Bell boy

He hit the big time as the young dancer in 'Billy Elliot' but he's 25 now and living in LA – so why is he still playing juvenile leads? Jamie Bell explains all to DONALD CLARKE

THERE IS SOMETHING distinctly odd about Jamie Bell's appearance in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin. It's not just that – thanks to the uneasy magic of motion capture – he is both there and not there. Following peculiar films such as The Polar Expressand Beowulf, we have become used to these quasi-animations partially fashioned from flesh-and-blood performances.

What's particularly disconcerting is that he's back "playing" the juvenile lead. It's been over a decade since he turned up as the young dancer in Billy Elliot. Since then, in films such as King Kong, Hallam Foeand The Eagle, he has confirmed his status as a gritty, angular cinematic presence. It's almost as if, at 25, he's been cast because he used to be a child actor.

"Well, I first met Steven to talk about Tintinwhen I was 15," Jamie explains. "Then it was going to be an action movie. Fifteen in Hollywood? Meeting Spielberg? I couldn't believe it. The first film I'd seen in the cinema was Jurassic Park. He'd defined my idea of cinema."

So what’s going on here? Why did they pick Jamie Bell for Hergé’s gallant Belgian cub reporter? Okay, he’s a man playing a boy. But is he playing the boy he used to be? “They knew I was European, so that helped,” he says. “They knew that I could move physically. And I could thus embody their version of a boy-man thing really well. He is, actually, unidentifiable in terms of age. He has the physical appearance of a boy, but the courage and intelligence of a man.”

You could never mistake the real Jamie Bell for a boy (or a Belgian for that matter). Sharp-featured and stringy, his Stockton accent only mildly Americanised, he has grown into an eccentrically charismatic actor. Yet, such was the impact of Billy Elliotthat you can't help but see the boy in the young man. Securing the part in Stephen Daldry's film was quite a coup. Then doing a bit of acting with the National Youth Music Theatre (NYMT), Bell found himself auditioning against several thousand equally keen young performers. I assume he was surprised to get the role. "I didn't even expect to get into the NYMT. I was amazed," he laughs. "Stephen said that I was really disruptive. I thought that everyone else was disruptive. What do you want me to do? But he did always say he could access me emotionally."

We think we know about Bell from watching Billy Elliot. Both the character and the actor are from the northeast of England. Both grew up in single-parent families. Both were plucked from working-class backgrounds and offered a chance of fame in an unlikely field. How much did they have in common?

“The wanting to do something that was unusual for that part of the world,” he says. “A slightly divided family. My family was divided by divorce rather than death, which is slightly better. The fabrication and dramatics of the story are so universal it didn’t need to be about dance. The universal story is: you should be allowed to express yourself. I don’t think there’s a single person who wouldn’t root for that kid.” He mentions his parents’ divorce. In fact, his dad left his mum before he was born. The last I’d heard, the two men had never met. Has that situation changed?

“I met him once, very briefly,” he says in a voice that, though polite, suggests an understandable reluctance to continue the line of questioning. So they’re not pursuing the relationship? “No, no. I think too much time has elapsed.”

By all accounts, Daldry acted as something of a surrogate father. Dragging a kid from obscurity and launching him into a major motion picture is not something any director should consider lightly. Daldry has continued to give Bell sensible advice. “Mostly he phones up and says: ‘Pick up the phone, you bastard! Call me!’ His guidance has been very crucial. I really trust the guy.”

In fact, only a brief period of Bell's career involved juvenile roles. He was an excellent Smike in the 2002 film of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. But, in the same year, he played a British soldier in the undervalued horror film Deathwatch. He was terrific in David Gordon Green's Undertow, a slice of southern Gothic. Then he found himself chasing huge monkeys in Peter Jackson's King Kong. It doesn't sound as if he had time to consider the often-difficult transition from child actor to senior performer. Failure never came into it.

“No. That was never an option,” he says with determination. “Not achieving was not an option. I never thought about not continuing and not working. It’s up to me now, I thought. I have to figure out how to work. I have to work out who to trust. I had great support from Stephen and my mother. But I have to perform. Nobody is going to do it for me.” And that involved conquering – or at least seducing – the United States.

"I needed to prove to myself that I could play an American," he agrees. "That's such a big part of the casting process. They don't particularly like casting people who aren't American. But, look at something like the last X-Menfilm, with Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. There are a lot of people from the UK and Australia doing these parts now." So how do you go about it? He was very convincing as a southerner in Undertow. Does he walk around listening to tapes?

“I hung out in Wall-Mart. I got into blues music. There’s actually a lot of similarities between the southern hospitality and the north of England.” He spent some time living in New York, before giving in to the inevitable and moving to Los Angeles.

You wouldn't expect a working-class Northerner to embrace the life of plastic surgery and pink-tiled swimming pools. Sure enough, he claims that he never goes anywhere near Beverly Hills and made sure to find a home among the funkier, less ornate streets of seaside Venice. "The first time I went there I was like everybody else," he marvels. "I thought: everything is huge. Their milk cartons are huge. Their fridges are like cars. You notice the sound of a bag rustling like the one Sigourney Weaver carried in Ghostbusters. I was in love with all that stuff. Then suddenly all those things you knew from movies become normal."

And despite settling in nicely, he has not yet learned to drive. Such an admission can cause embarrassment in Los Angeles. “Yeah, I take cabs everywhere,” he says. “People say: what if you had to get to hospital? I think I could manage to drive that far.” I’m sure he could.

Failure is, indeed, not an alternative for this determined young man from Durham.

The Adventures of Tintin

is released on Wednesday