Mail on Sunday
May 2, 2004


In a taxi with STEPHEN CAMPBELL MOORE

BY MAUREEN PATON

It's a lovely sunny day for sightseeing, and a rising star is being borne through North London's Tufnell Park. Stephen Campbell Moore has been so busy working round the world that he's suddenly nostalgic for the green lung of Hampstead Heath, where he's always getting stopped by the police for cycling. So off we go for a quick motorised jaunt round his favourite haunts, with our Turkish-born driver Hasan bemoaning the fact that he hasn't had time to vacuum the cab let alone find a red carpet.

Hasan knows a future celebrity in the back of his cab when he sees one.

After breakthrough roles in the BBC2 drama Byron, and as the hero Adam in Stephen Fry's directorial film debut, Bright Young Things, the 26-year-old actor is now appearing in the BBC's latest Anthony Trollope costume drama He Knew He Was Right, and will be seen in Alan Bennett's new stage play The History Boys, and with Scarlett Johansson in the film A Good Woman. In short, the boy is hot.

The floppy brown hair, newly grown Elizabethan beard and slinky seersucker shirt ('it's such a magnet for dust that my girlfriend defluffs it with a little machine') all add up to a beautifully bohemian package.

At first glance, he looks fleetingly like a suave young Ian Ogilvy in that TV golden oldie, The Saint. But saintliness is not what Stephen is about. The shadows under his aquamarine eyes give him a romantically famished look or an interestingly dissolute air, depending on the role and he's seizing every dramatic opportunity to exploit them. 'The first agent I went to said, "What's this under your eyes? You'll never work with those shadows." What a twit!' exclaims Stephen. 'As an actor, you're representing people as they exist in real life. I have never been attracted to the idea of playing the perfect guy.' 

Which is why, after playing penniless, lovelorn heroes in Bright Young Things and He Knew He Was Right, he recently finished filming the role of a rich, lady-killing rake opposite Scarlett in A Good Woman. 'It was a nice change from playing heroes to play someone naughty by nature; it's a lot more enjoyable,' he admits, grinning. 'Scarlett was hysterical; she has such a good sense of humour. She would break into song mid-conversation; it was like living in a musical.' The son of a mechanical engineer, Stephen's the only actor in his family, thanks to an 'inspirational' maths teacher at his minor public school who directed plays at the local Shakespeare Festival in Tring, Hertfordshire. Although Stephen loves the buzz of London, he misses the leafy countryside enough to ask Hasan to drive past Hampstead Garden Suburbs's Arts & Crafts cottages, out of which you can imagine Stephen's character Hugh Stanbury, the cash-strapped Victorian journalist in He Knew He Was Right, emerging. Hasan drives on to the Holly Bush pub in Hampstead, where Hugh would probably have drowned his sorrows when he realised he was too poor to marry the girl of his dreams though probably not with Stephen's favourite tipple, Guinness. We stop off at another of Stephen's watering holes in Belsize Park, whose cosy community feel he loves after a day's rehearsing or filming.

'And I really like the Italian look of the pastel-painted buildings down these streets,' says Stephen, who filmed A Good Woman last November and December on the same Italian Amalfi coast where his grandfather's tank did a lap of honour at the end of the Second World War, and the beautiful Italian girls came out to greet him. Now Stephen's got his own beautiful Italian girl. We head back to the flat he shares with the Egyptian-named, Italian-born Ra, a postgraduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art. No wonder the shyly smiling Ra sees Stephen as a work of art, rendering him immaculate with her special defluffing machine.

He Knew He Was Right is on BBC 1 at 9pm tonight; The History Boys begins at London's National Theatre on 8 May; A Good Woman will be released later this year.