Chronicles of Ben Barnes

My Other Crush: Chace Crawford

2009-05-09T01:07:00.000-07:00

Chace Crawford, seen here in the set of his new movie Twelve, is our second crush after Ben Barnes. Who's the cuter of these two?

Photo via Famewatcher

Ben Barnes on Interview Magazine

2009-04-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

Interview by Kaleem Aftab of Interview Magazine with our hunk, Ben.

KALEEM AFTAB: The last time that we saw each other was a year ago. You were still acting onstage in The History Boys and were excited that Bigga Than Ben was nearly completed. What a difference a year makes.

BEN BARNES: It's so funny, last time I saw you this change in fortune was just happening.

KA: Yeah. You'd just been to-or were about to go to-the audition for Prince Caspian.

BB: And then it all went a bit mental.

KA: You stopped making $200,000 movies.

BB: Exactly. But Bigga Than Ben played at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It never came out! Now it's getting released in a few cinemas in the U.K. They've cut it
together with really cool music and got the likes of Pete Doherty on the soundtrack.

KA: Has all the attention you've been receiving come as a shock?

BB: Yeah, but I've been working steadily at it since I left school, moving up the ranks, as it were. When I first came out of university, I had my obligatory six months out of work and was pulling my hair out, wondering what the next step was. It was such a miserable state of affairs for me in London. There just didn't seem to be any work. I saved up some money and headed over to the States and bashed on a few doors and got a few meetings and took some auditions to play L.A. lifeguards and all sorts of things I was entirely inappropriate for. I managed to get a pilot, but it wasn't picked up. Then the work in London started slowly coming.

KA: Did you have any trepidation about playing a fantasy hero?

BB: Luckily for me, Caspian is supposed to be scared and running for his life most of the time. When I got to the set, I was fairly intimidated by the size and scope of the film. I wasn't really prepared for it. I found myself having to learn all these new skills-horseback-riding, sword-fighting, and accents. There was sort of this Narnia boot camp that I had to throw myself into for a few weeks before we even started shooting.

KA: There was a period earlier this year when you couldn't walk a block without seeing your face on a poster.

BB: When they first showed me the publicity campaign, I said, "Is that sensible?" They said, "It's called Prince Caspian, so we've got to have the prince on the poster." It was a little disconcerting, you know, when I went over to the States to publicize the film, seeing myself 15 stories high. When you're driving down Sunset Boulevard and you see Harrison Ford and then Will Smith and then Robert Downey Jr. and then yourself, you think, What am I doing up there?

KA: At least your new higher profile ensures that you won't be scrambling for parts in tiny independent films.

BB: I still do independent work. In two weeks I start shooting a version of The Picture of Dorian Gray that is obviously much darker, much grittier-it's more of a gothic horror story.

KA: Looking at 15-story-high posters of yourself seems like the perfect grounding for playing a character like Dorian Gray.

BB: There have been some very interesting parallels. I don't really see the point in making a film unless you can think of a good reason to do it. We live in this celebrity-obsessed, youth-obsessed culture, and it just seems to make a lot of sense to make this Dorian Gray film right now. Especially for me, as somebody who's . . . I don't know if "on the brink" is the right term, but sort of at the beginning of getting attention from the media and from other people. Dorian Gray is also somebody who, at the beginning, doesn't want to be looked at, doesn't really want to be noticed, but thenbegins to realize the power of youth and the power of people wanting to be around him. Obviously it goes very dark, which I'm hoping in real life my part won't. I suppose you have to be aware, on some level, of the attention being focused on yourself even to accept a part like Dorian Gray.

KA: But being cast as Dorian Gray is like being told you are the ultimate in beauty, that people should sell their grandmothers to look like you. That must give you so much confidence.

BB: I don't know. You still get these waves of doubt that come over you, for example, when you get a bad review or you accept a part and think, "Oh, God, what have I just accepted? I can't do that." I don't think that's something that will ever go away in me.

KA: I've never taken you for a fragile soul.

BB: I hide it well. It's in private. You should doubt in private.

KA: Is there anything you're scared of doing?

BB: My brother is organizing a half marathon in London called Run to the Beat. You run to
music. They wanted me to do it to help promote the charity, but I can't because I've got such
terrible knees. I can't run. I start getting twinges. If I were filmed running, it would be awful.

KA: You're really going for the iconic gay writers, aren't you? Alan Bennett, Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde . . .

BB: Sexuality is a topic that has huge shifts in -society. Attitudes toward different sexualities change, but the actual sexuality of a human being is something that's consistent, and it's consistently interesting, and so people write about it. But having said that, I think that for all the characters I've played-obviously Caspian-sexuality hasn't been the most interesting thing about them.

