Helena Bonham Carter

On a Role

THE MYSTERIOUS HELENA BONHAM CARTER TAKES ON HER FIRST MUSICAL ROLE THIS MONTH IN THE BIG-SCREEN ADAPTATION OF SWEENEY TODD, DIRECTED BY HER BOYFRIEND TIM BURTON. BY MICHAEL J. BANDLER

FANS HAVE BEEN WAITING - forever, it seems—for her to command attention in a major big-screen role the way she did in 1999’s Fight Club. Well, she’s finally done it. Six years aft er her first appearance in a Tim Burton film (Planet of the Apes), and following a series of small yet telling roles in his and others’ movies (Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and last summer’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), the 41-year-old, London-born actress is gleefully cutting loose this month with Burton as director—as the malevolently manipulative Victorian-era piemaker, Nellie Lovett, partner-in-crime to the titular character (played by Johnny Depp) in Sweeney Todd: Th e Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Th e eagerly anticipated screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s epic Grand Guignol musical opens nationwide December 21.

We spoke with Bonham Carter, who is expecting her second child with Burton this month. (They also have a four-year-old son, Billy Ray.)

I’ve read that Sweeney Todd is a project Burton has wanted to do for a long time. Is this true?

“It had been marinating for 15 or 20 years. I think he got close once, and it was almost, but not quite, set up. He first met Sondheim 14 years ago. I remember that when Tim and I first got together as a couple, we spent a whole Saturday playing the score, which we both loved. It was one thing we had in common—but not the only thing!—and he said he wished to do it one day.”

When he said that, was he thinking about you as Mrs. Lovett?

“I don’t know. He confessed to me, once I’d been cast, that he had a hunch about me—maybe about me and Johnny [Depp], younger versions of the characters. But once it came to casting it, he said, `You’ll have to audition with everybody else,’ because of the singing factor.”

Johnny Depp had been cast already?

“Yes, he didn’t have to audition, strangely enough [laughs].”

Had you ever sung or danced on film?

“I hadn’t. I’ve always wanted to, and I’ve always loved musicals—contrary to Tim, who hates musicals, on the whole. I’m a real musical fanatic and love singing around the house, singing lullabies to Billy. But I had no idea, really, whether I could sing well enough.”

So did you take lessons?

“Oh, yes. When he said I could audition if I wanted to, I had three months, so I went immediately to Ian Adam, a singing teacher who was quite well known for making actors sing.”

Tell me about the practice regimen you followed.

“Ian gave me exercises to do every day, and I worked about two hours a week with him, and I just practiced and learned a lot by heart. It wasn’t until I had to learn how to do it—or begin to learn how to do it—that I appreciated how much singing is a sport. You have to exercise those muscles daily. It’s such a physical, all-consuming exercise. The whole of your body is involved. You have to be really fit—quite apart from getting the breathing right, and the stomach, and the whole mechanism, and finding these different spaces in your head and forming them in order to make the sound right.”

What did you sing at the audition?

“I think I learned the whole lot (13 songs) in three months, but for the audition they wanted ‘The Worst Pies in London’ and one of my choice. I did them, and then some others, too. Tim couldn’t really quite stop me. I thought, ‘I’ve been working at it day in, day out for three months. Let me give it my best shot.’ So I did five. And he was begging for me to stop!”

Has he always made you audition for projects you’ve worked on together?

“I did audition for Corpse Bride, only because he wanted to hear the voice. And the animators needed to hear what they were going to animate to. With the others, he asked me, but first waited for somebody else—the producer or the casting director—to suggest me. With this one, he knew that if I couldn’t sing, forget it. Sondheim, likewise, was very fierce about that—quite rightly. And I didn’t want to be cast because I was with Tim. In a way, I had to prove that I was more right than the others, for everybody’s peace of mind. It was too big a project to ruin, if I wasn’t right.”

What was your audition with Sondheim like? Were you nervous?

“We all auditioned by proxy. All the videos were sent to him. Once he chose me—which was quite the day of my life—he came to rehearsals in London, and I had a morning or afternoon with him, where I went through all the numbers. He gave me some notes. I was really apprehensive, because he’s my hero, but he was very specific and very respectful. I was fascinated to pick his brain.”

It must have been quite a challenge to follow the women who created Mrs. Lovett onstage—first Angela Lansbury, then Patti LuPone—and to make her your own.

“There was no point redoing her with the same choices. I thought I’d go for a different take. I always thought Mrs. Lovett was deeply intelligent, pragmatic and actually much darker, in a way, than Sweeney. Sweeney’s been a victim, and he’s totally naïve. He’s redeemable—a common criminal, but as a result of a terrible wrong that’s been done to him. Mrs. Lovett is just plain immoral, and very calculating. She’s been around. She’s had a tough life, a survivor. She’s quick, the one who runs the show, the archetypal woman behind the man. But there’s a huge love there—he just does not notice her.”

Does the fact that Todd and Mrs. Lovett have been cast younger than ever before heighten the element of unrequited love?

“That’s exactly what Tim wanted—the possibility of real love between the two. He thought it was more tragic that way—that in different circumstances, maybe there could have been something between the two of them.”

