Sin the Los Angeles sun in a T-shirt and a hoodie, Ben Chaplin has a coffee mug in one hand and a cigarette between the two fingers of the other. He’s captain this morning, if he’s a little wary of technology, after an accident last year.
“My first Zoom thing was also my first Cedar meal ever,” says the 51-year-old actor. “My girlfriend is Jewish and I feel like this total charlatan, this thrower, among all her elderly family members.” Suddenly the screen turns blue and a curved white stripe emerges, led by an unseen hand. “This older voice asked, ‘What’s going on? ‘And then you start seeing the classic penis. I’m ashamed of how funny I found it. I thought, ‘Are they going to pull their hair on the balls?’ But then it was cut off. Apparently a child from one of the families was responsible. Good for him. Hahaha! ”
Chaplin has a natural exuberance, though he’s capable of being fun on screen in various registers – from the prickly comedy of Birthday Girl, in which he played a St Albans pen thrust on the fly, with Nicole Kidman as his mail order bride, to the full suspense of the BBC One drama Apple Tree Yard, notorious for his sex scene with Emily Watson in a House of Commons broom closet.
In his latest role, he has adapted to a softer mood: he plays archaeologist Stuart Piggott in the fact-drama The Dig.
He is not the main character here: the stars are Carey Mulligan, as the widow whose estate Sutton Hoo is home to the Anglo-Saxon remains, and Ralph Fiennes, who begins to dig it up as World War II approaches. However, it is in Piggott’s story that much of the film’s emotional urgency lies. His wife and fellow archaeologist, Peggy (Lily James), sees him goo-goo eyes looking at a male colleague and meaning that old treasure is not the only thing buried.
“The movie is beautiful,” he says. ‘It’s just about minutiae, isn’ t it? The legacy of the individual, our prints. You can argue that it’s on the nose, but I’m glad it is. There is a universality of themes. ‘
He chose not to dig too deep into the real Piggott’s past. “When I was young, I made the mistake of investigating something and thinking, ‘Well, what did that do to me?'” He says. “Then I’m coming back from non-transformation school.”
That was the complaint at Guildhall, the drama school in London, from which he was kicked out, albeit temporarily. “The official reason was that I did not transform enough,” he says. ‘I played King Lear at 19 – what did they want me to do? It’s not a rack, it’s a rack. ‘
Chaplin, the youngest of four children, was raised in a town near Windsor. From his mother, a teacher, he got his passion for reading. From his father, a businessman, he inherited a love of film. ‘The lounge has become our cinema. When I speak, I am kicked out, so I stop and pay attention. His father passed away 20 years ago when Chaplin’s Hollywood career was in full swing. “I’m sure he died without worrying about me and thinking my place was fixed.” He laughed. “Little did he know how picky and uncomfortable I would be.”
An earlier robbery hit Chaplin particularly hard. ‘My oldest sister. She was tough, quirky, brilliant. She died when I started doing pretty well. I just did The Remains of the Day and she never saw it. I remember thinking she would have been proud of me. He says her death changed him deeply. “Appreciating the transience of life at that young age is a gift. It made me friendlier, more tolerant, a better actor. But sadder. I have a darkness I have not yet had. It has certainly been a less cheerful life ever since. ”
Chaplin experienced mainstream success as an agoraphobic Jack-the-boy in the BBC sitcom Game On, after which he left. He went to LA to spend time with his then-partner, Schindler’s List star Embeth Davidtz, whom he met while playing lovers in the adaptation of HE Bates’ Feast of July. While there, he successfully auditioned for The Truth About Cats & Dogs, a bubbly, gender-biased Cyrano de Bergerac starring Uma Thurman, which turned out to be a surprise hit. A year later, he was starring Jennifer Jason Leigh in an attractive film from Henry James’ Washington Square.
At that point, the doubt arose. “You do not know that you want to be famous first,” he says. ‘I felt embarrassed because I flew a business or first. You think, ‘I did not deserve it!’ Everywhere you go, the attitude towards you changes. It hardly helped that he was far from home. “I was kind of existentially lonely.”
Theater has always given him enough comfort. ‘When you’re in the zone, you’re wasting time and you’re killing mortality. All you can see is the face of the other actor. Someone I was on stage with said, “Are you going to the other side, aren’t you?” I’ve never heard of it. I said, ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘
It is more difficult to achieve the absorption during the fragmentary process of filmmaking. One exception was The Thin Red Line, in which he played a grumpy fight in the battle of Guadalcanal. There was war everywhere he went – explosions, planes flying overhead – while director Terrence Malick kept the cameras rolling. “We shot a million and a half meters of celluloid,” Chaplin said. “There are about 50 movies there.”
He ended up being one of the lead roles in the film, which had a part in the editorial suite: Mickey Rourke and Bill Pullman were one of the actors completely cut out. Chaplin returned for a smaller part in Malick’s next film, The New World, although his actions as an abusive father were cut from The Tree of Life.
His acting coach on The Thin Red Line was the late Penelope Allen, best known as the chief banker in Dog Day Afternoon. I tell Chaplin what she once said about him: ‘Ben had something like that to be the’ nice boy ‘, so he did not want people to see him as the nice boy; he wanted people to see him as the amazing actor he is. ”
When I look up, he squeezes his eyes. “Oh my God,” he says. “You make me cry.” I’m sorry – I did not intend to upset him. “No, it’s so nice,” he says. “I was just so flattered that she said that. I had the shame of calling myself an actor before I met Penny. I loved it, but it felt light-hearted. She made me proud of it. I miss her and you just brought her back for me. Thank you. It hit me to the heart, that one. ”
Was she correct in distinguishing a self-awareness about his appearance? “I wanted to become a serious actor, but I was often referred to as a British hunk,” he says. Then he adopts a ridiculous tone. “Honestly, Ryan, I felt objectified.”
How did he rate himself? ‘I never thought of myself as a beautiful boy. My brother took care of it when we were growing up – I got a lot of put-down, which was probably good for me. But also, I was very small until I was 14, so I was shorter than all the girls. I did not feel attractive. I did not think I was a minger, but I had no idea to be beautiful. ”
Any concern about his appearance arose from the fear that he would be typed. ‘I turned down some movies. The last thing I wanted to be was the new Hugh Grant, who was trying to paint me. I wanted it to be about my acting. ”
His Hollywood career did not turn out as many people expected. But Chaplin was resurrected. ‘I’ve never been so happy. I worked with some great ones. ‘Indeed: Francis Ford Coppola (who cast him as the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe in Twixt), Richard Linklater (me and Orson Welles), Oliver Stone (Snowden). He is waiting for production to resume in Joss Whedon’s fantasy series The Nevers, hence the temporary move from his home in London to LA.
“I was always ambitious to be better,” he says. “I was obsessed with it. I probably should have done more work that would have confirmed me as a more famous actor, but I did not want that. I wanted to go with him. As he says this, his hand illustrates a wavy line in the air, like a schooner happy to fall on calmer waters.
The Dig is on January 29 on Netflix