KA: Then what was it like playing the husband of Jessica Biel in Easy Virtue?

BB: Actually, we were in the recording studio together just this morning. We were singing some songs together in this sort of '20s jazz vibe, and it was so much fun. My character has to be in love with Jessica's character like a puppy, which is not a very difficult thing to act.

KA: How are you finding being called a sex symbol?

BB: I honestly find it slightly cringey and embarrassing [laughs]. I don't really believe it, to be honest.

KA: Do you find yourself playing it up? I've seen you quoted as saying something really cheesy like "I'm single and looking for a normal gal."

BB: Oh, no! They always just make it sound ridiculous. I was asked, "Have you got a girlfriend?" I said no. Then I said, "But I think having a big film coming out will probably help that"-as a joke! The dryness of the delivery was entirely sucked out. It was obviously supposed to be a joke, but when I read it, it was like I was looking for the babes. I've never said "babes" in my entire life! I find it really just embarrassing. Even the words film star make me feel awkward. I don't know how you're supposed to respond when people say things like that. Certainly I don't get any more attention on the street or in bars than I ever did.

KA: You think you've been waylaid with a lot of pressure lately as a rising star?

BB: When you're doing a film, people are always telling you exactly what to do. Literally, your own decisions are taken away from you. After three months of publicity, you'll get a menu and think, I don't know what I want. You have to ask other people what they are having to cover up this inability to make a decision.

KA: Would you ever return to singing?

BB: Never say never, but I highly doubt it. I love music and I love singing. I just feel that musicians have a harder time than actors do.

KA: But a lot of actors are in bands.

BB: I like the ones who just kind of do it for fun. The Johnny Depps and Russell Crowes. It's great if you're not trying to pimp it out and exploit it for all it's worth.

KA: What do you sing in the bath?

BB: Well, I was in Japan a few times recently, doing karaoke, and there were a lot of Beatles songs flying around.

KA: Favorite tune?

BB: "Twist and Shout." What I love is that they'd done two solid days of recording, and it was late in the evening on the second day, and John Lennon's voice was completely shot, and he just completely went for it, ruining his voice for a week.

Dorian Gray Movie: Official Poster?

2009-04-23T19:37:00.000-07:00

Am not sure if this is an official movie poster or a fan-generated one but here it is. This is for Ben's upcoming Dorian Gray movie.

Dorian Gray Movie: Ben Barnes is Dorian Gray

2009-04-23T19:19:00.000-07:00

My bad. I haven't been following Ben Barnes this past months so I didn't realize that he's starring in an upcoming Dorian Gray movie which is scheduled for release Fall 2009.

Here's a photo from the movie set. Ben is starring with Colin Firth in the role of an older man who introduces Dorian to the hedonistic lifestyle or something like that. More about this later.

Adam Lambert Track of My Tears

2009-03-25T21:43:00.000-07:00

Do you think Ben Barnes is as good as Adam Lambert? Maybe Ben should also join American Idol because he can sing. And he looks better than Kris Allen.

My American Idol favorite now is Adam Lambert. He is very good.

Ben With the Hyrise Boyband

2008-07-27T06:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, didn't know that our Ben can sing. Turns out that he was a member of a boyband, Hyrise which competed in the Eurovision Festival. I admit that he's no David Cook in the singing department but, these days, it's rare to find an actor who can also sing.

Prince Ben Barnes

2008-07-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

I am so stealing this article from Timesonline because the writer stole comments from the internets anyway. Seriously, it's just too good to excerpt so let's republish the whole dang thing here. I pretty much agree that Ben is a hottie. If there is an Olympic sport for hotness, Ben will be a runaway winner.

Why Ben Barnes is the people's Prince
Times Online
Here’s what happens if you are 26 years old, have boyish good looks and get cast as a rapier-wielding, horse-riding, dashing prince in a romantic fantasy adventure such as Prince Caspian: within days of hitting the big screen, most of the comments about you on film websites such as The Internet Movie Database read: “Jenny8327: He is incredibly hot. I would love to have his babies.

“The-rebel-angel: Yeah, so would everyone else here . . .

“Missy 915: It kills me to say, but he has to have someone, so here are the ladies in Hollywood I thought he could go with: Hayden Panettiere, Rihanna, although I think she has a boyfriend, and maybe Christina Milian.”

At face value, therefore, Ben Barnes is just this year’s British dream boy – the next Jim Sturgess or James McAvoy, with tousled hair and a bit of swash and buckle. And yet you would be hard-pressed to find a man less keen on being a sex symbol. When the producers showed him the posters for Prince Caspian, featuring Barnes smouldering down the blade of his sword in a way that would cause even asexual protozoa to spontaneously divide, he was aghast. “Is that sensible?” he asked them. “Because, you know, nobody knows who I am.”