So you won the part…

“…and then I really had to work hard! This was my most arduous part—but arduous in the sense that it was the most fulfilling, the most satisfying, the most exciting. It was sheer, hard work. ‘Worst Pies’—I just had to rehearse that to death to make sure I got all the props in the right place—the pies, the flour and rolling it out. Every single action had to be done exactly at the same time.”

You recorded it all before shooting and then lip-synched?

“Yes, and that’s a whole other discipline. You think, thank God for muscle memory—learning lines, singing. If you speak your lines, do the whole song enough times, your body takes over. It’s like learning to ride a bike—or learning accents. But the trouble with lip-synching is, you can’t think about it. You’ve got to be acting at the same time. You’ve got to be in the moment, as it’s happening for the first time. If you think about the lip-synching, you come straight out of the moment.”

Your role as Bellatrix Lestrange in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and now Mrs. Lovett, are both rather dark. What is it about villainy that gives you such a charge?

“I think it can be more fun. I’ve got to get back to Bellatrix in February, and the following year, too. She’s so anarchic. Most villains are really sick. Bellatrix is definitely sick, immoral yet childlike in her arrested development. She can be really naughty—I mean, completely out of control. She was great fun to play.”

It was a small part.

“Oh, tiny—but I squeezed out every drop I could!”

There have also been other villains in your past.

“I guess Kate, in The Wings of the Dove, was a pretty complex character. People said she was a baddie. But you never morally judge someone you’re playing, because once you’re inside them, you think you’re completely fine and right. You see them from their point of view. I’m quite humane: I always think there’s an emotional and psychological background as to who they are. And definitely the kids tend to love the bad characters in Harry Potter. There’s always something in a child that loves the badness—maybe because they are innately naughty!”

Was there any project that you and Tim more or less took on as a team?

“Not really. I don’t think we think of ourselves as a team. Only if it’s right—only if I’m right for the part—do we work together.”

Is work ever discussed at home?

“Categorically, no! As we went through the shoot, I was gathering a list of commandments and rules for working together, and that was number one. Thou should not work at all at night. Don’t take advantage of each other’s presence.”

Has this always been true during your years together?

“No, I think we learned more about each other and how to work together on this one, because I think the stress levels were much higher than on the others, in which I had much smaller parts. I had a big part in Planet of the Apes, but I wasn’t with Tim yet. It was entirely different. It was as director and actress that we met.”

What bonds the two of you—besides your apparent aversion to combs?

“I guess our sense of the absurd, our sense of humor. We’re both pretty childlike and both pretty creative. We’re very comfortable with each other. We have a similar aesthetic, in some ways.”

What have you learned from working with him?

“He doesn’t like choice, and I love choice. I’m definitely analytical in my approach, and he’s completely not. He’s all intuition. He knows exactly what he wants. He really relies on his intuition and instinct, and I can really mess that up by chattering too much, coming in with options one, two, three.”

Did he help you improve as an actress?

“His main thing with me was to make me more still. He didn’t want me to use my hands. He was very specific: ‘Don’t use your hands. Don’t gesture. Don’t use your eyebrows’—which was quite tricky, because I never know what my eyebrows are doing.

He calls them my hyperactive caterpillars. He just wanted an unexpressed performance sometimes, I felt. I found it very hard. I would say, ‘I’m playing an East End extrovert, and you’re asking me to act without my hands?’”

Was there ever a time when you thought about giving acting up?

“Periodically I felt that it wasn’t a terribly serious profession and that I should do something else. But pretty much I worked for 20 years, really, until I had my son. Also, at the beginning, I thought I should go to drama school because I didn’t really have much confidence. In the end, I didn’t. But my confidence was up and down. It’s a tough profession, really.”

Are characters from earlier periods more compelling to you than those of the present?

“Maybe not now, perhaps, but when I was starting out, of all the parts available—to me, anyway—the roles set in the past were much more interesting, dramatically, than modern ones. The contemporary ones were there because they were decorative, or tended to be the girlfriends. They weren’t very interesting parts. But you had a wealth of characterizations of women from 19th-century novels—much more dynamic women. And all those male writers, interestingly enough, could recognize that, even though the women led pretty ordinary lives, as characters they were fascinating, with huge emotional lives.”

You spend much of your time in America bookended in New York and Los Angeles. Do you have any favorite haunts around the country?

“We’ve been to Boston and Chicago, and Big Sur (in California) was amazing. I went to Nantucket years ago. My dream is to spend a summer in Martha’s Vineyard, and I’d love to go to Charleston or New Orleans, because I’ve always loved Southern literature.”

How would you define your career?

“I think it’s pretty difficult to have a formal shape to a career in acting. I’ve only been led in choosing parts by what’s appealed to me— not with any commercial view, which maybe I should have had. I’ve never been prepared to do parts in high-profile movies. I’ve often ended up doing a really low-budget film that three people would see, but I knew that because of the writing, it would be satisfying to do—small art-house films that gave me huge satisfaction to do but didn’t necessarily raise my profile. I’m a total non-strategist.”

Are you ever worried about not finding the next project?

“Not since having Billy. Life is too full. You have to be very careful about work, actually. You’ll miss your kids. You probably have to check out of life and go somewhere. That’s a big price. Having done it for 20 years, you begin to think, ‘I’m having kids for a reason, so I want to be with them.’ Life’s much bigger than the acting.”