6

ANNA AND THE KING

or

CLARICE AND HANNIBAL

I won’t lie. Although I’d never really considered myself to have any special acting talent—and I had no sense that I’d fulfilled the prophecy of Anne from the drama club—I did feel satisfied with The Borrowers. I thought I was okay in it. It was fun to watch myself on the big screen. Perhaps that was terrible arrogance. Or perhaps it meant I was free from the self-awareness and self-criticism of an adult.

I love to visit the theatre. I go for the performance, of course, but I also go to experience the reactions of an audience to a work of art. One of the most moving responses I ever saw was at the musical Matilda, where I sat near a little boy no more than five years old who was there with his mum. He couldn’t take his eyes off the stage. No doubt he could barely follow the story. I’m sure many of the jokes went over his head. He was simply lost in the experience. For me, it was a bit of a tear-jerker. It would have made no sense to ask him if he liked the show or not. He was too young to be a critic and it reminded me of that time before I had succumbed to the adult tyranny of judgement and self-consciousness.

Now, whenever anybody asks me about acting, my advice is always the same. Be playful. Childlike, even. Separate yourself from the tedious analysis of adults. Forget about good and bad. It’s a mantra that serves me well. I often try to force myself to be more like the young Tom in The Borrowers, or that little boy watching Matilda, free from the crippling restriction of self-consciousness.

Some of that freedom was still with me when I auditioned for my next big film. Anna and the King was a step up from The Borrowers in terms of scale and prestige. Jodie Foster—a huge Hollywood star—was cast in the lead role, and filming would take place over a period of four months in Malaysia. The casting process was much more rigorous than anything I’d encountered before. I attended two or three auditions in London and then, once I was down to the last two, I travelled to Los Angeles for a final audition.

The hindsight of an adult tells me this was a special moment. But I was still a child, and I had no sense of this being anything massively out of the ordinary. They flew my mum and me to Los Angeles and we were put up in a crazy huge hotel, which to my absolute delight had not only an indoor swimming pool but also a jacuzzi. What kid doesn’t love a jacuzzi? What kid doesn’t hilariously pretend it’s an enormous farting cauldron? Or was that just me? I was far more interested in re-acquainting myself with room service and the Cartoon Network than in the audition. My recollection is that the other boy who was up for the part had a much more hands-on mum than mine. She was reading lines with him, almost directing him. My mum never did anything like that. She never tried to train me, never told me how to say something, always encouraged me to trust my instincts. In many ways I was completely unprepared, but it was that attitude, I think, that won me the part. Remember the Mother Goose girl? I was once again the complete opposite. I walked into that Hollywood audition free of any anxiety or preconceptions. I was just normal Tom and I think that’s what they were looking for. They wanted to see that I was happy with twelve people watching me, clutching notepads, whispering in each other’s ears, because if I wasn’t happy with that, I wouldn’t be comfortable on a film set. They wanted to see that I was malleable and directable. They wanted to see that I could deliver a line in more than one way. Most of all, I think they wanted to see that I was relaxed, and I think I was helped more than anything else by the fact that I wanted the interview to be over so I could get back to the hotel and its hilarious farting cauldron.

Mum and I returned home to Surrey and I didn’t think too much more about the film. I was still more interested in getting into the A team for football. Maybe I had a better chance, now that my haircut was a bit more streamlined. A few weeks later, though, Mum picked me up from school and, walking back to the car, she said she had news: “You got the part!”

I felt a surge of excitement. “Really?”

“Really.”

I felt a surge of hunger. “Did you bring me a cheese straw, Mum?”

I was obsessed with cheese straws. Still am. Far more so than making films.

The decision was made: Mum and I were off to Malaysia for four months. I’d barely heard of Malaysia, and none of my family had even been to Asia. We had no idea what to expect, but we were both very excited. Mum quit her job and off we went.

It would have been a lonely four months without my mum. It was the first time that I had separated myself from the normality of a day at school with my friends, and I missed it. There was no social media back in those days. I certainly didn’t have a mobile phone. I don’t think I spoke to any of my friends more than once or twice during the whole four months. My dad and brothers came to visit only once, for a week. I was the only Western child on set, which was a little disorientating, but I quickly made friends with the locals.

I also had my first experience of one-on-one tutoring, which took place for three to six hours a day in a cold, draughty Portakabin with one tiny window. And although my private tutor, Janet, was a lovely and intelligent lady, I missed the bustle of the classroom, the proximity of my mates and, yes, the opportunity to play up. It’s hard to be the class clown in a class of one. On-set tutoring would be a feature of my life throughout my childhood and I’m afraid I never grew to love it. My obsession at the time was rollerblading. When I wasn’t filming or in lessons, I would nag my mum to take pictures of me doing fake grinds and tricks on my rollerblades so I could send them back to my mates and show them what a cool time I was having. But I don’t think I fooled anyone.

I might have sometimes been lonely out in Malaysia, but I did meet new people from different walks of life, and I can’t overstate how much that kind of cultural enrichment helped me later in life. My mum went out of her way to make the experience easier for me. The film’s budget was enormous, which meant that the catering was on another level. They served incredible five-star meals in a huge marquee comprising pan-seared this and truffled that. I wouldn’t touch any of it. I had, and still have, very plain tastes in food and not much of an appetite. I was more than happy with a chocolate bar and a bag of crisps rather than any of the fancy food on offer. In an attempt to get me to eat something other than sweets, Mum would venture out in the car to find me my favourite chicken nuggets from KFC. She doesn’t much like driving round the quiet lanes of Surrey, let alone the busy highways of central Kuala Lumpur, but she braved them. Thanks to her, I was spared a nasty bout of food poisoning that knocked the rest of the cast and crew out for a week. So don’t tell me that chicken nuggets are always bad for you.

