Chasing Chaucer

Having seen his gritty, violent side as a younger Malcolm McDowell in Gangster No. 1, you’d be forgiven for being caught slightly off-guard when Paul Bettany makes an entrance during the opening act of A Knight’s Tale. Filthy and bare-bollock naked, the former hoodlum ambles up to Heath Ledger and declares himself to be none other than venerated English writer Geoffrey Chaucer. Still more surprising is that he goes on to steal the show as Ledger’s heraldic aide with a series of WWF-inspired crowd addresses that will leave you in stitches. Empire Online caught up with Bettany to find out about bringing the Canterbury Tales author to life for the MTV generation. “They sent me a package of material on Chaucer to research the role,” he recalls. “But on the front of it was a picture of him and he was actually a bald, bearded dwarf. I looked at it and went ‘oh fuck!’ And then I did what any self-respecting actor in the same situation would do, which was throw any intention of doing research out of the window and just hope for the best. I’m sure some academics are going to be really upset with me, but the man did write a story about a talking penis, you know? I think he was having a bit of a giggle.” Aside from offending the nation’s literary elite, Bettany has nothing but good things to say about A Knight’s Tale. From the first month’s ‘rehearsals’ where director Helgeland imposed “an enforced period of intense alcoholism” to facilitate bonding, to the camaraderie and endless on-set banter, the film was, by all accounts, damned good fun to make. “They’re all just fucking funny people. If there’s a success to the movie, it’s that it really looks like a bunch of people who all really know each other and you wouldn’t mind going out for a drink with ‘cause they’d be a laugh.” Bearing the brunt of the film’s comedic responsibilities, Bettany’s Chaucer, or ‘Geoff’ to his friends, dances across the courtly grandstands, extolling his Knight’s virtues in an uproariously camped-up fashion. Playing Don King to Ledger’s champion, Bettany is, however, less than comfortable taking the spotlight off-screen. “I’m very frightened by the idea of stand-up and I stand in awe of people who can do that. The reason I could do it happily in the film is that somebody far cleverer and clearly a lot less drunk than I was had written the words.” The someone in question would be Oscar-winning writer, and the film’s director, Brian Helgeland, whose turn at humour was somewhat lost on the crowd during filming. “We had flags made that you could raise to make the audience laugh because they were all Czech and didn’t understand a word I was saying.” Scheduled to begin work alongside Nicole Kidman in Lars Von Trier’s Dogville next year and having just finished work on Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind - “he’s a really lovely man, a completely non-confrontational, quiet director” – Bettany will next appear in Paul McGuigan’s The Reckoning (previously known as Morality Play). “It’s amazing, I play a priest,” he grins. “It’s medieval again, because I’ve kind of cornered the market on medieval roles. It’s really sinister and really dark… It’s not A Knight’s Tale.”