Jamie Bell hates period dramas, but not enough to avoid two

LOS ANGELES — Get Jamie Bell talking about period dramas and his head might explode. Or at least he might pretend that it has, complete with dramatic sound effects.

“Like seriously, I am so not into period dramas. I think being English, I am like overloaded with period dramas. You can't escape them. They're on TV all the time. It's like thrust upon you in school. Like you just cannot get away from this idea. I understand that for people who aren't kind (used) to having it shoved down their throats all the time, it's kind of interesting, kind of exciting to see. �Oh, like that's pretty, it looks nice, they kind of talk funny, it's kind of good.' But to me, it's so hackneyed. It's a hackneyed thing. It's boring,” he said in a recent interview in a meeting room at the posh Four Seasons Hotel.

“So why am I doing a period drama,” he said, with a long, thoughtful pause. “That's a good question.”

Actually, the English actor, 24, is involved with two period dramas: In the Roman saga “The Eagle,” currently nearing the end of its theatrical run, he plays a British slave named Esca who accompanies the Roman centurion (Channing Tatum) who owns him into northern Caledonia (present-day Scotland) on a quest to find a priceless golden eagle. On March 11, he can be seen onscreen in the new film version of Charlotte Bronte's often-adapted 1847 gothic novel “Jane Eyre.”

It seems that Bell, who broke out as a teen in the acclaimed 2000 dance film “Billy Elliott” and will play the title role in the Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson upcoming adaptation of “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn,” actually is drawn to fascinating stories and talented directors.

With “Jane Eyre,” he took on the role of St. John Rivers, a missionary who takes in Jane (Mia Wasikowska) when she flees a haunting experience in the home of her employer, Mr. Rochester (Michael Fassbender) after his manager encouraged him to watch the first film from director Cary Fukunaga, the celebrated 2009 immigration tale “Sin Nombre.”

“That energy coming into something like that makes it fresh. And I think a gothic �Jane Eyre' is much more interesting,” he said. “We kind of understand this time period in a very aesthetic value. But we don't know what it feels like really, to really be there, to be an uneducated woman, who's kind of self-educated, doesn't come from any money in a time when all that matters — where you were educated and how much money you have. So what's it like to walk into these rooms and be with these people. So it's very much �Jane Eyre' from Jane Eyre's perspective,” he said.

For “The Eagle,” he had never read the source material, Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 teen novel “The Eagle of the Ninth.” But he loved the script, the opportunity to work with “Last King of Scotland” director Kevin Macdonald and act opposite “the nicest guy in the world” and fellow dancer Tatum.

“I just really loved the story. I'd never heard of the novel, I'd never read the novel, but I just really liked the journey and the world it was set in. I thought I hadn't really seen this specific time period in a long time kind of done well. And I really loved the character of Esca a lot,” he said.

To make “The Eagle,” Bell had to learn to ride horse, memorize lines in the “predominantly dead language” of Scots Gaelic and undergo intensive fight training. And he had to cope with the frigid wet of a Scottish winter.

Location filming in Scotland for “The Eagle” was particularly a shock to the system after playing the adventurer Tintin in Spielberg's first motion-capture animated movie, Belgian artist Georges “Herge” Remi's classic comic series that dates back to 1929. Jackson, who directed Bell in 2005's “King Kong,” is producing the long-awaited film, set for Dec. 23 release.

“Listen, it was crazy because I actually finished off �Tintin' and then the next summer went straight into this,” Bell said. “We could shoot �Tintin' in here. You know, you just attach like a few, couple hundred cameras in the ceiling and a few people who kind of look like they work at NASA like over there on their computers and stuff and we could do it.

“And then you go to Scotland and you're freezing cold and there's actually real wind and real rain and it actually really hurts when you fall down and there's a real, live animal underneath you and stuff. So it's the complete antithesis of two different forms of filmmaking.

“Both are great. ... It was kind of a bit of a shock, though, to go from one to the next. It was a very strange experience.”