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Dec.26/04 - Jan.2, 2005 |
An Enduring Offbeat Welshman
Rhys Ifans sheds goofy image for serious Love in Roger Michell's adaptation of book
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2004-11-07
For the past five years Welsh character actor Rhys Ifans, 36, has been teetering on the brink of typecasting hell following his breakthrough role as Hugh Grant's scuzzy flatmate in the 1999 British comedy Notting Hill. His scene-stealing role as Spike, bare-bottom sequence and all, shot him to international fame; he was even squeezed onto the film's poster at the 11th hour, next to stars Grant and Julia Roberts. As offers came pouring in from Hollywood, the lanky six-foot-two actor with a flyaway blonde mop and limpid blue eyes, found himself in such big-money lowbrow comedies as The Replacements (as a washed-up football player sidelined by coach Keanu Reeves) and Little Nicky (as the lesser sibling to Adam Sandler's son of Satan). But these parts did nothing for his career. That's why Ifans jumped at the chance of starring in a "serious" picture when his Notting Hill director Roger Michell offered him the part of Jed in Enduring Love.
Based on a book by Ian McEwan, Enduring Love begins at a picnic shared by Joe (Daniel Craig) and Claire (Samantha Morton) in the English countryside. Their idyll is shattered when they see a hot-air balloon escape its moorings and float away with a small boy trapped inside. Joe runs and grabs the rope dangling from the balloon and is joined by four other bystanders - strangers who become intimately connected in the ensuing action. When a sudden up thrust of wind yanks the balloon skyward, all let go save one man. He, too, will jump, but the fall will kill him. When Joe is asked by one of the survivors - a scruffy loner named Jed (Ifans) - to pray for the men who fell too far, the ultra-rationalist Joe scoffs. Then Jed starts stalking Joe, forcing the latter to withdraw into an alternative world.
Tandem talked to Rhys Ifans when he was in Toronto recently.
Tell me about Jed.
"He's a strange character, but not unhinged in any way. He's a loner who finds a kind of solace in religion. But when this horrific event happens and he witnesses it, and when he witnesses the actual evidence of that broken corpse in the field, the only person whose with him is Joe. So, both of them are thrown into this most dramatic stress condition. And for Jed, Joe becomes the only other witnesses, so in a sense he becomes a coping mechanism for dealing with this horrific image. And that fixation becomes an obsession, which turns into a love. So it's kind of a cumulative process that starts with a need to share an experience, and then it becomes an illness. When love isn't reciprocated or returned it's loveless. It's such a strange emotion; if you're getting it back then the insanity is contained, but if you're not it's destructive and dangerous."
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