Clive Owen Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters

It's not a bad thing to be scared,

it's not a bad thing to go in there

thinking the chance of failure is pretty high,

but just give it a go.

When you're challenged like that as an actor,

that's how you improve.

[upbeat music]

Children of Men.

[bomb explodes]

You know, sometimes you read a script and you say,

oh, I know what to do here,

or there's things I can do here.

I didn't see it in that.

I thought it was a really interesting, cool script,

but I was like, where's the character?

Where do you get to do things?

I met Alfonso and he blew me away

with his vision of the movie.

And then I realized actually,

I'm the conduit to which he wants to discuss these things.

Now by setting a film in the very near future,

I think it gives you license to discuss head on,

things that were already troubling and concerning people.

You set it slightly in the future

and it gives you a way of really getting into those subjects

without it feeling heavy handed

and, you know, in the moment.

And I realized that my job

was to not get in the way of it really,

is to not act too much.

I really saw that.

I thought, I see,

you need to see this world through this character.

So it was really about, you know,

signing on to Alfonso's vision for the movie.

And it was one of those films that still,

like people still talk about today.

There was an article in the New York Times,

I think like 10 years after it was made, saying,

why is Children of Men still the most relevant film today?

I mean, that's how much

I think that Alfonso was on it really.

[gun firing] [people screaming]

My memories of those sequences

is how close my relationship was with the operator,

because we had to do a dance really in those scenes,

especially that long sequence at the end of the movie.

And we spent a long time rehearsing

and there were half day resets.

If we didn't get it right,

it was a half day before we could go again

to reset the whole thing.

So it felt like me and the operator were doing this dance,

and I have to not make it obvious that, you know,

I have to make it feel as natural as possible.

And the beauty of those sequences,

the intent of them is just to get you in

to feeling what is going on,

not to show you how great Alfonso is,

and how great Chivo was.

It's the best way to plant you emotionally

in what is going on.

I really have fond memories of doing those

because I kind of love that technical aspect

and that kind of meeting with the operation,

both trying to achieve something together like that.

Even if they discovered the cure for infertility,

it doesn't matter, too late.

World went to shit.

You know what, it was too late

before the infertility thing happened for fucks sake.

I'm still trying to tell a joke, man.

Michael Kane's a legend,

and when you work with him, you realize why,

and you realize why, you know,

his career has lasted as long as it has

because he's like the ultimate pro

and he is smart and economical and you know, it was a joy.

And there was something quite special on that movie.

I did a couple of films with Mike Hodges,

who did the original Get Carter with Michael Kane,

which was a big film in Michael Kane's early career.

And they hadn't seen each other for like 10, 20 years.

And so I got Mike Hodges onto the set of Children of Men

and just listened to them to sort of reminisce

about the early days and the making of that movie,

which for me was just a treat,

just to listen to those, you know,

guys just going back and remembering

the stuff that they'd done.

[upbeat music]

The Knick.

He's based on a real guy.

He is based on a guy called William Holsted,

who was a genius doctor at that time,

but had this, you know, massive drug addiction

and was like a wild, wild,

but still was at the forefront of medicine

and like, hugely brilliant.

We need to lengthen the incision and get the baby out now.

Jules.

Yes, Mark.

Knife. Knife.

We had an amazing medical advisor on The Knick

who has this townhouse in New York

that has over a million medical photographs

and every single operation in the show

was based on a real operation of that time.

There was nothing that was like made up about it at all.

And Soderbergh wanted us, you know,

we did as much work as we could

in the suturing and all of that,

and he would use and wanted to use us as much as possible.

And I'll never forget the first operation we did,

which is the first operation in The Knick.

It was just a river of blood on the floor.

The expert doctor was standing there

and just going more blood, more blood, more blood.

And Soderbergh just kept shooting and shooting

and we were doing it and we were losing this patient

and everyone was just sort of soaked at the end of it.

It was like, wow.

Nothing.

I'm hugely proud of that show.

And I think Stephen Soderbergh did an unbelievable job.

And the cast of that show is I rate so highly.

