Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
with a $2 million check in his pocket and not a clue how to play the
character he’s best known for. “I couldn’t really remember what I was
supposed to do,” he says of embodying the arrogant attorney Mark Darcy,
who gets his name from Austen’s hero. It didn’t help matters when about
600 people turned up on the streets of London to watch. “People
recognized me from the [first] film, which I daresay they’ve seen more
times than I have, which is exactly once.”
Rewatching his scenes in 2001’s Bridget
helped. But Firth is facing this dilemma a lot: Crowds are turning out
for his smoldering-yet-sensitive characters, and he’s not so sure he
wants to turn up to play them. “I know I’ve played parts that are
similar to each other,” he says. “The withdrawn quality, the air of
inaccessibility. It’s one of the things they hire me for. There’s a lot
of money being spent in movies. You want to buy it ready-made.” It’s
why the Bridget producers
needed him for the sequel. Firth initially bristled at the idea (“I
didn’t like the inevitability factor,” he says), and joined only after
Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant did.
Days after finishing Bridget
press in the States, Firth is back on the Truth set, purging himself of Mark
Darcy and reveling in his new persona. “I’m attracted to dark stuff,
and I’m in that mode right now,” he says. But the darkness could come
only after the dawn. “The things that have limited me have also been
currency for me.”
The best career investment Firth ever made comes exactly three hours
and 15 minutes into 1995’s Pride and
Prejudice when Mr. Darcy emerges from Pemberley pond like Adonis
during a wet T-shirt contest. Tapes were paused. Frames were frozen.
The English press dubbed Firth’s newfound fame “Darcy mania.” Websites
quickly sprouted up with names like Firthfrenzy, Firthessence, and
aFirthionado. On one, a frenzied Firthionado can link to more than 50
sound bites recorded from Firth’s films including “You have to marry
me,” “I’m sorry, it was all my fault,” and, for some inexplicable
reason, “Whose pen is this?” The fact that Firth is—insert
transatlantic sigh here—married (to Italian producer Livia Giuggioli)
with children (two with Giuggioli and one with Meg Tilly, whom he met
on the set of 1989’s Valmont) doesn’t give pause to the passionate.
Even before the big-screen adaptation was conceived, the obsessive
heroine of Bridget Jones’s Diary, the
book, couldn’t stop fantasizing about...Colin Firth. So when it came to
cast, it’s no shock that “Helen Fielding said if we didn’t cast him,
she would not let us have the rights,” laughs Eric Fellner, who’s
produced four of Firth’s flicks (both Bridgets,
Love Actually, and next spring’s Nanny McPhee). Ask Fellner what
incites such fervor and he says: “I truly don’t know. I’m not a girl.” Reason director Beeban Kidron takes
a stab: “He embodies a particular kind of Englishman—chivalrous,
polite, articulate, clever—that is a fantasy. One night he came [to the
set] as himself, Mr. Relaxed. I withered all over again. People think
directors don’t have those feelings, but I’m a girl.”
Before cult Colin kicked in, Firth was keeping busy in local stage
productions, having horrified his professor parents by bailing on
university for drama school. Milos Forman cast him as Valmont’s lothario in 1988, but the
film was eclipsed by the similar Dangerous
Liaisons. “People love it when they see it now,” he says. “At
the time, it felt like walking into a room where someone had just told
a joke and the laughter was dying down and you go in and tell the same
joke.”
Even after Pride and Prejudice,
only supporting roles in films like The
English Patient and Shakespeare
in Love came his way. But when Bridget
made $71.5 million, he was christened the go-to guy for the hottie,
haughty hero. Sometimes that worked out well (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Love Actually);
sometimes it didn’t (What a Girl
Wants, Hope Springs). But with this year’s Sundance entry Trauma, Firth ditched his comfort
zone. “Marc [Evans, the director] used that principle of putting Jimmy
Stewart in Vertigo,” Firth
says. “Take someone [the audience] is comfortable with and make them
uncomfortable.”
Not that Firth is finished with good-guy gigs. It took several tries,
but Emma Thompson persuaded him to play the aloof father in Nanny McPhee, a fairy tale she’d
written about seven difficult kids and their caretaker. “He kept
saying, ‘I don’t want to do any more nice people,’” recalls Thompson.
Firth gave in but only after “lots of begging, lots of money, lots of
favors,” she says.
 With Nanny
and Truth both wrapped, Firth
is
officially unemployed. No concrete plans, other than picking at the
guitar and revisiting unfinished short stories he’s been writing (his
debut, “The Department of Nothing,” is included in the
Nick-Hornby-edited collection Speaking
With the Angel). He’s still
getting offered “lots of bumbling romantic-comedy figures,” and his
name perennially pops up as a potential James Bond (“No one has
approached me, but I would not be averse to it”). For sure, we won’t be
seeing Mark and Bridget: Smug
Marrieds. “At the moment, I can’t think of anything I would be
less attracted to.” The one project tempting him is Brian De Palma’s
thriller Toyer, about a
womanizer who also happens to be a lobotomizer. “It’s about as dark as
it gets,” he says. “I met with [De Palma] and we both said, “Let’s do
it when we are both ready.”
Whether he’ll be tearing out hearts while tearing out brains remains to
be seen. Firth, for one, is more than ready to put the swooning masses
to the test. “The idea of who I might be may always be skewed, but I’m
just a guy,” he says, exasperated. “Mr. Darcy would never have become
an actor.”
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