Journey's End's Paul Bettany on going from homeless to Hollywood: 'I used to be a real pain in the arse'

He plays Ted Kaczynski, the bomb-making anarchist recluse, wearing a convincingly bedraggled fake beard.  He has form for this: I thought he’d really lost his looks when I saw him playing Charles Darwin in 2009’s Creation, but no, that was just a bald wig and stuck-on mutton-chop whiskers; while his albino monk, Silas, in The Da Vinci Code, was a camp fantasy.

He makes me think of Laurence Olivier, because of his looks and also because, like Olivier, he is not only an actor who takes unpredictable roles, but also a director, producer and writer of work he believes in, namely 2014’s Shelter. The film, about a homeless couple, starred Connelly – the third time they had worked together since meeting 17 years ago on the set of Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind.  

In our interview, Bettany does rather a lot of dramatic pausing, before weighing in on everything from Harvey Weinstein (‘Un-f—ing-believable!’) to his own journey from gauche radical to, well, settled radical. ‘I feel I get more radical as time goes on,’ he says. ‘I’m much more settled in my 40s [he’s now 46] than I was in my 30s. I was probably a pain in the arse when I was younger.’

A little voice peeps up from across the room: ‘Yes, you were.’ It’s his PR minder, making a truly unusual contribution. Publicists tend to interrupt interviews to defend their clients, but these two have been friends for 20 years, and there’s  a sense that anything goes.   

Journey’s End, directed by Saul Dibb, is being released to coincide with the centenary of the battle it depicts: the Spring Offensive. Bettany plays Osborne, the second-in-command of C-company, a schoolmaster and father figure. Dibb’s handheld camera brings a hint of realism to the claustrophobic dugout scenes, while the script feels fresher, too. ‘Post-Blackadder Goes Forth, there’s quite a lot you have to try to weed out, all the tickety-boos, whizzbangs and so on…’ grins Bettany. 

The film is  highly anti-war, yet respectful. ‘The two aren’t mutually exclusive,’ he says. ‘You have so much respect for the men who went through it. They’re just absorbing the German onslaught before the Americans arrive, and the trenches have been asset-stripped of everything that’s good or important, except’ – he notes the irony – ‘the humans.’  

It’s hardly a spoiler to say Osborne is sacrificed. ‘The clue’s in the title, isn’t it?’ says Bettany. ‘I love Osborne. To me, he represents everything that’s good about Britishness. I based my performance on my uncle, Theo Rhys-Jones. He was in the army, although he never talked about it. He had a stiff upper lip that belied such kindness, such practical kindness.’

In what ways is Osborne like him? ‘Always busy. Darning, mending. And no self-pity. Even when my uncle was really ill. He died like a gentleman. No fuss. I miss him terribly. Politically, of course, we were diametrically opposed. I was, you know,  radically left wing and he would like to wind me up and get more and more entrenched in his conservatism…’   

Bettany’s family were part of the end of Empire. Theo Rhys-Jones and Thane Bettany, Paul’s father, were best friends growing up in North Borneo in the 1930s. ‘The Bettanys and the Rhys-Joneses both worked there for BP until the war broke out and they were invaded by the Japanese, and everyone escaped back to England.’

Theo went into the army, and Thane joined the Fleet Air Arm as a mechanic, before becoming a dancer and actor. ‘Much later, in the ’60s, my father’s mother died, and his father remarried Theo’s mother. So Theo and Thane became stepbrothers.’

Theo’s granddaughter is Sophie, Countess of Wessex, and her son James, Viscount Severn, has Theo among his middle names in his honour.  

Who knew Bettany was so posh? ‘Well, my life was very  different from his,’ Bettany laughs. ‘He and his wife Jill looked after me time and again when I was in trouble. I was this little guitar-playing reprobate and I used to turn up and need feeding and they were always so loving, although we spent most of our time arguing about guns…’  

The reason Bettany needed looking after was because at 16, he moved out of the family home after suffering a terrible bereavement when his eight-year-old younger brother Matthew fell from a parapet and died after fracturing his skull. 

The reverberations from the tragedy included the end of  his parents’ marriage, and Paul lived a chaotic life in London, busking and sleeping on the floor of his sister’s room, battling not to become homeless. ‘I was not in my best mind,’ he has said. ‘I was grieving. I was not well.’

There were times when  he didn’t manage to sneak into his sister’s boarding house, ‘and I slept on a park bench. I never thought of myself as homeless, and I wouldn’t want to overstate that, but I  absolutely felt that my safety and situation were precarious.’  This period of his life left him with a lasting legacy – a ‘radical empathy,’ as he puts it.

It wasn’t until three years later that he got it together enough to win a grant to attend Drama Centre London. Acting  was, after all, ‘the family business’. His mother Anne Kettle was an actress (Sister Theresa in the West End Sound of Music with Petula Clark, no less) and his maternal grandmother a redoubtable stage and screen actress, Olga Gwynne, who died in 2005 aged 90.

‘She was very cool,’ says Bettany. ‘She completely reinvented herself. Her mother ran a pub in Nottingham and all the daughters went into service, but she was very pretty and her mother said, “You should go on the stage.” She went down to London and never looked back. You’d have thought she was a member of the Royal family. She used to rap my knuckles if I held my knife and fork badly, and corrected my pronunciation, because at school I spoke like a Londoner.’