Like any kid, I had my off days, when the homesickness and the isolation got too much. I remember a handful of mornings spent crying, wailing that I didn’t want to do it anymore. I remember sweating my butt off in a six-piece linen suit that took an hour to put on and take off. I remember tearfully begging to be allowed to go home. But then by the afternoon I’d have calmed down and everything would be okay again.

And, of course, there was Jodie Foster.

My brothers had been trying to get me to watch Silence of the Lambs for years, but my mum had rightly shut the door on their attempts to scare the living daylights out of me (although they still managed to sneak in a viewing of Terminator 2). So I had no real concept of quite how famous Jodie was. Of course, I was told that she was very important, so I might have been forgiven for thinking she was more in the John Goodman mould than the Mark Williams mould. If I thought that, I was wrong. Jodie Foster couldn’t have been lovelier. I would grow to learn that, on a film set, everything trickles down from the top. If the actor whose name is at the top of the call sheet is difficult, the whole shoot becomes difficult. Jodie Foster—and her co-star Chow Yun-Fat—exhibited kindness, politeness, patience and, most importantly, enthusiasm for the process. Jodie even managed to keep her cool when I kicked her hard in the face.

We were shooting at the time. Jodie played my mother, brought into the court of the king of Siam to provide a Western education for the harem and the children. My character Louis gets into an argument with another kid who pins him to the floor. Jodie has to come and separate us. I was blindly bicycle-kicking my legs when I clonked her straight in the mouth. It was not a glancing blow. It was a proper whack and I’m sure plenty of other actors would have had something to say about it. Not Jodie. She was perfectly lovely about the whole affair, even when the moment of impact was shown several times on the blooper reel at the wrap party.

Let me take you forwards several years. I’m in my twenties and an audition request comes in. It’s for a film called Hitchcock, about the making of the film Psycho, and starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. So having done a film as a kid with Jodie Foster, it would be cool to get the Silence of the Lambs clean sweep and work with both of the leads, right?

Well, maybe not. The audition came up in the morning and I was called for that very afternoon. There was barely time to read the script, let alone research it. I was reading for the part of Anthony Perkins, who plays Norman Bates. I’d not seen the film, so I watched some footage of him and it quickly became apparent that I was uniquely unsuited for the part. He was nearly six foot two. I’m not. He had dark hair and dark eyes. I don’t. He exuded a kind of psychopathic menace. I… well, you can be the judge of that.

It was one of the few times that I’ve ever called my agent from my car outside the building and said, “Do I really have to read for this? I just don’t think I’m right for it. Perhaps the chance to work with Anthony Hopkins will come up another time, with a more suitable project.” They agreed, but persuaded me to turn up anyway, just to show my face to the director and producers.

So I turned up. I sat waiting outside the audition room. The door opened and out came the American actress Anna Faris, who had been auditioning before me. In an exaggerated stage whisper, she pointed back into the room and said, “He’s in there!”

Who’s in there? She was gone before I could ask her.

I entered the audition room. As expected, I saw a line of producers, dressed sharply, along with the director.

As not expected, I also saw Sir Anthony Hopkins himself, casually dressed, sitting there ready to read with me. By this time I’d seen Silence of the Lambs several times. Now I was about to read a scene with Hannibal Lecter, completely unprepared.

My stomach turned over. I was bricking it, horribly aware that I didn’t know the script, I didn’t know the character, I knew nothing about the film and I didn’t even think I should be here. But I was committed now. So we shook hands and I took a seat opposite him.

We get started. Sir Anthony reads the first line. I read my line in a very unimpressive American accent. He stares at me. He blinks. He smiles. He puts his script to one side and says, “I’ll tell you what, let’s forget the script. Let’s talk to you as the character. Let’s find out if you really know this character.”

Know this character? I barely knew the character’s name. I knew nothing about him. I was completely out of my depth.

“Okay,” I squeaked.

Sir Anthony fixed me with an intense stare. “So tell me,” he said. “Tell me what your character feels about… murder?”

I stared back at him, trying to match his Hannibal Lecter-like intensity. And I said… Well, I wish I could remember what I said. It was something so absurd, so traumatically cringe-worthy, that my brain has blocked it from my memory. He asked me more questions, each more peculiar than the last. What does your character feel about this? What does your character feel about that? My answers went from cringeworthy to downright bizarre. Until finally, he said, “What does your character feel about… children?”

“Children?”

“Children.”

“Er…” I said.

“Yes?” said Sir Anthony.

“Um…” I said.

“What does he like?” said Sir Anthony.

“He likes… he likes… children’s blood,” I said.

Shocked silence. I looked at him. He looked at me. The producers looked at each other. I wanted to crawl into the corner and die.

Sir Anthony nodded. He cleared his throat and politely said, with the tiniest of smiles, “Thanks for coming in.” And what he meant was: that was excruciating, please leave before you say anything worse.

The relief of leaving the building outweighed the skin-crawlingly poor performance with Sir Anthony. Not by much, but enough for me to excitedly call some of my mates to tell them the tale of the worst audition ever.