You know, I'm English

and I've been brought up on period shows

where everyone lives in a nice house

and goes sauntering off for a little walk with an umbrella.

And here we are in The Knick 1900

where life feels visceral, dangerous,

and probably more like what it's like for most of us

if we were living at that time, you know.

There was an urgency to life, life expectancy wasn't great.

You didn't want to end up in a hospital

at the turn of the century.

And it was so refreshing to be in a show

that sort of really, really told

how it might have been for an awful lot of us.

This is a technique I pioneered myself

and one I know to be completely safe if done correctly.

There are photographs

that show doctors did that at that time.

They were cutting themselves open

to teach people how to do certain operations

and they were doing it on their own.

And when Steven Soderbergh came to me

to pitch me the whole thing,

he already knew that that's the way we were going out

at the end of the second season.

He's phenomenal.

I realized very quickly we start shooting and then I go,

oh my God, he's editing it as he's looking at it.

And we shoot the edit. We don't shoot anything else.

We don't do loads of coverage of different people

and then gives him lots to play with later.

He looks at a scene and he attacks it with an editor's brain

and says, how would I put this together?

I go, bum bum bum bum bum

and that's the way we shoot it.

It's so focused.

His set is like a hallowed environment.

There's no small talk, it's concentrated, which I adore.

I walk into that environment and I go,

this is why we're all here.

There's no seats for anybody to sit down,

there's no monitors for people to watch.

It's all like so focused and concentrated

and I just had like the best time with him

and rate him so, so highly.

[upbeat music]

Sin City.

Hey baby, I don't hear you making those calls.

Answer me.

Oh, I don't need to-

Hi, I'm Shelly's new boyfriend that I'm outta my mind.

What I didn't realize when I signed on to do Sin City,

that it was gonna be so faithful to the source material,

to the point where every scene started

with an image from the graphic novel.

And it was an unusual shoot

because we were kind of floating in thin air.

It was all green screen.

We started off with car and things like, even that went,

so in the end it was a seat and a steering wheel,

like that's all we had.

So it's like floating, you know,

you're like acting in a sort of weird floating state.

And then I couldn't believe what he did

when I saw the movie.

I honestly couldn't believe it.

I sat there.

The world he created

and how he made everything fused together was so impressive

and it was so faithful to the graphic novel.

I watched it and went,

this is the graphic novel just burst into life.

This is not like, you know,

some cinematic takeover there of it.

He has gone into that material and just sprang it into life.

I thought it was a really impressive movie.

The scene that I did with Benicio in the car,

Quentin Tarantino came in and shot

was literally two boxes and a wheel for the drive,

you know, and that was it.

And the rest, all the car, everything else

was created afterwards.

You ain't even going to make it to the pits.

You shut the hell up. I'll make it.

Not unless you keep your eyes on the road sugar pie.

Watch it.

It's unusual to begin with,

but then you kind of suspend belief

and it becomes a bit like theater or something.

You sort of know that that,

but still, I didn't realize

how well he was gonna achieve the world.

You know, how fleshed out that was gonna be

and how well done he was gonna do that.

The energy and smart of Robert Rodriguez really,

he was really like a brilliant to work with.

And I didn't quite know what it was

because it was all green screen.

So I'm like, I dunno what the finished thing's gonna be like

but I totally embraced the way he was working

and the way we were shooting it.

[upbeat music]

Inside Man.

When Spike first gave me the script to Inside Man,

I went into the bank and I never took the mask off.

I put the mask on

and I spent the rest of the film in the mask

and I said, why would I do this?

I said, do you want me to do a voiceover?

Like, you know, do I wanna stick around for months

to do a film where you never see my face?

And we left it and then three months later

I get a call going, I got Denzel for the cut.

Does that change anything?

And I was like, yeah, I think it does actually, yeah.

I think that definitely does.

And we met up and he took me to a Knicks game,

never really talked about the movie,

didn't say a word, you know,

didn't realize that he was part of the game,

he's remonstrating with the players

and the rear play into the crowd.

Still didn't talk about the movie.

At the end of it said to me, you got a ride?

