Jeremy Irvine

Golden boy

I

t is very strange talking to a man who, unbeknown to him, made you cry so much your collarbones filled up with tears.

Of course, I didn’t tell Jeremy Irvine he had me stifling terrible, embarrassing sobs in a Cambridge cinema. At the time he was onscreen in Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, his first major film role that made two years of desperately posting CVs worthwhile, and saved him from becoming a welder. My tears were well earned.

Born Jeremy William Fredric Smith in Gamlingay in 1990, Jeremy took his stage name from his grandad and studied at LAMDA for a year before famously snagging the part of Albert in Spielberg’s adaptation of the heart-breaking story of a horse during the First World War. Jeremy had been on the brink of giving up his acting dream completely.

Since then he’s played Pip in Great Expectations, starred alongside Colin Firth in another war drama, The Railway Man, appeared less notably in the second Woman in Black film, CAMBRIDGE MAGAZINE

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As War Horse actor Jeremy Irvine celebrates the UK release of his new film, Beyond the Reach, Ella Walker talks to him about sharing the spotlight with snakes and working with the one and only Michael Douglas.

celeb interview Angel of Death, and only just lost out in the race to play a lead role in the Divergent series starring Shailene Woodley.

He wasn’t too disappointed, it wasn’t Hunger Games after all, and anyway, he’d much rather develop his own nook in an overcrowded market. Hence Beyond the Reach, his latest blockbuster out this month.

“I hadn’t read anything like it, which might not sound like much, but that’s actually very rare, I think, in the industry at the moment,” Jeremy explains. “You tend to get a lot of things which are versions of something that’s already been successful, whereas this was something new.”

That swipe at franchises aside, the fact Michael Douglas produced the movie also gave him a nudge. “Michael actually bought this material with the idea of playing my part when he was my age, so this is a pet project of his.” Jeremy flew out to New York to Michael’s house to read some scenes with him and director Jean-Baptiste Léonetti, whose last movie was Carré Blanc (“A really extraordinary, very disturbing French film – I just thought someone with that visual mind was someone to work with”). “I think any actor, no matter who you are, let alone someone starting out in my position, would jump at that chance. It was a no brainer really,” laughs Jeremy.

Michael stars as a deadly corporate shark taken on a hunting trip in the crushing Mojave Desert by Jeremy’s reluctant guide Ben, who, when things go wrong, ends up fighting for his life. Fortunately, the pair got on. “Michael is very funny, he’s a lovely guy to be around. For someone who’s had the extraordinary career he’s had, he’s humble beyond words, we had a really good laugh together.” It must have been a relief considering they spent two months stranded in the middle of nowhere in accommodation Jeremy wryly calls “fit for purpose”. “It was great. There was one bar; we spent many an evening getting to know the bar quite well. We became regulars there by the end of it, haha.” He makes Michael sound like a cuddly old man, but in Beyond the Reach he’s taut, ruthless, calculating and, let’s be honest, quite terrifying. Jeremy disagrees: “Ha, ha, he couldn’t be less scary!”

He does admit the filming conditions were as gruelling and extreme as they look on screen though. “It’s an extraordinarily harsh place to be, let alone to work, the Mojave Desert. We were out in the middle of nowhere, where you could drive for a couple of hours and not pass a single sign of human civilisation, or a tree, or water! So it was brutal,” he says. “It’s funny because reading [the script] I didn’t really think about that side of it, I kinda liked the idea of playing a character who literally has only about seven or eight lines in the whole film, and I hadn’t really thought too much about when it said it’s 110 degrees during the day and freezing temperatures at night, and I’d be running around for two months in just my pants, barefoot in the desert. I don’t think I’d really thought about the actual logistics of doing that.”

Not that Jeremy’s complaining. Even encountering a snake means a chance to share his rattlesnake impression. “We were doing a lot of night shoots,” he recalls. “Snakes love warmth, so they like to hide underneath the big film lights: where the actor has to be. So I was barefoot in my underwear, shivering in the night – and that’s the thing I couldn’t get over, it was so hot during the day and then it snowed one night it was so cold – and I’d step over a rock in my bare feet in the darkness and just hear [rattle snake impression] a rattle snake!

It was intense.”

Quick to joke, measured, eloquent and always ready with an anecdote, Jeremy’s as smooth as his cheekbones, but is still vaguely amused at how his life has panned out. “One of the best things about having been doing this the past few years has been getting to travel round the world and get to see places I’d never normally have gone. For a boy from Bedfordshire to suddenly go out there. . .” he marvels.

Jeremy grew up in Gamlingay, the eldest of three brothers and is “in Cambridge a lot. My little brother’s there [at university]. I love it down by the river and stuff, but it’s where I spent my childhood. I went to school in Bedford, but Cambridge is a lot nicer than Bedford; we’d always want to go to Cambridge on the weekend.” The actor, who has Type 1 diabetes, has also spent a lot of time at Addenbrooke’s in the past, where he took part in trials at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. “They do wonderful stuff,” he says.

“The juvenile diabetes team do some really wonderful, important work. There are some really kind, selfless people that work there.”

Work-wise, Jeremy has a busy few months ahead. It’s just been announced that he’s signed up to play radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in independent film, Mary Shelley’s Monster. “I don’t really have much to say about that one,” he says politely. “You attach yourself in the hope that will help with financing and things, so we’ll see. I hope it does get made and it works, but it’s very early days.”

He’s much chattier when it comes The Bad Education Movie – the big screen version of Jack Whitehall’s BBC sitcom, where Whitehall plays the hapless, troubled-in-love Alfie Wickers, who’s more child than his students. “I was at a party in LA and I was chatting to an agent and he was talking about how he represents Jack Whitehall,” Jeremy recalls. “I said: ‘I love Bad Education!’, and he went: ‘Really? Because they are actually shooting a film right now.’ I thought nothing of it, and the next day I get an email from Jack saying: ‘Any chance you’d be interested in coming and playing the bad guy?’”

The bad guy in question is the ever-so-posh Atticus Hoy, Alfie’s school bully. Jeremy didn’t even consider saying no. “My little brothers are big fans of the show so it’s one for them.”

Does he think he’s developed and changed as an actor since War Horse?

“I’d hope so. I was green as green can be getting into it. I was in a position where you’re learning literally on the job, you’re hopefully only making mistakes once or so, often on camera, but I’ve been very lucky to work with people like Michael [Douglas] who’ve really taken me under their wing and made me feel very comfortable, made me feel more normal and reassured about it than I guess I could have done.”

He also has a policy of watching as many films and different performances as possible. “I’m always watching stuff. It’s quite a lonely process, acting in films, because there isn’t rehearsal, you often show up to set not having met your other cast members, you’re thrown into it and the first take is probably the first time you’ve ever said those lines to another actor. One of the things you do have is a chance to watch and learn from other actors’ work, it’s quite an important part of it I think.”

Talking of loneliness, Jeremy has been itching to do some theatre again. “I’ve been hounding my agent to send me theatre scripts,” he says. “In film you don’t have that immediate reaction from an audience, so it’s very difficult to tell if what you’re doing is actually any good. You’ve only really got the director’s opinion to go on, and that’s one person’s opinion, but it’s nice to have a few hundred to gauge how it’s going and get that performing-in-front-of-anaudience buzz back again, which I really miss.”

Don’t worry Jeremy, you really are doing fine. Even Michael Douglas thinks so.

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Beyond the Reach comes out on Friday, July 31.

See it at all good local cinemas.