Jamie Bell interview: ‘I should just grow up already, but it’s difficult!’

Inspired by his new historical movie The Uprising, I’ve just asked Jamie Bell if he was taught about the Peasants’ Revolt in school. It’s maybe the worst question to ask someone who became incredibly famous at the age of 14. “I don’t think I was taught about it,” he says. “But at a certain point I just wasn’t in school. And certainly if I was taught about it, I was not paying attention.” He had other stuff going on, I suppose.

It’s been 26 years since Billy Elliot, yet Bell retains the boyish insouciance that made him a star at the turn of the millennium. For playing the County Durham miner’s son who discovers himself through dance, Bell became the youngest Best Actor Bafta winner in history, then he bounced off to America. Which explains why he’s video calling today from his home in Westchester County, New York – which he shares with his American wife, the actor Kate Mara – and why his accent has a touch of the mid-Atlantic to it. He can’t do his ts anymore, so “incremental” becomes “incremennal”, “representing” becomes “repre-zenning”. Bell, 40 now, is wearing a cosy blue sweater and what the internet might term “slutty little glasses”, and getting conspiratorial about the British education system.

“Reading the script was a great way to learn our history,” he explains, of The Uprising, which is about the men and women who first challenged the serfdom of 14th century England. “I couldn’t believe that this happened in England, as it felt very distinctly not English. That kind of visceral, immediate rebelliousness. I was like… ‘Maybe that’s why it’s been squashed?’ Just systematically it feels as if it’s been squashed, as if we can’t be reminded that we actually can go against our masters…”

The master here being the despotic teenage King Richard II, played with perfect odiousness by 17-year-old Woody Norman. Strapped for cash, the king orders tax hikes on the peasantry class, further wounding a country still crippled by the ravages of the Black Death. Andrew Garfield’s unnamed ploughman protests it, rousing support among his comrades and coordinating with Bell’s egalitarian priest John Ball. The ensuing conflict is brutal, director Paul Greengrass recreating a country’s desperate pleas for political change, and the horrors that befell those on the front lines once they put their faith in a dishonest elite. It’s a muddy, furious movie as a result.

“Ultimately, what did this fighting achieve?” Bell asks. “Where’s the win? All we got in return was betrayal.” But he thinks the movie is explicit in depicting change as something that takes time. “Political action instigates other political action,” he continues. “Sometimes it doesn’t even happen in your lifetime, but those acts can inspire and galvanise. If things aren’t tried, people in the future have no reason to try either.”

That’s where the Robin Hood element comes in. There was a strange snafu shortly before The Uprising hit US cinemas last month when it was suddenly retitled The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood by its American distributors. Its UK distributors quickly clarified in a statement that they had nothing to do with the change, and that The Uprising is not, in fact, about Robin Hood as we know him. Bell echoes this. “[Andrew] isn’t playing Robin Hood, this isn’t the origin story of Robin Hood,” he sighs. “But I think what the film is saying is that one act can inspire and seed the next form of protest, or the next form of disobedience. How something in 1381 can cause a ripple.”

Garfield sparked a minor stink in the right-wing press last month by saying during a Q&A for the film that billionaires should be “scared s***less” by The Uprising. (“Like the billionaires who greenlight your movies and stroke all your multi-million dollar paychecks?” tweeted exhausting reality star and failed political hopeful Spencer Pratt soon after.) Bell hadn’t heard about this (“I’m relatively analogue,” he insists), but doesn’t think it’s surprising that people have been triggered by the film’s themes, whether they’re on the side of the servants or the masters. “People are going to bring their own politics to it,” he says. “And they’re totally entitled to do that. That’s what we fought for in the first place.”

He says that politics has informed many of his biggest films. Billy Elliot played out against the backdrop of the 1984 miners’ strike, while Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) revolved around a speeding train at the end of the world, the lower classes stuck at the back and the upper classes living in luxury at the front.

His takeaway from these experiences – The Uprising included – is that it takes real passion to make change. “The leaders at the forefront of these movements have absolute faith that what they’re standing for will happen,” he says. “And they also have real, unconditional love for the people they’re representing. That’s fundamental to it. Obviously, in modern politics, that’s true to varying degrees.” He laughs. “John Ball certainly and wholeheartedly believed in the cause, loved the land, and loved the people he was representing. And if our leaders had an ounce of that – whatever side of the aisle they fall on – we’d probably be in a better place.”