I said, yeah, yeah.

He said, can you drop me off?

So we went back to his house, the car pulls up and he goes,

so you doing it or what?

I was like, of course I'm doing it.

Just sort the mask thing out.

And he goes, yeah, yeah,

we'll find a way to get the mask off a few times.

And I had a great time on it.

And he's become a great friend.

A few months ago,

I gave him a sort of BFI Fellowship award in London.

And like, you know, I've got nothing but you know,

huge respect for Spike and I had a great time on that movie.

I'm gonna walk out of that door when I'm good and ready.

Can I get you to do that today?

I didn't think so.

Any other proposals?

Oh, please do not say proposals.

My girlfriend, she wants a proposal from me.

It was just a very well written character

and Spike was always, always talking about like,

he needed someone who could go toe to toe with Denzel

'cause he is so strong.

And I just knew that that character

had to feel like he had the upper hand throughout the movie

and that was the way through it really.

[upbeat music]

Closer.

I'm sorry you were-

Don't say it,

don't you fucking say you are too good for me.

I am, but don't say it.

You're making the mistake of your life.

You're leaving me

because you believe that you don't deserve happiness,

but you do Anna.

Yeah, so Closer

I remember where I was when I first read that play.

They were work-shopping the play.

They weren't even putting the play on.

And I was like, that's a fantastic piece of writing.

I wanted to play Larry

and Patrick Marber said I was too young.

It was seven years before the movie.

Then a year later, they do the play,

they're gonna do it at the national theater.

And my agent comes to talk about something else

and I say, that play Closer.

What a piece of writing.

And he says, well, Ciarán Hinds is playing Larry,

how do you feel about the other part?

I go, you know what, they're four great parts.

Like yeah, if they want me to play down, I'll play down.

And I did, and I did the original production of the play.

So we launched that play and it was a big success

and really kind of like a bolt of lightning, really.

People were walking out during, I remember regularly.

It got towards the end of the first half of the play

and people would walk out when it was getting so intense.

Seven years later I get a call going,

Mike Nichols wants to meet you for lunch in New York.

And I'd heard rumors he might be doing

the film version of Closer, but it wasn't clear.

Well, I wasn't told exactly why, but that was in the air.

And I went and had lunch and then he told me who he'd cast.

He told me he got Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman.

And he offered me the part of Larry

and I walked outta that lunch like on cloud

because I knew that play really well

and I knew it was a gift,

a gift of a part in a brilliant piece of writing.

I remember walking out of that lunch just,

yeah, so thrilled.

When?

When did you do it here?

Answer the question.

I mean, it's a really tough scene

and I think because of, you know,

the language that's used and where the scene goes,

we approached it very sensitively

and it was feeling a little like too on the nose

and a little too excruciating.

And then Mike came up, which he did throughout his career,

and he did this with a lot of his films,

is that he likes people to be busy and to move them around

so that the scene is happening

within the context of something else.

So it's not just two actors sitting there

having like this super frank like,

you know, detail, very personal conversation.

And so he started to move us around the apartment

in the scene, me following Julia up and down.

And suddenly the sink comes alive

because we're buried in a movement

and there's a sort of energy to it.

You know, as I was doing the play playing the other part,

I knew the power of that scene

and how sort of intense it was.

I just embraced it and it's such a powerful,

disturbing piece of writing that play.

Thank you. Thank you for your honesty.

Now fuck off and die.

[upbeat music]

Croupier.

That film, possibly the most important in my career

in terms of a gear shift.

It was a very small film,

cost less than a million dollars, I think.

Practically didn't get released at the beginning.

In fact, Mike Hodges who directed it,

said that film wasn't released, it escaped.

But it had a really big impact on my career

because it became the kind of

cool indie film of that year in America

and opened doors and suddenly my career shifted.

So it feels like, you know, an important film.

And it was made by a great friend, Mike Hodges.

[soft music]

21.

Blackjack.

I went to croupier school

for two weeks straight all day, every day.

The one thing I remember about that training

is they were obsessed by stealing.

Like they drilled into everybody learning to be a croupier.