They do now. Since Prince Caspian wrapped, he has been named in lists of talent to watch on both sides of the Atlantic, hailed as the “second coming of Orlando Bloom” by Entertainment Weekly and described by the International Herald Tribune as being “in a rare position in Hollywood: an unknown actor on the brink of certain global fame”.

And yet he doesn’t seem aware of what’s about to happen to him. He crashed at a friend’s apartment during a recent visit to Los Angeles. He has no publicist. His first junket in New York – an interviewing sausage-machine in which actors face round tables of six or seven journalists for 20 minutes at a time, repeated in seemingly endless succession, day after day – almost killed him. Most actors prepare 10 funny stories and trot them out to the assembled pack while working out where to have dinner. Barnes, on the other hand, threw himself into the machine determined to give all he had.

“I was trying to be interesting, and my defences were high because I didn’t want to say anything stupid, and I wanted to be funny and entertaining and promote the movie . . . and to do that for 90 interviews in a row is nigh on impossible.” He still seems faintly baffled. “And then if you’re trying to be original with every answer . . . I had people saying things like, ‘Who is Ben Barnes?’, and a French journalist said, ‘Tell me, what is life?’ I don’t know. And if I did, who cares? I got so sick after three days, I couldn’t get out of bed, and they brought a doctor to my hotel room because I had to get up and keep doing the interviews.”

When we meet in his agent’s office in London, my immediate response is to slot him into the round hole of dim but cute. He’s wearing a leather jacket and loose-fitting shirt, his eyes are open and trusting and he grabs at a movie magazine to check its coverage of The Incredible Hulk. As we talk, however, a square peg emerges. For a start, he’s bright for a pretty boy. As we chat, he is far happier investigating the writing intentions of CS Lewis across the whole Narnia series than gazing at his perfectly formed navel.

“The difference between Lewis and all other fantasy writers is that he writes different genres with each book, while the others just stay in the milieu,” he argues, with knowledge of the text that you’re unlikely to find in Jude Law, bless him. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a Christmas fairy tale of discovery, with snow and Santa and Christian imagery. With Caspian, it’s an action story, although the motives are darker because the villain is human. We can identify with his greed and lust for power. His fascist mentality – going to war to promote his race above all others – is more terrifying to us because it’s part of our history. I think that was the second world war seeping into Lewis’s writing. But what stood out for me as incredibly modern was the fear-based politics that Miraz [Caspian’s evil uncle] was using – trying to get his generals to fake casualties to justify his desire to attack.”

He pauses, a little downcast. “None of the reviews really picked up on that, which is surprising to me, given the Bush syndrome.”

Perhaps it’s growing up the son of a psychiatrist father and psychotherapist mother that gives him this analytical approach. “They taught me that you are made up of your childhood memories, so even if I say I’m not a method actor, I have something to draw on when placing myself in intense human situations,” he begins, before delivering a sly change of tack. “But when you’re playing a fantasy prince, there’s not a huge amount to relate to. Obviously, I’ve never held a sword at a family member’s throat.”

What he did have to draw on, however, were two real-life princes – possibly the first time Harry and Wills have been credited with any sort of cultural inspiration.

“Caspian is not a swash-buckling heroic Prince Charming, but Americans expect somebody like that,” he explains. “Their concept of a prince is Disney – that’s all they know. But I’ve grown up with two princes, one my age, one my younger brother’s age. Caspian makes mistakes; Harry goes to a party dressed as a Nazi. Caspian does something heroic; Harry goes and fights for his country without telling anyone. I think it’s interesting that they are real people, making real decisions about their lives, but they have this responsibility that they may or may not want.”

He does become irritable when his meteoric rise is compared with the spotlight shone on the Windsors. “People say, this must be like winning the lottery. Well, it isn’t. I started off singing in choirs. That’s how I got into acting. When I was 15, my voice broke and I was like, now what? It’s not really cool to be in a choir any more – I’m not sure it ever actually was cool. Then I got a job playing drums on stage in Bugsy Malone, and I felt great, because I was so shy and awkward at school. I spent every summer doing plays with the National Youth Music Theatre. At university, I spent every summer taking plays up to the Edin-burgh Fringe. I’ve tried my hand at television presenting and music projects, I’ve played Russian thugs in indie movies, Yorkshire schoolboys at the National Theatre, and I’ve done American television pilots. I have worked to get here.”

