JeremyNortham.net

Source: US August 1995. Words by Guy Nicolucci. Photograph by Kevin Westenberg.

After four months in America shooting The Net, a high-tech Internet thriller with Sandra Bullock, Jeremy Northam is back in England, talking of gardens. “Not to sound too dewy-eyed or nostalgic,” he says to the accompaniment of orchestral music on the stereo,”but it was an unusually wet spring, so everything is incredibly lush. Some friends of mine have a house with a garden, so I’m taping them some classical music that I thought would be perfect to sit and listen to in that garden.” Northam, who is 33 and single, is a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his stage-trained voice resounds with rolling vowels and clipped consonants. He gained some fame a few years ago when he replaced Daniel Day-Lewis midperformance as Hamlet when Day-Lewis couldn’t finish the play. “I was the understudy, but I really didn’t feel prepared,” he recalls. “Oddly enough, I’d felt more prepared when I didn’t think I’d ever have to go on.” The dark, brooding qualities Northam brought to Hamlet came in handy for The Net, in which he seduces Bullock’s character, then spends the rest of the movie trying to catch and kill her. Unlike that computer-savvy hit man, however, this Englishman is a low-tech fellow whose keyboard skills are limited to the piano. “I’m the youngest of four, and my parents insisted we all learn two instruments, and mine were the piano and the viola. Being a musician’s much harder than being an actor,” says Northam, who also has two other films, Voices in a Locked Room and Carrington, coming out. “I mean, in Carrington, I shag Emma Thompson. Not much talent in that. A lot of fun, though.”