Bell has been in a lot of great movies over the years – All of Us Strangers, the Irvine Welsh adaptation Filth, playing Bernie Taupin in Rocketman. His hit rate is quietly really impressive. “Can’t say, haven’t seen ’em,” he laughs. Wait, none of them? “Noooo,” he hoots. “Hate it, basically. Can’t handle it.” Can we unpack this? “I talk about this way too much for an actor, but it’s just insecurity. It’s just boring, not-unique insecurity. And that’s it.” We sit briefly in silence, which Bell finally breaks with a cackle. “I mean, I should just grow up already, but it’s difficult!”

In fairness, Bell didn’t really mean to become an actor. He danced after school in his native Teesside when he was chosen out of more than 2,000 boys to play Billy, then rode the wave from there. He got a manager, a woman named Vanessa Pereira, who gave him an immediate education in cinema. “She was basically like, ‘Go do some homework – go look at what great filmmaking is’.” He made lots of great American indies, by the likes of David Gordon Green (2004’s Undertow) and Thomas Vinterberg (2005’s Dear Wendy), worked with Clint Eastwood on Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Peter Jackson on King Kong (2005), and Steven Spielberg on The Adventures of Tintin (2011). “In Vanessa, I was incredibly lucky to have someone, who loved movies as much as I did, be the one who was holding my hand back then,” he says. “She’d always say that, when all is said and done, it’d be those experiences with those filmmakers that are really gonna teach you something and give you something. And she was right.”

There’s also been a ballsiness to his choices, too, from playing an S&M dominant in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, to his presence in the two most disturbing things I’ve seen this year: Richard Gadd’s deeply grim Baby Reindeer follow-up Half Man, and the certifiably cuckoo black comedy Rosebush Pruning. In the former, Bell was a man in a permanent death spiral, engaged in a tortured psychosexual frisson with his best friend and greatest tormentor; in the latter he was the eldest son of an incestuous (but hilarious!) family presided over by Pamela Anderson.

“They were dark, yeah,” he smiles. “Like the seedy underbelly of humanity, that you know exists but you don’t want to shine a light on.” Does he enjoy discomfort? “I think I just like material that’s singular.” Half Man, I add, was particularly horrible. “Punishing is the word I’d use,” he adds. Did he mind that people seemed to find it almost too punishing? “It wasn’t unexpected. Because it was punishing with little reward, right? Like there was little levity, little escape. You do want things to resonate with people, but ultimately that’s out of my control.”

Bell thinks about control a lot, both because his life has been a series of random bursts of incredible good fortune, and because he’s in a business where he has to relinquish control at all times. Take when he nearly played Spider-Man in 2012, only to be beaten at the last hurdle by his Uprising co-star Garfield. But if Bell had become Spider-Man, he probably wouldn’t have gotten the role of rock-faced superhero The Thing in Marvel’s Fantastic Four in 2015. And if that didn’t happen, he probably wouldn’t have married his co-star Kate Mara. Today they have two children, aged seven and three (he also has a 13-year-old with his former wife, the actor Evan Rachel Wood.)

“It’s very strange!” he laughs. “If I don’t book Fantastic Four, these two kids don’t exist. The last 10 years of my life are completely different.” Bell and Mara’s Fantastic Four was famously a bit of a disaster, too, heavily reshot after filming and unveiled with a whimper. (A reboot, starring entirely different people, was released last year.) Which only compounds the strange, lovely twist of fate that two of its stars ended up running off together.

That said, they’d orbited one another long before Marvel came into their lives. “I screen-tested with Kate for another film when I was like 18,” he recalls. “I even had to kiss her in that screen test. But then neither of us got parts in the movie, and you think… maybe if we did get those parts, maybe we wouldn’t get married later on? It’s funny the way your path goes. But I’m also an actor, so I’m very used to having little control over my life.”

It’s partly why he never watches his own work. “I have a very fraught relationship with the lack of control,” he says. “Like it’s excruciating. It really, really, bothers me.” He laughs, then seems to imitate the look of a person trying to crawl out of their own skin. “That doesn’t mean it’s ever fractious on set, because I understand my position in it. But I’ve had to divorce myself from the outcome because otherwise I’d be a twisted mess of insecurity and anxiety and all these other things.” He pauses. “Which, you know, I obviously am.”

Earlier I’d suggested Bell give his movies a go, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe don’t watch a single second of yourself, I tell him. For your own sake.

“I mean,” he shrugs, “it’s worked well so far.”

‘The Uprising’ is in cinemas from 9 October