Don't think you'd ever get away with it

because unusually, I don't know if it's still the case,

but unusually it was a rare thing

where there's so much cash around.

People were giving cash, people spending cash.

There was this general paranoia

that if you're coming to train as a croupier,

don't think you'll get away with it

if you feel like you've found a way to steal from us.

I just remember that being drilled into people.

[upbeat music]

Chancer.

Well that was the kind of

the first really big project that I did.

I'd left drama school, I hadn't done much

and then I landed this TV show.

I went away somewhere and I came back to London

and there were massive posters everywhere and my face.

And I think they had a sort of phrase underneath saying,

what's the matter? Don't you trust me?

'Cause he was a real chancer,

he was this kind of guy that was like pulling scams

every week against the big banks.

It was the first time I really noticed

the shift of being in the public eye.

I got in the tube and people were,

this is like a day or two after it aired

and people were looking and giggling.

And I went into a shop

and it was the beginning of understanding

what that kind of shift in profile entails really.

That was a very strong memory of going,

oh my gosh, it took time to adjust to that,

you know, to be in a prime time TV show

when you hadn't really done anything.

It was a big shift.

It takes time to adjust and process

and find your way through that really.

You are a rude, arrogant self-opinionated,

corrupt and dishonest young man.

I know. Cheers.

Unfortunately, you are just the kind of man

a business seems to need these days.

It was great.

And there was an actor in it called Peter Vaughan,

who I really, really became very fond of.

And I kind of learned a lot from him really

about sort of discipline and approach

and always being ready and focused.

As a young actor I watched him closely

and was really impressed with him, yeah.

But that show was the sort of, you know,

the beginning of everything in some ways.

[upbeat music]

King Arthur.

I remember the big thing on that one

was I'd had a couple of bad experiences on horses.

I'd been thrown off on a TV thing.

I went to America to do a pilot

and I had an awful experience

where they put me on very lively horses

that I wasn't really good enough

and I developed a bit of a thing about it.

And so we negotiated to do King Arthur

and the day the deal was done, I made a call and said,

I need to get on a horse tomorrow.

And I had a long time before that shoot started,

but I knew it was gonna be a journey

because the whole movie was on a horse

and I needed to get comfortable.

You should be on your knees.

[horse neighs]

I came to see your face

so that I alone may find you on the battlefield

and it would be good for you to mark my face, Saxon,

for the next time you see it,

it will be the last thing you see on this earth.

I was very lucky,

there was this brilliant horse stunt guy called Rob Inch

who was kind of the best at any horse stunts.

He'd done some really big stuff in movies on horses.

And he walked me through it and he trained me on a horse

and we got better and better

and he got me into shape for it.

It was wild, yeah.

Then they built Adrian's wall and it was about a mile long.

They were saying it probably cost more than the original.

You know, like than the actual thing.

It was huge. It was huge sets.

I remember we did scenes where we sort of iced vast areas

to do scenes in the snow and it was a big movie.

Knights, the gift of freedom that is yours by right.

[knights shouting]

[upbeat music]

Impeachment: American Crime Story.

Didn't mean to catch you off guard.

Mr. President, sorry I was just-

You don't have to apologize for doing your job.

I was very surprised when they called me up and said,

they want you to play Bill Clinton.

I couldn't see it. I couldn't see it at all.

I was like, why, why would someone come to me?

You know, I'm English firstly,

but also I just didn't see it.

And then I started to think about it

and then I started to look

in like a lot of projects that I do,

if something gets set a light in me suddenly I go,

well there's something I think I can do in this

and there's something I want to give a go.

And I knew it was a challenge.

I knew it was a big reach but I wanted to take it on.

If you've been set alight and ignited and this,

you feel that you could possibly do something.

It's not a bad thing to be scared.

It's not a bad thing to go in there thinking

the chance of failure is pretty high,

but just give it a go because you know,

that's when you're challenged like that as an actor,

that's how you improve.

Mr. President, even if you didn't have

sexual relations by that definition,

you still engaged in other sexual activities.

So the statement, there is no sex of any kind in any manner

is a lie, is it not?

