InStyle Interviews Jamie Campbell Bower
Posted on 10. Aug, 2011 by amydod in News
You play Arthur in Camelot - did you do a lot of research for the role?
I did a bit of research. Above and beyond anything I wanted this character to be real and to be a boy so what it really boiled down to was what experience can I draw from my own life that will make this character real and they wanted to modernise it in a way. People forget that this character may not have actually existed, there’s no factual evidence that he was even born, so while you can draw on literature, most of it is historical and includes possible facts about battles – not so much about the man, so watching someone else’s portrayal of that character doesn’t really help.
You’re working with an incredible cast, is there anyone who you’ve particularly learnt from?
I suppose myself and Joseph [Fiennes], because of the characters and because of who Joseph is naturally as a person who just so happens to be really really nice and lovely. I suppose just being able to watch the way that he works and watch his method and his technique, and the same with Eva [Green] as well. That’s the learning curve. Do I go up to them and ask? Not really because I’ve never really done that at work.
My experience with directors is that they will always encourage you to do something in a different way or get you to push yourself further. That’s their job and you have to listen to them and put your trust in them.
As Arthur you do quite a lot of sword fighting, did you have special training?
Yeah, we did a month of bootcamp prior to shooting which involved horse riding and sword fighting every day.
Was there a particular technique that you had to learn with the sword fighting?
At the beginning it was very choreographed, but what we were looking for was the fact that this kid is not particularly skilled swordsman throughout the first half of the series and then come episode nine and 10 you get to see how good he’s become. As we continued to shoot the show, that’s what was happening. We were getting better so we started choreographing our own fights and working through that rather than having a stunt team choreograph them with us.
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