Jamie Bell Soars in "The Eagle"

Cute Brit Jamie Bell, who wowed audiences as an underdog teen dancer in the film Billy Elliott (now also a Broadway play) has grown up to impress as a very good actor. He played a freedom fighter in World War II alongside Daniel Craig in Defiance. He was in King Kong and will co-star with Mia Wasikowska in the upcoming retelling of Jane Eyre.

In the sword and sandals actioner The Eagle based on the young adult novel “The Eagle of the Ninth”, Jamie plays Esca, a slave who is also a prince of his people. Those princely, leadership qualities come out when he and his “master” Roman Legionnaire Marcus (played by Channing Tatum) have to work as a team to survive while on a quest.

We’re in Beverly Hills asking Jamie about the dangerous stunts in the film and we are learning how being a dancer both hurt and helped, how he and Channing bonded as bros, how Jamie overcame his terror of horses and he is showing us his pride at playing an ancient man from the same area in England that he came from!

Jamie enters our interview room casually dressed in jeans and an Army green, chunky sweater. He’s carrying some black-framed glasses.

Jamie Bell: I’ll put my glasses on so I can see you [he does so].  You look lovely.

TeenHollywood: Thanks! You just look like you are freezing for real in this film. True?

Jamie: It was freezing, absolutely freezing, no joke. We started in Budapest where it was actually quite nice and warm and beautiful and then by the time it got to the highlands of Scotland, everyone in the crew was just in kind big black pieces of plastic with fur on the edges. You couldn’t tell one from the next. It was cold, it was very cold. We were in tunics.

TeenHollywood: Burrrrr! Your character Esca was from the same area in England that you’re from. Was that fascinating for you to research? Do you feel a responsibility because he’s from where you’re from?

Jamie: Yeah, for sure. They are such ancient peoples, the Brigantes specifically. It’s not pin-point exactly where I’m from but in that area. It just represented a native people who were trying to resist an invading force trying to impress their customs on them.

It is a responsibility, I think. It was fun just to play someone who is the complete opposite of this other person [Marcus], in terms of values, cultures and customs, and realizing that your friend can actually be your enemy as well, which is nice story. It plays well.

TeenHollywood: You and Channing have a nice relationship in this, I wondered if your dance backgrounds had anything to do with that, and how did being a dancer help you with the choreography for the fights?

Jamie: I think it’s funny, two dancers wielding swords and riding horses. There is a great competitive nature between the two of us I think, who’s got the biggest sword, who has got the fastest horse, who can dance better, which is great because it’s exactly what these two characters need to go on their journey with.

Bizarrely, sword fighting breaks all the rules [of dance], because you’re supposed to go right foot, right arm forward. Dance is right foot, left arm. With the fight choreographer, I had to un-learn the way you teach sword fighting and teach it backwards for me, because I literally couldn’t do it. I cannot make a step with my arm going at the same time, because in dancing it’s a very unnatural movement.

But being a dancer I think it helps in every sense of any kind of physicality for a character, any kind of movement or anything that requires physical attitude. Channing is incredible physically. That’s how he expresses character is through his physical actions, so the movement part of that side of things is very important to him as well.

TeenHollywood: Have you ever been to Hadrian’s Wall [the famous wall across much of northern England built by the Roman Emperor]?

Jamie: I did go there on a school trip as a young kid, it was rather boring as a child, watching a lot of rubble on the floor. ‘Wow, this is great, really interesting’. Let’s be honest, [the Romans] wanted to keep something out. They were very afraid of what was on that other side [fierce Britons]. It’s kind of unbelievable to think that these guys wearing tunics, who come from Tuscany, would then step into the highlands of Scotland. They must have had a pretty formidable opponent and they must have been absolutely terrified. I’m not surprised they built a wall that big.

TeenHollywood: What about learning to ride a horse? Weren’t you intimidated by horses?

Jamie: Yeah, there’s a weird thing because horses are so big and they’re kind of like told to be unpredictable, ‘Oh, it can bolt at any time. It’s a little dangerous.’ There is a built-in fear that you don’t even really know where it has come from. When I was a kid, I was walking across a field with a few friends. There was a horse in the field in a little paddock, and they went, ‘Oh, a horsie,’ and they approached it, that’s nice, I petted it’s nose, and literally it took one look at me and backed away, because it totally sensed all of my fear, my anxiety.

TeenHollywood: But you got over that. You were a great rider in the film.

