Paul Bettany takes the lead in Uncle Frank and WandaVision
After decades playing memorable supporting roles, Paul Bettany stars in Alan Ball’s drama Uncle Frank and the upcoming Marvel miniseries WandaVision
When Paul Bettany burst onto cinema screens with great authority in Paul McGuigan’s Gangster No 1 (2000) it seemed the British actor was set for major stardom.
Partly because he didn’t want that, he became a supporting player in major films starring alongside Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind and Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and in A Knight’s Tale alongside Heath Ledger. He also had a rare leading role in 2004’s Wimbledon opposite Kirsten Dunst, stood out as an albino Catholic monk in The Da Vinci Code and recently stole the show as villain Dryden Vos in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Now as he nears age 50, the tall, lean, well-preserved actor is achieving major notoriety for his lead turn in WandaVision co-starring Elizabeth Olsen, which launches the Avengers characters onto the small screen. It comes at a time when the majority of cinema audiences are stuck at home, even if the miniseries was already filming before COVID-19 struck.
Hailed as something new and fresh and unlike anything in the Marvel universe, the show, inspired by 1950s sitcoms, features Bettany’s Vision character from the Iron Man and Avengers movies and Olsen’s Wanda/Scarlet Witch as a married couple living their ideal suburban lives in a bizarre alternate reality where they appear to be inside a sitcom.
The series started shooting in Atlanta last year and was forced to take a long break, finishing in LA only last week.
“WandaVision was on hiatus when everybody was on hiatus and we actually just finished about a week ago,” he tells The Australian over the phone from the US.
“We shot the rest of it in Los Angeles. It was a little challenging and it works … frankly, I’m really excited to see it.”
Earlier this year, Bettany quipped to Collider.com that WandaVision was “so bonkers and really risky … I’ve realised I’ve wasted my entire life and all I want to do is be in sitcoms”.
That was back in January, and Bettany was in Sundance promoting Uncle Frank, a film written and directed by Alan Ball (writer of American Beauty and creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood), streaming from next week on Amazon Prime.
In truth, Uncle Frank is more the kind of project we might expect from this talented character actor. The film is highly personal for both the openly gay Ball and Bettany (who is married to American actor Jennifer Connelly) as they both experienced the death of a sibling in their teens.
Bettany plays a gay literature lecturer at New York University, who in 1969 comes back home to the conservative American South for a family get-together. Clearly an outsider, he bonds with his niece Beth (Sophia Lillis) and when fours years later she comes to study in New York he takes her under his wing.
On the death of his disapproving father (Stephen Root) they travel back home and Frank’s life partner Wally (Peter Macdissi — Ball’s real life partner) insists on coming along. The skeletons in Frank’s closet begin to rattle as he recalls the suicide of a young lover his father forbade him to see.
Bettany is the son of two teachers and theatre workers who split after their son, eight-year-old Matthew, died in a fall. “I was 16 when I lost my brother and when my father was 63 he came out to me which was a relief to me and was no surprise at all,” he explains.
“My father then had an amazing renaissance, a 15-year relationship with a man. When his partner died my father went back into the closet because he was a Catholic and was convinced that as a gay man he wasn’t going to get into heaven where my brother was waiting for him. I thought, what a sad, dreadful tragedy. So for me the film was an opportunity to talk about identity and shame and have a happy ending. It isn’t always the case in real life.”
Whether this was the case in his father’s life he is unsure. “My Dad only died a couple of years ago and I was with him holding his hand. Was he unhappy? I don’t know. After he died I found a small vial of his partner’s ashes in his pocket. So despite having been back in the closet and refusing to mourn the passing of his lover, he clearly on some level did.”
The London-born actor had to summon a lot of emotional energy to play Uncle Frank. “I felt it would be edifying for me to place myself in the position of somebody who was in a similar predicament as my father who was retaining a really big secret from his family. It led to him being unable to live a very authentic life and that obviously had consequences for the people around him, like his wife and children. You know, you never really get to know who your father is, because there are a lot of very carefully curated stories. So for me it was sort of radical act of understanding and forgiveness. I was able to let a lot of things go by imagining myself as somebody in a similar situation.”
Bettany lives in New York with Connelly and their two children, Stellan, 17 (named after his friend and Dogville co-star Stellan Skarsgard) and Agnes Lark, 9. The couple met on A
Beautiful Mind and Connelly appeared in her husband’s 2014 directing debut Shelter. Will they work together again? “If somebody would put us in something I’d love to work with my wife again. She’s a great, great actor.”
Despite a campaign by fans over the years, a sequel to Master and Commander is unlikely. “I’d love to make another one, I doubt that is ever going to happen, but making that movie has been one of the highlights of my life,” he says.
Bettany has long lived in the US, but still sounds utterly British. He speaks with his native accent in WandaVision, though is just as adept at playing Americans like Uncle Frank. “You know the upside is I am an American now. I finally decided I had to be able to vote in this election so I became a citizen. I live in New York City where there are lots of Americans who sound different.
“I’m very invested in the politics here. I’ve noticed that the rest of the world is really invested in this election … It’s really interesting.” Still, I venture, despite the turbulent events of the moment, I wouldn’t want to live back in the 70s when Uncle Frank is set.
“I asked Alan why he chose that. Of course there’s a lot of that sort of oppression still with us, but his feeling was a 40-year-old literature teacher in New York would probably not be under the same duress in 2020 as he was in 1973.”
Uncle Frank streams on Amazon Prime from November 25. WandaVision arrives on Disney+ on January 15.