Does he now correct his own children’s diction? ‘No. They just sound like New Yorkers to me.’  When he married Connelly in 2003 he gained his first son, Kai, whose father is Connelly’s former partner, the photographer David Dugan. The age gaps between his children are ‘crazy’.

‘So I have a 20-year-old [Kai] who’s at Yale studying engineering, a 14-year-old [Stellan] who’s preternaturally gifted at music, and a bonkers, bonkers daughter [Agnes Lark] who is six and really into imaginative play and most mornings wakes up as a cheetah or a monkey. I’m worried she’s going into the family business, which I try to steer everybody clear of…’

Which jungle animal does he have to pretend to be for her? ‘Very often I’m me and I find a cheetah in the bedroom and I have to explain to it where we are and what a city is and so on. And there are lots of time-outs because she’s the director and I’m asking the wrong questions, apparently. Oh hell, she’s going to be a director, that’s even worse…’ 

He once said that as an actor  you can cheat a lot of things, but you can’t cheat at being a parent. He took a year and a half off after Stellan was born. He plays a lot of whist and rummy on family holidays in Greece. He still only takes on work that he can reconcile with his kids’ schooling in New York.

‘Otherwise I just can’t do it.’ A London West End stage role, for example, ‘would mean abandoning your children, which I’m not yet prepared to do. Although Agnes, maybe…’  Bettany is not a relaxed person. He is not a gardener. ‘I hate gardening! I wish I did like it, I wish I could potter, but I can’t. My missus loves it, we can feed guests in Vermont at the weekend from the amount of veg that she grows. I love to move, even if it’s just getting up to the countryside, and then I love coming back to the city. I suppose I am restless.’

He is an active – and liberal – political tweeter. Typical contributions include retweeted evidence that Trump stands to profit personally from the new US tax laws, and his thoughts on China’s surveillance state: ‘f—ing terrifying’. He says he attempts to rise above groupthink. ‘I try not to get entrenched in my views. Equally, I’ll go out on the streets. I was on the Women’s March in Atlanta, I wasn’t in a group, I just went out and marched for my own beliefs. My wife and daughter were out in Houston, my son was out in Washington. It was the same when Trump started the Muslim travel ban, lots of us went into the streets and we marched on City Hall.’

The day after Trump was elected, he applied for dual US/UK citizenship.  ‘I realised that after 15 years of paying taxes, I had to have a vote. Of course, I’ll have to move somewhere like Florida to make it count.’ 

Does he think Hollywood is going to change post-Weinstein?  He makes a long, thoughtful growl.  ‘I really hope so. I mean, wouldn’t it be great, just great, if people were safe in their workplace? It seems to happen all over society, but we have a peculiarly sexualised business. But even the idea of having a meeting with someone and running a bath – I mean, that has never crossed my mind! Did I miss something? I find the whole thing just totally un-f—ing-believable!’  

He sees sexual predation as more about control than attraction. ‘It’s a little difficult to know if the fear of being outed will help these men to police themselves, because to me these sound like compulsions. It’s something about men and power. And sexual predators who survive as long as Harvey did, they know when they’re talking to a kindred spirit. They test you. You know?’ He means, I think, that predators select sympathisers to work with.

‘I don’t believe you survive that long, unless you are wily in that way,’ he says. Does he mean that lots of people must have been complicit? ‘That’s why I just don’t believe everyone is so shocked.’   

When I casually repeat the banality ‘we mustn’t let this turn into a witch hunt’, he picks up on it. ‘Well, there are witches. It’s f—ing ghastly what these men did! There are people that need to be drummed out of town. Get ’em out!’  

In his work on film, though, he takes pleasure in exploring what it means to be a monster. As Ted Kaczynski, he spent a few days off-grid in a cabin in the woods, ‘which was great because you don’t want to take the Unabomber home with you. It wouldn’t be a nice experience for a child.’

Paired on-screen with Sam Worthington as the detective on his trail, Bettany believes Kaczynski (who is serving eight life sentences in a maximum-security prison) is ‘not mad, but damaged. He had a ridiculously high IQ and he was at Harvard aged 16, where he was tortured with experiments designed to break Soviet spies… If you say he’s a monster, that’s the end of the conversation. But if you say, no, he’s a human being, it’s much more interesting. He did heinous things’ – his bombs killed three and maimed 23 – ‘and he was brutalised. I don’t think the show is looking for sympathy, but it’s asking for some pretty radical empathy.’  

This year also sees him appear in blockbuster movies Avengers: Infinity War and Solo: A Star Wars Movie, both shrouded in secrecy apart from tantalising tweets by director Ron Howard showing Bettany, his friend and frequent collaborator, grinning, wearing a Skywalker-style shirt, captioned ‘the Outer Rim just got a little wilder’. Bettany is one of a galaxy of stars involved in Solo, which he describes as ‘a dream come true’.  

His life is pretty dreamy, all told. He married his childhood film crush – he first saw Connelly racing around in a ballgown in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, released when he was an impressionable age. He’s good at having it both ways: a career that spans the high idealism of ‘radical empathy’ as well as popcorn multiplex movies; a grown-up marriage that started as an unattainable crush; a high profile without relentless exposure.

And as we say goodbye he steps into a waiting lift, and the recessed lights catch his tawny, saffron-gold hair, I can’t help noticing the final sleight of hand: one of our foremost ginger actors isn’t really ginger. 

Journey’s End is out in the UK on 2 February 2018