Famous International playboy

Nobody took Clive Owen seriously when he announced, aged 13, that he wanted to be an actor. It was 1977 and Owen was a pupil at a rough and ready state school in Coventry, the sort of place where the unruly kids were given overalls and ordered to do manual labour around the school instead of actually learn anything. Owen, though, was bright – in the top streams for all his subjects – but then he got a part as the Artful Dodger in the school production of Oliver! and loved it so much that schoolwork no longer seemed important. He knew what he wanted to do, even if no one else did.

“They didn’t think I would actually get into a drama school and do it,” he says of his friends and family 30 years ago, a long way from the balmy sunshine of a Los Angeles afternoon where he now sits at an outside table at the Four Seasons Hotel, Beverley Hills. “I don’t think anybody took it seriously. There was another kid at my school, Dominic, who wanted to be a guitarist and me and him were like the two freaks that were being ‘unrealistic’. But I was really, really stubborn about it.”

The stubbornness evidently paid off. At 44, Owen still has a noticeable Midlands accent – Ozzy Osbourne having the most extreme example – and a slight roughness around the edges, but everything else about him shrieks movie star. He is wearing a casual Armani suit and beige suede trainers. His pale blue shirt is unbuttoned far enough to reveal a modest sprouting of chest hair and a heavy silver chain worn round his neck. He is tanned in a way that looks slightly unreal and his teeth are such a luminescent white that it is difficult not to do a double-take when he grins. His face is just the right side of craggy, defined by pale green-blue eyes that stare at you with unnerving focus.

His brooding masculinity and penchant for complex tough guys has led to comparisons with Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart. After breaking through in 1998 with Croupier, he stole the show as the rogue-ish butler in Gosford Park in 2001 and was sublime as the testosterone-overloaded doctor Larry in Closer, for which he won a Golden Globe and a Bafta as well as an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.

Since then, he has appeared in a string of box-office hits, including a star turn as a mysterious bank robber alongside Denzel Washington in Inside Man in 2006 and, a year later, playing a goateed Sir Walter Raleigh in Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age. His latest film, The International, is a big-budget thriller with Owen in the lead role as an Interpol agent battling against corporate corruption.

It begs the question, whatever happened to Dominic from school? Did he make it as a guitarist? “No,” he says with a rueful smile. “He’s a teacher.” Owen starts to laugh, a low rumble that sounds like the put-put of a motorbike starting up. He puts a forkful of chicken stir-fry in his mouth and shakes his head with disbelief as he chews.

Despite not seeking the approbation of others, he receives it in spades. According to Naomi Watts, his co-star in The International, Owen is “a fantastic guy with a British schoolboy sense of humour. He can laugh at himself although he does take his work very seriously.” Alfonso Cuarón, who directed Owen in the 2006 futuristic cinematic dystopia Children of Men, said Owen had “a constant awareness of the film we were trying to do. He understood the rhythm of the scenes.”

But then Owen is not the kind of person to believe his own hype. Although he is undeniably good-looking, he professes to be unaware of it – one suspects it’s because he does not think it is the sort of thing a real man should care about. “I don’t think about it at all,” he says. “I think any actor who ever thinks about that or considers himself to be a sex symbol has got serious problems.”

Yet despite the reticence he insists he is “pretty comfortable” with himself. “I hated myself when I gave up smoking [when his first daughter was born]. I loved being a smoker and when I gave up I really didn’t like myself. I preferred the guy that smoked, that put everything into the cigarette, and suddenly there was no cigarette there and I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ But generally, I don’t hang around disliking myself.

He then launches into a comprehensive synopsis of where Liverpool has been going wrong in recent matches – the typical complaint from Reds about “frustrating draws” and Liverpool’s failure to perform to their potential. “I’ve been hurting this week. Seriously. I’m absolutely not joking. I had to talk to a friend last night on the phone just to offload.”
Although he refuses to acknowledge he has a clause in his contract to allow it, Owen still manages to watch Liverpool games wherever he is in the world. “I have to be able to get it in my trailer,” he admits. “Yep. They know it’s important to me.” He gives a sheepish smile, perhaps aware of his own absurdity.

In between the lengthy bouts of post-match analysis from the comfort of his trailer, Owen found the time to film his latest project, The International. He stars as the obsessive Interpol agent Louis Salinger, a man determined to bring justice to a powerful bank that has been funding unethical arms sales. It is, if you like, the first credit-crunch thriller:  the baddie is a bank rather than a single individual, and the tagline – “They control your money. They control your government. They control your life. And everybody pays” – seems designed to appeal to the indebted sub-prime generation. Directed by Tom Tykwer, who made his name with Run Lola Run, the movie is set in multiple locations – Istanbul, Berlin and Milan – and features a memorable set-piece shoot-out in New York’s Guggenheim building.
Does Owen think it marks the beginning of a new genre of film that pitches capitalist corporations as forces of evil? “Yeah, I think like Tony Gilroy’s film Michael Clayton.

For a full version of this article and more details about The International and its star, see NOX 34