Well, that depends upon

what the meaning of the word is, is.

It's a difficult line, you know, to tread

because you don't want to do just a bad impersonation.

You just don't want to, you know,

you need to infuse it in with something.

But you know, in some ways, for me,

the most satisfying part of doing that

was that there was all this footage.

And we were recreating some of it.

And it's there for you so there's something, you know,

you know what you're trying to do.

There's something very satisfying

about having a really clear idea

of what you're trying to achieve.

And it's not open to a sort of actor's interpretation.

The clarity of what you are trying to nail is very clear

and I kind of like that.

[upbeat music]

A murder at the End of the World.

I did a lot of work with Brit and Zal on that show

just before we even started shooting.

Just, you know, when they first came to me

and they put it to me.

And as they wrote each script, we would jump on a Zoom

and discuss it and talk about it.

I didn't base that character on anyone in particular.

But you know, the one thing that was becoming clear

and they were kind of exploring and I imagine is the truth,

is that when you're that successful

or that powerful, that wealthy,

it can be a lonely place and a little paranoid

because you've got everybody around.

You're never quite sure of people's intent around you

because you're in a slightly different place to them

all the time.

The isolation and how, you know,

it must be a strange place to be

and it must be very, very hard to trust things

and people around you.

You are holding us hostage.

Not one of you is going back to the surface of the earth

until I know who has betrayed me.

That came from the work that that Brit and Zal did.

But also that feeling of somebody

who's very cool and very calm and very on the top,

but when triggered of, you know,

it was just a character thing

that this guy's got a temper and you know,

it's a way of expressing that underneath it all

that he's not as cool and collected as he appears.

[upbeat music]

Monsieur Spade

[speaking foreign language]

Quite the pepper gun you got there, madam.

I get a call from Scott Frank

wanting to talk to me about a project,

and him and Tom Fontana jump on the phone

and they pitched me the idea of a spin on Sam Spade

taking him 20 years ahead.

The room I was sitting in when he called me,

I've got an original Maltese Falcon poster on the wall.

I take a shot, I send it to him and say,

you've come to the right guy.

Like, I'm a huge Bogart fan.

I'm a huge Maltese Falcon fan.

And it was like a gift.

It was like a, you know, a genre that I love

and something I was very excited about.

[soft music]

These things will kill you.

These are the same ones Doctor smoke.

I saw on TV.

It's difficult to try and reinvigorate noir in a way

because we've kind of seen everything before.

You know, when you set it up in a very classic way,

people feel very quickly very familiar with it

and I think it's hard to reimagine and reinvigorate it.

And Scott did a very clever thing

and he moved it 20 years ahead

and put him as a complete fish outta water

living in the south of France.

And he did an awful lot of work on the,

you know, Spades getting older Spade's,

not the guy he was, he's trying to live a quieter life.

But it also gave me the opportunity, which I welcomed,

to go back and really flood myself with Bogart

and those kind of characters from the forties

because it's also important to know

that's where the guy comes from.

He might be getting older,

but I needed to ground myself

in the origins of the source material really,

plus the fact that I was surrounded

primarily by French actors.

So I'm trying to do a kind of like period,

kind of American Sam Spade thing,

but kind of isolated

because no one else is doing that around me

because we're now in sort of early sixties France.

So I used Bogart's voice a lot to ground myself

and sort of get me.

I lifted all of his dialogue

from the Maltese Falcon in Casablanca, just his dialogue.

And that was my kind of setting template every morning

on the way into work.

Philippe could have taken the shelf.

With Theresa in the car,

hard to imagine even Philippe doing that.

And he's wounded, which shouldn't make him too hard to find

for a pair of top detectives like you

[speaking foreign language]

We've already talked, Scott and I,

about ideas and possibilities,

some really cool, exciting ideas

about where to take him and what to do with it.

But it's just a case of, let's see how this goes

and then we'll take it from there.

[Interviewer] Were you ever in talks to play James Bond?

No, and it's not a bad thing to be talked about.

You know, it was like, [laughs]

but no, it was all rumor.