Jamie: Well, I learned to ride with this girl at this horse school, and I guess because she was female, I felt kind of emasculated, going ‘Oh my god’, wearing this stupid little helmet going, ‘This is really scary, really dangerous’, but she makes you forget that you’re riding a horse. She actually asks you really personal questions while you’re riding and because you’re so scared you tell her everything about your life. So it’s like a therapy session on horseback.

And then, literally within two weeks, I was bolting on and off, I was riding the thing backwards, I could literally parallel park it into a parking space. And when the film was over that was the saddest part, saying goodbye to this animal because they are majestic creatures, and they’re really beautiful things, and I was so pleased that I managed to conquer that fear. I totally appreciated that relationship.

TeenHollywood: Don’t all actors say “Oh, sure I can ride a horse”?

Jamie: [laughs] I’ve had friends who have done that and of course, they fall off and horse falls and something terrible or horrific happens and shuts down the production. But I was very straight-up, ‘I am terrified.’

TeenHollywood: You were galloping across rocks in the film. Was anyone hurt?

Jamie: The insurance people said, ‘You guys can’t gallop,’ so we were like, ‘But hold on a second, the second half of the film is about galloping very quickly to get away from these people who are chasing us. So how do we do that without galloping? Are we just going to do a lot of this [he pretends to gallop holding the reins]? That’s going to look ridiculous. I didn’t train for six weeks to trot around the Highlands of Scotland’.

I was very privileged. My horse Dali is very famous and was actually faster than Channing’s horse. He’s known as the mountain goat, because he never falls, he has the best footing out of the horse stable, and he took really great care of me. I was more afraid that the horse would hurt itself on the terrain. But he never did.

TeenHollywood: When was the moment in rehearsal when you and Channing figured out that you were going to be friends for a long time?

Jamie: I knew immediately, I’d met Channing before we started this job. I just thought he was such a nice guy from the second I saw him, he’s so charismatic and his energy is so warm. He is just the nicest guy. And our working relationship was really great. When I was freezing cold, to the point of almost passing out, he’s like, ‘Come on Jamie, come on, do it, let’s get on with it,’ which is great, you need that energy. It was a lot of fun. I’d do it again, I’d cross the wall again with him for sure.

TeenHollywood: Esca is a complicated character. He’s a slave but he is really, by birth, a leader of his people. How did you interpret him?

Jamie: I think for him there was a lot of sense of guilt and shame, the rest of his family were killed off while trying to stave off the enemy in an honorable fight and he gets captured, and I feel like there is a sense of honor unfulfilled in his life. When he says to Marcus ‘I’ll serve you, and that’s my honorable debt to you.’ I think that’s him trying to get rid of that guilt and shame about not dying with the rest of his family but he is also part of royalty as well, so it’s kind of an interesting thing that he becomes enslaved to the very enemy that murdered his family. He turns it around though.

TeenHollywood: Loyalty is the center of this story, have you ever encountered a situation where someone relied on you for that degree of loyalty, or you on them?

Jamie: Oh yeah, I think so. This lady right here [we see the woman in the back of the room] is my manager. I’ve been with her for ten years, since the very beginning. I was a very annoying kid in an office going through her desk,  imitating her other colleagues but, for some reason she signed me and she’s here with me today and I owe a lot to all of these kinds of people who have stuck by me through everything.

TeenHollywood: You are also in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. That’s a motion capture film. How different was that for you?

Jamie: It was definitely a change of pace. It was a lot warmer, which was good. My first initial thing about motion capture was ‘What is it, how do you do it, what does it require, how does it work, does it even work? Let me see some evidence of it working’. I watched some of those motion-capture films which are kind of very early and primitive in terms of the technology.  All props to Robert Zemeckis for spearheading the industry and saying, ‘This is something that we need to take note of.’

TeenHollywood: I think more teens in Britain know about Tintin than those in North America.

Jamie: Yeah. I was already a Tintin-aphile, or a Tintin-ologist. So I was very into that but I think anyone who understands and appreciates Indiana Jones understands and appreciates Tintin and they don’t even know what it is yet. I think the characters are great because they all have human flaws, and the Tintin character is a very driven and ambitious guy on an adventure. In a similar way that James Cameron has kind of made motion-capture understandable, Steven Spielberg is such a household name and is so linked to childhood and fantasy for kids that I think he will make motion-capture something we will understand and appreciate.