Charlie Cox

Charlie Cox

Charlie Cox could be forgiven for choosing the allure of Hollywood over the daily grind of the West End, It's both bracing and somewhat surprising, then, to find the 25-year-old star of the fantasy adventure film, Stardust, not to mention the Al Pacino Merchant of Venice and Heath Ledger vehicle Casanova before that, on stage at the Comedy Theatre in a Harold Pinter double bill, The Lover and The Collection. It’s Cox's second-ever professional stage gig following a Southwark Playhouse production three years ago of Tis Pity She's A Whore. In the first of the two Pinters, both dating to the early 1960s, Cox makes a cameo appearance as a milkman suggestively delivering cream to the home of the adulterous (or is she really?) Gina McKee. But it's The Collection that tests the young actor's chops, playing both the boy toy of older gent Timothy West as well as a possible bedmate of McKee's Stella. (The truth, as so often in Pinter, is teasingly elusive.) The supremely open and affable Cox chatted to Broadway.com one recent Saturday before that day's two shows about his West End debut, fielding those famous Pinter pauses, and why the fame that surely awaits him is also in some way terrifying.

So, here you are nearing the final stretch of a four-month West End run when surely the demand for you to stick with movies must be intense.I suppose, and there is a way in which this was the first real decision that I had to make, since I was offered a film at the same time as this play. But the truth of the matter is, when you start out acting, you take any job you can get. A lot of young actors nowadays are being forced into film and into fame, and they're not any better than when they started. And I've always thought the best possible scenario for my life and my career is longevity, and the theater has to be part of that.

But don't agents go, "You can't give over 16 weeks to lesser-known Pinter when you could be doing movies?"
It depends on who the agent is. My agent in England [Lindy King] is incredibly understanding. There is no such thing as "can" or "can't." She sees the bigger picture; I mean, obviously she will advise me as to what she thinks is best for my career but that's precisely why this appealed to me so much. I hope to do much more theater; I love it. I've had a fabulous time all the way through.

When you did Tis Pity at the Southwark Playhouse in 2005, that was only a three-week run. How have you found the eight-show-a-week routine over the past few months?
It's interesting: After rehearsals, a lot of the work is done, and you don't have to come into work and face new challenges as you often do on a film. I'm finding that when you do a long run, you have to go places you've never been before to keep the material fresh, and that's working with some very seasoned actors in both film and theater: Timothy West, Gina McKee... I will go through a period of four or five days when I feel I can't deliver, but then something happens that brings you out of any possible rut. It's about finding new ways of being able to hear it each night.

Charlie Cox in The Collection

I'm sure the fact that it's Pinter is a major plus.
Yes, especially that it's Pinter. The words he uses are so precise and so brilliant and so perfect for their placement within a script that when we first started, I thought, I can't do this without a dictionary.

What about those celebrated Pinter pauses? Are they tricky to navigate?
Well, we have to remember that Pinter was an actor first and foremost, and he is there to help the actor in his writing. There's become this belief that you have to tap out the pauses, but he'll openly admit that is absolute bollocks. With Harold, the punctuation is even more important than the pauses and the silences.

Did Pinter come to rehearsals?
He came on three different occasions, and I was kind of all right with it. Gina and Rich were really, really scared. He had very, very few notes: he gave me some areas where I could slow down a bit.

It must be fun priming yourself for the intrigue of The Collection with your brief encounter with Gina in The Lover.
The two plays do work surprisingly well together in that Harold's characters tend to do battle with the same power struggle. But let's be honest : the milkman could be done by anyone; it's kind of embarrassing, actually. What happened was that Jamie [the plays' director, Jamie Lloyd] gave me the script and said that there's a small character in The Lover who's normally played by the person who plays Bill in The Collection: that made a lot of sense to me.

You began in theater with a Jacobean writer, John Ford. Do you see any Shakespeare in your stage future, especially having appeared with Al Pacino on screen in The Merchant of Venice?
I'd love to, though I don't find it very easy. I know there are some people who find that doing Shakespeare is just like chatting but I'm much more comfortable doing something more modern. I don't feel natural when playing royal monarchs [Laughs.]