Ben-Hur star Jack Huston inspired to pursue acting by famous relatives

HE’S had big shoes to fill, but James Huston says the achievements of his famous relatives have inspired him to continue the family’s storytelling tradition.

BEING born into film royalty might be seen as a burden for an aspiring actor, but for Jack Huston there were only upsides.

The British actor counts among his famous relatives grandfather Jack Huston (Oscar-winning director of The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure Of Sierra Madre and The African Queen), aunt Angelica Huston (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Prizzi’s Honour) and uncle Danny Huston (who has appeared in movies including X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Robin Hood).

Jack Huston as Judah Ben-Hur, left, with Toby Kebbell as Messala Severus in a scene from the biblical epic, Ben-Hur. Picture: Philippe Antonello/Paramount Pictures

Rather than be daunted by the formidable achievements of his predecessors, Huston has been inspired to live up to the family’s storytelling tradition. Indeed, it was a visit to the set of The Witches, starring Angelica, that made him realise that acting was something he could do, too.

“I feel inordinate amounts of pride and that helps me strive to do the best job possible because I would like to make them proud,” he says. “That’s a lovely sort of drive for me because I have such a lovely relationship with my family and they are such pillars of support for me in all of my choices. Even with something like this — some people would say, ‘What a risky thing to do’ — we embrace that, we love risk.

“My grandad was known as a maverick, going out and doing his thing and that’s it — just go and f---ing do it, man.”

British actor Jack Huston was born into a family of actors. Picture: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures

The risky choice Huston is referring to is his title role in the new version of the biblical epic Ben-Hur. The film is based on Lewis Wallace’s 1880 best-selling book, Ben-Hur: A Tale Of the Christ, and its best known adaptation is the 1959 version starring Charlton Heston, which won a record 11 Academy Awards (see breakout).

Huston prefers to think of the new Ben-Hur, directed by Russian action specialist Timur Bekmambetov, as a reimagining of the book as opposed to a remake of the film, and says its themes of forgiveness and redemption are more relevant than ever.

“If you look at Lew Wallace’s book as a landscape and you told four painters to paint it, you would get four very different paintings,” he says. “This is working on the same landscape but it’s a very different painting.

“We are one of many Ben-Hurs that have happened over the years and there will probably be a few more. If anything, that’s a wonderful homage to the words that Lew Wallace wrote. It’s like Shakespeare — you do a play over and over again and it’s done in many different countries and performed by many different actors.”

Huston declares himself “such a lover of the ’59 version” and he feels this update “in no way ... stepped on the toes of its predecessor”.

“It felt very contemporary, weirdly enough and very relevant,” he says. “It felt like a story for our times as much as 2000 years ago because not much has changed. We are still going through the same old s---, these religious wars. While the ’59 version was much more a revenge story, this one is more about finding redemption and forgiveness and hope and love. I thought that was very interesting.”

Huston, who has also appeared American Hustle, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, grew up riding horses. Still, nothing prepared him for the experience of shooting Ben-Hur’s most famous scene — the chariot race.

Jack Huston one of the most well-recognised scenes from Ben-Hur. the chariot race. Picture: Supplied

Bekmambetov was determined to shoot as much real footage as he could, which meant Huston had to learn how to control teams of horses, travelling at speed, with sand flying into his face.

“As experienced a horseman as I was, it doesn’t give you a leg up on driving a chariot,” he laughs. “It’s insane, but it’s an incredible thing to get to do. We were all very conscious that we wanted to be driving those chariots so there were no special effects. Every time you see us with those horses, it was us up there.”

While the aggressively-promoted Ben-Hur is by far Huston’s highest profile role to date, his name has also been regularly mentioned as a frontrunner for an even higher profile role: that of super-spy James Bond.

Some bookies have him second-favourite to succeed Daniel Craig, but while he concedes it’s “one of the great roles”, he dismisses the chatter and the odds as pure speculation.

“There has not been one conversation with me,” the suave Brit says. “As far as I am concerned, Daniel Craig is still James Bond. That’s just the way it is. Until that’s no longer the case, I don’t think there even is a conversation.”

Ben-Hur opens in cinemas today.