Rupert Friend, Keira Knightley’s squeeze, is set to make his own mark as a famous other half, Prince Albert
Poor Prince Albert. Despite an entire adult life devoted to the British nation, pioneering patronage of the arts and sciences, and ending up with much of a London postcode dedicated to his endeavours, Queen Victoria’s consort is more associated these days — at least according to the results yielded by Google — with an eye-watering item of male genital furniture.
“If you say, ‘I’m playing Prince Albert’, it’s, ‘Oh, have you had it pierced, then?’ That’s the standard response,” says Rupert Friend, who suits up as the Prince Consort in a new film, The Young Victoria. “From what I understand, it was a myth created by a piercing guy who wanted to give a bit of legend to something he had invented. It’s quite a cool idea, because you’ve got this strait-laced German, not exactly a party animal — the idea that he went and got his piercing there is very funny, I think.”
Whichever way you cut it, there’s still something inherently mysterious about the blueblood of Saxe-Coburg. . . and, not forgetting, Gotha. Dead at just 42, Albert is recalled largely as a ghost, one whose widow spent two-thirds of her 63-year reign grieving for him: dressing permanently in black, setting out her late husband’s shaving tackle every morning and mounting a one-woman mission to have every institution, dock, square and pub named in his honour. (Charles Dickens, writing in 1864, wondered whether an “inaccessible cave” existed where he might escape the onslaught of memorials.)
Penned by Julian Fellowes, who wrote Gosford Park, and produced by the unlikely pairing of Martin Scorsese and Sarah Ferguson — it’s based on a pitch by the de-Highnessed duchess — The Young Victoria is an attempt to throw light on the monarch’s earlier, sunnier years, a sort of bookend to Mrs Brown. It stars the in-demand Emily Blunt as a spunky young sovereign, far removed from the unamused majesty of later life: “This vivacious, vitality-filled, danceaholic girl,” as Friend puts it. “I don’t think anyone has any idea of her other than as the 80-year-old widow, and, of course, nobody is born that way. The first thing that registered with me was, ‘What was it about her relationship with Albert that meant she didn’t change out of black for the remainder of her life?’ ”
Before Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837 — the coronation scene features a brief glimpse of Princess Beatrice as a lady-in-waiting — we find her a frustrated door-slammer of an adolescent, the heir presumptive to William IV (Jim Broadbent) and overly cosseted by her German-born mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson). As a fledgling monarch, she’s prey to the wiles of prime ministers Melbourne (Paul Bettany) and Peel (Michael Maloney), and in desperate need of a co-pilot. Cue Albert, younger of two nephews of the influential king of Belgium.
“His brother was out shagging anything that moved. Albert was the one getting up early to study chemistry. He was the geek,” Friend says. It lent Albert a “pole-up-the-arse quality”, he concedes. “But he was deeply upset by the infidelities of his own parents, which inspired in him a sense of what was right.” Duty and loyalty were his watchwords.
They were spliced at 20, in a no-bones-about-it arranged marriage — Victoria and Albert were first cousins. Indeed, indicative of the “selective” nature of royal husbandry, Elizabeth II and Prince Philip share Victoria as a great-great-grandmother. Nonetheless, it proved a happy union. Albert was the first royal escort to embrace the concept of public service — “Which progresses to opening supermarkets eventually,” Friend says. Or, in the case of his producer, endorsing WeightWatchers.
All mild-mannered introspection and quiet, German-accented chivalry, this is an impressive turn by Friend, who has been quietly coming to the fore as a screen actor. In May, the 27-year-old will be seen in Stephen Frears’s Chéri, set in belle époque Paris, in which he plays the lover of Michelle Pfeiffer’s courtesan. It’s a steady progression from films such as The Moon and the Stars, Outlaw, The Last Legion and Virgin Territory, which, while they didn’t exactly set the world alight, were enough to get the actor serious consideration last time Bond was being cast. “My lips are sealed on that one,” he smirks.
More recently, Friend caused something of a stir as a vicious Nazi officer in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas — a million miles, one should point out, from the softly spoken, skinny, easy-going chap who is currently picking over a club sandwich in a Covent Garden hotel. It is the attention surrounding his other anointed role, however — that of consort to Keira Knightley — that sits less easily with him. The pair met on the 2005 film of Pride & Prejudice, in which he played the soldier-bounder Mr Wickham to her Elizabeth Bennet.
The paparazzi attract his greatest disdain as he gets impressively protective of his other half: “You have to expect a level of interest if you’re in the public eye. Yet there are young singers and actresses who’ve been driven almost mad by the taunting and the harassment. Take the camera out of the way and you’ve got a stalker.” On his own, he says, it’s a different matter. “I’m never, ever recognised. It happened for the first time this week on the Tube. A girl was looking at me and eventually said, ‘Were you in Pride & Prejudice?’ I said, ‘I was, yeah.’ And she said, ‘Wow, but you’re on the Tube.’ And I went, ‘Yeah. . . It’s faster.’ ”
Such matters seem a long way from the Oxfordshire village where Friend grew up. He fell into drama college by accident; then, out of the blue, he was cast as Billy Downs, the louche gay sidekick in The Libertine. “One minute, you are in college making your own props out of toilet rolls, and suddenly you’re on a film set. Johnny Depp is being sick on your ear.” Given Knightley’s grapplings with Depp on Pirates of the Caribbean, not to mention Friend’s oft-remarked-on resemblance of Orlando Bloom — “Is that good?” he asks — it all gets rather confusing.
Depp rates highly in Friend’s estimation: “His comportment and his skill with the camera were two things that never really left me.”
So, too, does the venerable Joan Plowright, with whom he appeared in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, about the unusual friendship between a struggling writer and a Lady in Lavender. “Just by working with someone who is genuinely at the top of their game, yours goes up.”
A film he shot in America, Jolene, in which he plays a New Orleans tattoo artist, is awaiting a UK release date. “They never tell us anything,” he shrugs. In the meantime, he is working on The Kid, about bare-knuckle fighting, a film for which he is currently in the boxing gym every day. With it comes the logistical headache of juggling schedules so that he and Knightley aren’t apart too much, such being the unorthodox lot of the thespian. “It’s weird, because you’ll have nothing to do for six months, then, suddenly, you won’t sleep for three months. You just have to roll with it and be accepting, try to be as understanding as you would like the other person to be for you.”
There may yet be further adventures for Prince Albert. The Young Victoria concludes in 1840, soon after an assassination attempt in which a lone gunman takes a pop at the queen’s carriage. While historians will cringe at the preposterous suggestion that the deed was thwarted only by Albert flinging himself, like Clint Eastwood in In the Line of Fire, to cop the offending bullet, at least the film doesn’t go the whole heroic hog and cite this as the reason for the Prince’s premature demise. Albert is two decades short of developing the nasty chesty cough that will do for him in the end.
“I think there’s room for one more film,” Friend says. “Still to come is the welfare-of-the-poor revolution, the fact that he basically invented the world market, with the Great Exhibition. . . then nine children.” To cover all that in one sitting would have tested the audience’s stamina. “Your bum would have gone numb.”
The Young Victoria opens on Friday
Fonte:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk
