Five minutes before we speak, Ben Barnes posts a photo showcasing the glamour of press junkets. He stands, alone in a room, pouring himself a soft drink. He’s spent the day talking about his latest movie, 'Seventh Son', which is due for release in Australia this March.
Post by Ben Barnes.
For someone who jokingly tells me “you’re number 522,000 of the day,” Barnes is a veritable ball of energy, passionate about his work, and the work of those around him. He’s quick to brush aside his own growing presence in an industry he loves to focus on the joy of working with his heroes. “I am constantly surprised by the kind of people they allow me to share a screen with,” he laughs down the phone.
Co-star Jeff Bridges was the main reason Barnes tried out for the role. “That was the main draw, to work with 'The Dude', and one of 'The Fabulous Baker Boys'… I’d be lying if I said that one of the main draws wasn’t to work with a couple of my heroes.” But for all the excitement, there was a downside to working with Bridges. “It took a little while to warm up [to him] because I was so in awe.” Celebrities really are just like you and me.
Jeff Bridges plays Master Gregory, the mentor to Barnes’s character, Tom Ward, and a man on a mission. “He has a week to try and train me to be his apprentice.” It’s the time of the rare blood moon, “which means that Mother Malkin – played by the very glamourous Julianne Moore – and her evil sidekicks, including warlocks and witches, their power is growing.”
Though on the surface it sounds like standard fantasy fare, 'Seventh Son' takes the typical hero/villain dynamic and turns it on its head. The heroes aren’t purely good, the villains not without sympathy. There’s something entirely human in the fantastical beings battling for their own ideas of a safe, free world.To Barnes, Tom Ward isn’t your typical fantasy hero. Oh, sure, he can slay monsters and wield swords with the best of them, but he’s also prone to sarcasm. “It was nice to play a character in this genre who had a little bit of a sense of humour about him, and an awareness of the people around him, because sometimes the characters in this genre can be quite earnest.”
A veteran of fantasy films, including 'Stardust' and 'The Chronicles Of Narnia' franchise, Barnes is also a big fan of the genre. “I think fantasy is so representative of everything else. I think that the human story, the mentor/apprentice story, the love story can be set anywhere, in space or in a desert or anywhere. But I think the themes of destiny and good and evil between people work particularly well in a fantasy setting. That, balanced with the escapist nature of it, the kind of hum-drum life of a pig farmer verses this kind of adventure and the adrenaline of fighting for innocence and justice over the dark side. I think it’s just a great setting for metaphor, really.”{youtube}e4xNLuDvW2I{/youtube}
'Seventh Son' is an action heavy movie, and Barnes did many of his own stunts, including a water battle with a boggart. It’s a change from the shape-shifting boggarts of the 'Harry Potter' universe. In the world of 'The Spook’s Apprentice' (the book by Joseph Delaney that Seventh Son is based on), boggarts are giant creatures, blind and aggressive, and the scene in which Master Gregory and Tom run into one of the creatures quickly became Barnes’s favourite to film. “They built this huge mechanical gimbal which would serve as the boggart's arm so essentially I could just get very angry at machinery rather than anything real… We had some fun; a couple of my favourite little lines were in that sequence, which I shouted at Jeff’s character. It was definitely a lot of fun to shoot.”
Witches and boggarts are a long way from empty rooms in New York, and posting photos on social media. “My world has a lot of fantasy,” he admits, “but not a lot of spare time... I’ll always take what I can get and try and pick the most interesting stories,” he says, his year already filling with projects at various stages of completion. Among the projects is the musical flick 'Jackie And Ryan', co-starring Katherine Heigl, and' Sons of Liberty', a mini-series on the History Channel. With so many projects, one thing is certain – we’re going to be seeing a lot more of Ben Barnes in 2015.
