In “Wimbledon,” Bettany stars as a tennis player on the verge of retirement when his luck finally changes at what was to be his final appearance at Wimbledon. Kirsten Dunst co-stars as a rising hotshot who captures his eye and serves as his inspiration for accomplishing great things at the renowned tournament.
INTERVIEW WITH PAUL BETTANY (‘Peter Colt’):
People have said this role will help establish you as a leading man, and have even compared you to Hugh Grant. How do you feel about that?
I think that Hugh Grant is also British and there the similarities probably end. I think that he does something that I can’t quite do and I think he does a Cary Grant thing beautifully. I watched a lot of those movies before doing this one and he’s brilliant at being charming and doing that sort of elegant fluff, and I mean that in no sort of patronizing way. I think it’s wonderful to watch Fred Astaire manipulate a top hat and a cane. There’s an aesthetic pleasure you can receive from watching that, and I think he’s brilliant at it. I don’t know what it feels like to be Hugh Grant so I have no frame of reference as to whether I’m becoming him. Maybe I am. My wife would be shocked or maybe pleased. I don’t know.
Were you hitting a real tennis ball in this movie, or was it basically a computer generated ball?
All the serves are real. How it works is the serves have to be real because you are handling the ball, and that’s impossible to do on computers. The serves are real and if the camera is just on me or just on Kirsten or on Austin Nichols, then you’re hitting a real ball. The moment that there are two players in frame at the same time after the serve, it becomes a computer ball brilliantly made by a man called Richard Stammers. It has to be because we tried, even with professional tennis players, to repeat…Every point is meticulously choreographed and you cannot hit the ball and repeat that choreography endlessly all day for coverage from other cameras. So this film wouldn’t have been able to be made in this style until very recently.
Did any of your shots go wild and hit something?
I hit the cameraman three times. He was very sweet about it. He made “A Knight’s Tale,” and we knew each other very well. Two of the times they were just glancing blows and the third time I bought him a bottle of scotch because I really hit him in the head. Mostly, things went pretty smoothly except for a fractured rib and a torn up chin and so on.
You got a fractured rib filming this?
Yeah, I had a fractured rib because I, stupidly, asked for a mat to be put down because I’d done this dive so many times. At this point, I was beginning to get sore. So, they put a mat down for me and I sort of half missed the mat and busted up my rib on the floor. Usually you put your hand down but I saw a big fluffy mattress and I didn’t put my hands down and I fractured a rib. Slightly stupid of me.
You and Kirsten Dunst took lessons to help with your roles, but if we were to watch you play now, who would win?
I have no notion of who would win because the pressure of trying to look right for film was such that we all had separate coaches so we never actually played together even for fun because, at that point, there was no fun. “I must practice every minute of the day.”
How was working with Kirsten?
It was seven weeks of shooting tennis and it was such a delight when it ended, there were suddenly words to say and little things like that and she’s clearly been doing this since she was a fetus, I think. She was therefore very relaxed in front of the camera and gets so much for nothing. She’s very sort of free, and that’s all I ask for in any partner that I’m working for. It’s what you hope for, that you feel relaxed with them and they feel relaxed with you, and hopefully you can make some happy mistakes.
