Henry Cavill was the ‘the unluckiest man in Hollywood once, for missing out on premium roles, from Cedric in Harry Potter series and Edward in Twilight series to James Bond. He missed out on Superman too, once. Finally, he donned the Superman cape in the 2013 reboot, Man of Steel and the world smiled at him. With the next instalment, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice opening next year, things are heating up again.
For now, he is playing Napoleon Solo, a postwar art thief turned Cold War agent in Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In an exclusive email exchange with The Quint, Cavill who plays the dapper playboy, opened up about his new film.
Q: Henry, you’re English but playing an American spy. How did you shape your American accent for this film?
Henry Cavill: I think the hardest thing for me was the accent. When we started, Guy said, ‘Okay, I want something a bit like Clark Gable, but not Clark Gable.’ And I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ So I sat down with Andrew Jack, our dialect coach, and he ran me through some Clark Gable stuff. We worked on it. We kind of got it down, and then we started shooting. And Guy kept on saying, ‘Okay, no, that word sounds wrong. Come listen to it.’ I say, ‘Yeah, okay, it sounds weird. And what’s weird about it?’ He says, ‘It just sounds too English,’ or ‘That one sounds too American.’ So we had to try and finesse it in different ways and eventually, a quarter way through the movie, it became an affected American accent, which was transatlantic and dated. And that’s why Napoleon sounds the way he sounds now.
Q: Speaking of the atmosphere of the Cold War, it’s very different from the contemporary environment. What was your frame of reference for this era?
HC: I remember my brother bringing back a piece of it, in fact. But even till today, there’s the idea of constant threat. And the great thing about the ‘60s, and maybe today as well, is that despite this underlying threat at all times, people are still going about their lives and just really enjoying it. Right now, there’s always the threat of terrorism, non-stop, especially in America, so we can appreciate how it may have felt. I mean, it’s not quite the same as nuclear apocalypse, but maybe we can be a bit more in tune with it because nuclear apocalypse is something which is really difficult to fathom. Whereas a bunch of people getting hurt is easier to imagine.
Q: There’s a lot of action in this movie as well. The car chase that opens the film has a balletic quality, but when your characters finally meet and fight it out in the bathroom, it’s quite gritty. How was it for you as an actor to handle the physicality of your role?
HC: I think that the real physicality came with Armie. The fight, despite it looking very rough, was very short. It didn’t take long to shoot, and it wasn’t very complicated. It didn’t require much in the way of fitness, either. Yeah, but Armie had to run for three days straight, chasing that bloody car. He had to be fit for that.
Q: Watching the movie, it looks like all of you had a lot of fun making it. What was the atmosphere like on-set?
HC: It was fantastic. Most enjoyable movie I’ve worked on. Most fun. We all walked away as friends. We’ll come see each other again, as friends. It’s hard to say more, really. It was just relaxed.
Q: You play a very casual, sophisticated guy, compared to Superman. What’s it like to have such a change in mindset between characters?
HC: It’s the joy of being an actor. You get to play these different roles, and then see yourself in these sort of imaginary characters. It’s fun. But you’ve got to mix it up, and break it up. Otherwise it just gets a bit boring. And as I said, Napoleon is really fun to play. And as stoic as the Superman character is, it’s also very cool to be him. He’s got superpowers, and he does some pretty wild stuff. It’s fun to switch and change.
(The writer is a journalist and a screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise. Follow him on Twitter: @RanjibMazumder)
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