Читать книгу Blood Brothers - Amy Rickman - Страница 9
ОглавлениеDamon: Your life was pathetic. Your after-life doesn’t have to be. (1.07, ‘Haunted’)
In interviews, Ian comes off as surprisingly self-conscious about his very traditional career trajectory: ‘Models-turned-actors are a bit of a cliché,’ he told Metro. ‘It is a huge cliché but you have to look at the positive aspects – I learned a lot about the world and took a lot of knowledge away from it.’
It was now the late nineties and Ian had just turned twenty. He was on the set of a feature film called Black and White (1999) starring Robert Downey Jr. and Elijah Wood, about a group of white high-school students who get involved in a predominantly black Harlem hip-hop scene. Ian was only an extra – one club-goer among a 400-strong crowd, but he clearly stood out from the group. He was spotted by a talent manager who signed him up right away.
From then on, the acting jobs came thick and fast. It must have been fate – Ian did four auditions and booked all of them. After his The Big Easy experience, and a brief stint on a short-lived TV series called Now and Again, Ian got a part in a spinoff of Dawson’s Creek – the series that launched The Vampire Diaries’ creator Kevin Williamson’s career. The show was called Young Americans and followed Will Krudski (introduced briefly on Dawson’s Creek as one of Pacey J. Witter’s childhood friends) as he starts at an exclusive American all-boys’ boarding school. Ian’s character was Hamilton Fleming, the son of the dean. Hamilton is confused about his sexuality and thinks he’s falling in love with a fellow student. It turns out though that the student is actually a girl disguised as a boy. The series also launched the career of another teen star, Kate Bosworth (Blue Crush and Superman Returns).
This wasn’t to be the only time when Ian played a character confused by his sexuality. In fact, it seemed to be a bit of a theme in his body of work pre-Lost and The Vampire Diaries. In his next two roles, he played bisexual characters. The first was in a TV movie called My Life as a House, a tear-jerking drama about George Monroe (Kevin Kline), a man with terminal cancer who struggles to reach out to his estranged son, Sam (played by a pre-Star Wars’ Hayden Christensen). Ian played Josh, a hustler, pimp, drug dealer and all-around bad guy who tries to turn Sam to a life of drugs and prostitution. ‘[My Life as a House] was the first studio film I was part of, and it was amazing. I remember, after some takes, Kevin Kline would just walk around singing,’ he told TV Mania. The movie was well reviewed and although Ian’s role in it was small, he helped bring some edge to an otherwise overly saccharine drama.
The second role was his biggest to date: he was cast as Paul Denton in an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel The Rules of Attraction by director Roger Avary, alongside James Van Der Beek and Jessica Biel. The movie was a dark satire about college life, depicting three main characters and their disassociation with their outrageous sex lives. It was highly controversial when it came out in 2002 and completely divided critics – the BBC described it as ‘fiercely original and seriously funny’ while respected movie reviewers Ebert & Roeper simply said they ‘hated this movie.’ The film was originally given an NC-17 rating in the US – one of the highest ratings available – and awarded an 18+ in the UK, yet most of the controversy came from Somerhalder himself. He and James Van Der Beek had to kiss during a scene where Paul (Ian’s character) fantasises about a sexual experience with Sean (Van Der Beek). Somerhalder spoke to A&F magazine about the kiss: ‘Here is the thing: Two guys kissing is not as sexy as two girls kissing. When Selma Blair made out with Sarah-what’s-her-name [in Cruel Intentions], that was hot. Me and James Van Der Beek making out is not hot, it’s rather disgusting. We both looked at each other and said, “Dude, don’t stick your tongue in my mouth.”’
Naturally, those comments spread through the media like wildfire until Ian finally had to come out and defend himself against accusations of homophobia. ‘It’s not me who can’t handle it, it’s the audience. Seann William Scott didn’t get all of the backlash that I received when he did just the same in American Pie 2. It was completely unjustified – fans and outraged men saying that I was making anti-gay remarks. I wasn’t and those very close to me who are gay were visibly upset. I’d never make a disrespectful remark about anyone, especially in public, about one’s sexual preference.’
Furthermore, he felt victimised by the journalist who had, as far as he was concerned, twisted his words to make a sensational story. For three years, from 2003–2005, he kept up a series of mini-interviews called the Friday Five on his official website. When a fan questioned him about the journalist’s story, on his Friday Five he wrote: ‘Most of my dearest friends in the world are homosexual men and women. Having said that I can honestly say that I have a great understanding of them and appreciate them for all that they are and give to my and the world around them. It’s easy for someone to make me look as though I say negative things about people who are gay. I would say that they are wrong. Never have I said anything derogatory but instead have done nothing but support and work for organizations that support gay rights and many others.’
The film itself might have divided critics, but the author of the novel, Brett Easton Ellis, was happy. Four of his works have been adapted into movies (Less Than Zero [1987], American Psycho [2000], The Rules of Attraction [2002], and The Informers [2008]), and he considers The Rules of Attraction to be the best: ‘My favourite movie out of the four was The Rules of Attraction. I thought it was the only one that captured the sensibility of the novel in a cinematic way. I know I’m sounding like a film critic on that, but I’m talking about that in an emotional [way] – as the writer of the novel. I watched that movie and thought they got it in a way that Mary Harron [director of American Psycho] didn’t and Less Than Zero didn’t.’
Even before he had experienced it himself, Ian knew a little about victimisation from another movie he had starred in, called Anatomy of a Hate Crime (2001), which chronicled the real-life story of the torture and murder of twenty-one-year-old gay college student Matthew Shepard. Ian played one of Matthew’s murderers, Russell Henderson. The film focused as much on the twisted motivations of his killers as it did on Matthew and it was broadcast on MTV in three half-hour acts as part of their year-long drive: ‘Fight For Your Rights: Take A Stand Against Discrimination’. It was probably the role that had most affected him up until then, as he wrote on his Friday Five: ‘I have to say after Anatomy of a Hate Crime (the movie wasn’t great, though), I truly understood that one’s life can change in a matter of moments…’
The Friday Five was very important to Ian, who was keen to connect with his fans in a different way to most actors. He really didn’t consider himself ‘famous’ at that point, but he did have a steady fan base that he wanted to keep in touch with. Every week he would answer five questions, ranging from the very personal to the professional, and with virtually no subject off-limits – from shows to relationships to philosophy. It was there that fans learned about his relationship with American socialite Nicky Hilton (and the subsequent break-up); Ian even kept the Friday Five going when his career started to take off and he landed the part of Boone Carlyle on Lost – showing that his growing celebrity had not affected his down-to-earth nature.
The following years Ian spent building up his résumé on the small screen, with frequent guest spots on popular television shows such as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and CSI: Miami. He then landed a recurring guest-star role on Smallville as Adam Knight, a teenager who died from a liver disease but was later resurrected using a special injection known as ‘Lazarus Serum’. Adam was sent to Smallville by Lex Luthor’s father Lionel to befriend Lana Lang and spy on Clark Kent. Altogether, Ian shot six episodes before his character died from lack of serum to keep him ‘undead’ ending his time on the hit show.
It was 2004 and Ian was in need of a big role… and soon he was about to crash-land into the perfect one.
