Born Equal
Colin Firth plays Mark
Colin Firth was constantly caught on the hop when he played City worker Mark in Dominic Savage's powerful new drama, Born Equal. With no lines, no rehearsals and sometimes no idea of quite where he'd be filming each day, the experience proved to be an utterly exhilarating ride for this Hollywood star.
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A multi-stranded film, Born Equal weaves together the stories of several disparate characters living in and around a B&B providing temporary housing for the homeless in London.
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Firth plays a wealthy, forty-something hedge fund manager, whose conscience and guilt about his luxurious lifestyle prompt him to try to help those less fortunate.
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Mark has money, status and a beautiful home, and his wife (played by Emilia Fox) is pregnant with their first child. But all he sees around him are people who have none of those things.
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He is moved to do something and volunteers to work on the streets with homeless people, alongside a charity outreach worker (played by Julia Davis).
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But Mark's actions ultimately have devastating consequences for both himself and others.
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Firth (46), who became an instant household name a decade ago when he smouldered on screen as Mr Darcy in the 91Èȱ¬'s Pride And Prejudice, jumped at the chance to play such a complex character – not least because director Dominic Savage offered him the opportunity to create the role from scratch for the fully improvised drama.
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"The premise was that here is a man who goes through some change of outlook. He works in the world of big business, a world of self-interest, and it bothers him and for one reason or another he gets involved in working with homeless people.
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"But it gets a bit too much for him – things happen to him that make it difficult for him to be too idealistic about it," explains the actor.
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"I would hesitate to be simple about what's driving Mark because the way we worked on this film threw so many contradictory things at you about motives.
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"My feeling was that I love seeing grey areas. I think most actors like to inhabit the grey areas because they're what we inhabit anyway, really – where the writer leaves off, we supply the rest."
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Firth, who lives in London with his Italian wife, TV producer Livia Giuggiolo, and their two young sons, describes the process of making Born Equal as "extraordinary".
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"I'd never done anything like this before, where there's absolutely no dialogue to begin with. You just jump in cold, which is a bizarre feeling, and you're flying by the seat of your pants all the time. You don't know how a scene is going to work out until it ends.
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"What really sets it apart is the use of complete and utter randomness. One minute your attempt is catastrophic, the next something really illuminating comes out.
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"You're discovering and creating as you go along and you often surprise yourself – and so do the other actors."
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Though the temptation was great, he made a decision early on not to turn up for work with reams of notes about his character and deliberately shied away from coming up with lines unless a camera was rolling nearby.
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"I decided that if it's going to be random, then I'd take it all the way and let it be really precarious. I really enjoyed allowing it to be absolutely unpredictable and I think I'd have compromised that if I'd done my homework.
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"I was much more interested in what came out of my mouth in front of a camera than if I'd thought it up the night before in my bedroom.
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"I'm someone who has a terrible habit of being punctilious in the way I speak and I think, if the camera's rolling and you've got a lot more pressure, a more truthful version will come."
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For Firth, Mark's story really began to fall into place as the cameras rolled.
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"For me, it was never simply a case of him being well-intentioned but naïve. I didn't want to see him behaving out of moral purity or idealism, I wanted it to be muddier than that," he says.
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"Perhaps some of what he goes through is a product of a mid-life crisis, problems with his marriage or his wanting to run away from something he feels trapped by – perhaps any of those things might create disillusion or fear in a middle-aged man.
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"But I think it's far more interesting to try to tell a story about a guy who has a multitude of motivations and conflicts and whose failings are very apparent."
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Indeed, things begin to spiral out of Mark's control when he tries to help Zoë (played by Nichola Burley), a desperate, teenage runaway who has chosen to sleep on the streets rather than return home to her violent and abusive stepfather.
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At first glance, Mark and Zoë seem worlds apart but, says Firth, take a closer look and it becomes clear that they do have something in common.
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"I don't think it's just about middle-class versus sleeping rough. Mark is just as alienated from his life in his own bedroom as he is from life in some underpass," he points out.
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"However polarised Mark and Zoë's lives are, however different their experiences are, one thing they've both got in common is that they're both fugitives from something they find unbearable.
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"In Zoë's case, it's far more immediate and understandable in that it's an abusive family, alcoholism and all the things that are easy to understand are a problem. In Mark's case, it's much less defined – but he doesn't want to go home either."
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Firth, who was born in Hampshire but grew up in Winchester and Nigeria, where his father worked as a teacher, caught the acting bug as a teenager.
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After training at the Drama Centre in London, he made his stage debut in 1981 in the lead role of the award-winning West End production of Another Country – a role he reprised for his first film appearance three years later.
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In 1989 he won acclaim for his roles in Milos Forman's film Valmont and the gripping Falklands War TV drama Tumbledown, before Pride And Prejudice shot him to stardom and international heart-throb status in 1995.
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He has since starred in big-screen hits including The English Patient, Fever Pitch, Shakespeare In Love, Bridget Jones's Diary and its sequel, The Edge Of Reason, Love Actually and Nanny McPhee, and will be seen next year in the Roman epic The Last Legion, alongside Sir Ben Kingsley.
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But Born Equal has perhaps posed the most challenges for the versatile actor.
He remains non-committal, for example, on the question of whether viewers will feel sympathy for Mark.
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"He is sympathetic at moments but there are other times in the film when his behaviour is such that it's impossible to feel that.
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"In trying to heal the wound or assuage his guilt or whatever, he ends up hurting a lot of people, almost everybody around him, in fact.
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"In the context of a film that portrays problems like homelessness – things everyone agrees are real problems – it is hard to show someone struggling with things that many people would not consider problems.
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"Now that will never change; you'll never convince some people that there can be problems if you're well-fed and wealthy.
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"So in some ways I think it might be inappropriate to try to draw sympathy for Mark. But, whether you sympathise with him or not, it is how it is. People in comfort suffer, too – they just do. It's a plain fact. They can suffer very badly and they can suffer to the point that they destroy themselves.
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"Choosing to suffer is a very complicated, weird thing. I think it's fantastic that Dominic's carved out a space for a glimpse of that in a story that is inherently about a much more palpable kind of misery."
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Despite the film's clear social messages, Firth claims that he had no agenda when he embarked upon the project.
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"I had absolutely none whatsoever," he says simply.
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"I just found it a fascinating way of working and thought all sorts of things might get thrown up, and it was exactly what I hoped it would be.
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"I wouldn't have risked doing this sort of stuff if I didn't know that Dominic could pull it off. This convention is a very dangerous one to work in and I think things could fall apart very easily. But I think he pulls it off with spectacular success."
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