That work includes a boyband called Hyrise, an unsuccessful Eurovision act that the press have been throwing at him for the past couple of weeks. He sighs when I bring it up. “I was in my second year at university when somebody rang me up and said, ‘Do you want to sing on this thing?’ I thought, carpe diem, I’m still at uni, nobody will notice. How wrong can you be? Anyway, we rehearsed for a week, and then they said it was Eurovision, and I thought, oh nonononono. I tried to pull out, but it was too late, and I felt a bit selfish. So, hey, how bad can it be? Pretty bad, as it turns out. We had one song, performed one time, and next morning I left. That was it: never heard hide nor hair of it until Caspian. I don’t feel it’s a skeleton because it really wasn’t anything – although my mum did make a banner.”

Next he has the third Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “I think it’s the best book, very episodic, but that makes it hard to adapt. It’s interesting that Michael Apted is directing it, because he did the Seven Up! series, so if there’s one person who knows about ageing someone and keeping their essence, it’s him.”

He will also be the lead in Dorian Gray from Ealing Studios. “How could I turn down Dorian Gray?” He spreads out his hands in appeal. “In two years’ time, I’ll be too old – well, I’m too old now. Just don’t tell anyone. But there hasn’t been a decent version made, and there needs to be in this celebrity-obsessed, youth-crazed culture. I think the best films and the best plays always seem current. There’s something in them that makes you think, that’s good, there’s a point in doing this now.”

And he explains how he staged Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch over Me at college, just after the invasion of Iraq. The play deals with hostages in Lebanon in the late 1980s; Barnes performed it as the same thing started happening in Iraq. “Playing Dorian feels right in just that way,” he says, leaning forward earnestly to make this point. “It says something about a darker side of Britain.”

I look at this handsome young actor explaining to me that obsession with handsome young actors is wrong and I think: Ben, I really take your point, but on the IMDB chatroom discussing Dorian Gray, the girls are just going to say you’re hot.

Ben Barnes: Underwear Model - Giorgio Armani

2008-07-27T05:55:00.001-07:00

Hey. Is this cool or what? From nydailynews:

Giorgio Armani would seem to be a little old for "The Chronicles of Narnia." But we hear the 74-year-old fashion icon absolutely loves the looks of Ben Barnes, who plays Prince Caspian in the epic movie. A source says Armani recently invited the 26-year-old actor aboard his yacht. Insiders wonder if Barnes may soon be become a soldier in Armani's army of celeb models, which includes David Beckham and Djimon Hounsou. Reps for Armani and Barnes declined to comment.

Ben as the next Armani underwear model. Me likes the idea. He will give that Beckham a run for his money :-)

UPDATE: Can't find any Giorgio underwear pics yet but check out Ben's gorgeous photos (shirtless) with Interview Magazine here.

Ben Barnes: Big Mouth, Lousy Kisser?

2008-06-23T03:54:00.000-07:00

Are big mouthed guys lousy kissers? Hmmm, I don't know. Maybe it's something that the guys at How to Kiss should study.

Ben Barnes is a Hottie

2008-06-23T03:39:00.000-07:00

Yeah, he is hotter than that overhyped and aging David Beckham.

Fiery Ben

2008-06-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

I'd like Ben to ride me too. LOL.

Ben Barnes: What a Hunk

2008-06-04T07:28:00.000-07:00

Yummy. I love the intensity.

Take Me Ben... I'm a Normal Girl

2008-06-03T01:16:00.000-07:00

My movie sweetheart Ben Barnes is looking for a normal girl according to the metro.

"I'm single right now and I have a movie out. I don't know if that will help."

The actor, who stars in the second instalment of the Chronicles of Narnia series says he is looking for a "normal" girl to date.

"Somebody who's fun and normal," he said. "There's a lot of fun people round here [Hollywood] but not so many normal ones."

So Ben, I'm married but I'm a normal girl. And as I said earlier, I will divorce my fat hubby if you take me.

Ben Barnes Photo

2008-06-01T06:30:00.000-07:00

I stole the picture from Perez because I had to. You mean I should ignore it when I see a dreamy picture of my one and only Ben Barnes? Are you crazy?

Perez, the slut, wrote those heart-shaped thingies.

More Ben Barnes.

OMG: Prince Caspian Official Movie Trailer

2008-06-01T06:00:00.000-07:00

Wow. Really, wow. I can't wait for this movie

OMG: It's Ben Barnes

2008-06-01T05:34:00.000-07:00

Ben Barnes is Prince Caspian in the second installment of the Chronicles of Narnia. He is so uber cute. Marry me, Ben. I will divorce my fat hubby if you will :-)

[picture via movies and lyrics]

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2008-04-21T19:11:00.000-07:00

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