Ben Barnes is a very down to earth guy, and provides a really good example of what he went through on the promotional tour for Prince Caspian. He mentions New York, where I saw him about four out of the seven days that I was there, and sometimes twice in one day, so I can attest to what he says about his experience there.
It can be hard work being a Hollywood hero. Just ask Ben Barnes, a.k.a. Prince Caspian, star of the billion-dollar-grossing Chronicles of Narnia franchise.
There’s the grinding tour of world premieres (“Travelling for three months, sitting on your own in a hotel room in Taiwan, thinking, ‘what am I doing here?’ Just weird.”) and the red-carpet appearances where your every move is greeted by an electric storm of flashbulbs (“I don’t think there’s any way of ever being comfortable with it. You put on a perma-grin, which is so unnatural, and the lights make you squint. I get very anxious.”). There’s the frankly disconcerting experience of seeing your very own toy action figurine for the first time. “My own was absolutely awful, shamefully bad. I was a bit upset by that. How many times do you get an action figure made of you? Mine looked like a cross between Adrien Brody and Javier Bardem – but ill.” There’s the tireless and tiresome conveyor belt of press junkets and interviews.
“They take as much out of you as filming does”, sniffs Barnes. “I thought, ‘it’s only chatting, how hard can it be?'” As it turned out, the New York round of Prince Caspian promotion very nearly wiped this swashbuckling regent out: he did 90 interviews in one day, woke up the next with no voice and found he had to do 70 more, dosed up on a cocktail of vitamin C, honey and lemon, and Chinese potions. “I didn’t really have a choice. The film was called Prince Caspian, there was no hiding.” Appearing on Jay Leno’s sofa was a rare highlight. “Have you seen it? It’s definitely the best interview I’ve done…”
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Today, arriving at his agent’s office and blaming his late arrival on the Piccadilly line, Barnes doesn’t really look like a star. Tall and slim and dressed in a white T-shirt, leather jacket, jeans and biker boots, he’s sporting some patchy stubble and “ridiculous” long hair in preparation for the [Chronicles of Narnia]: Voyage of the Dawn Treader shoot in July (“I do not want extensions again.”).
[…]
It has not always been an easy ride; Barnes already has one dispute under his belt, when he left The History Boys six months into its West End run to play Caspian, annoying the National Theatre. “I’m still hugely regretful about it and I still haven’t heard a peep out of them. I didn’t feel like I was leaving anyone in the lurch but I did feel like I was letting people down. And I felt like I was going to vomit for three and a half weeks between getting Prince Caspian and leaving. It was always my dream to work at the National: I’d been going there with my Dad since I was 10. I’d love to round it off one day by going back. It’s still the most gratifying job I’ve ever done.”
Prince Caspian, he implies, was not quite so gratifying. “It’s more to do with the contrast between the marketing and what I was asked to do. I was trying to do this awkward character who wasn’t sure he wanted the responsibility of being a leader. I don’t think that tested so well, so they tried to tweak him into a hero.” Did they Hollywood-ise him? “Just a little. Yeah. Which is completely fair and it made a lot of money so they know what they’re doing. But at the same time, as you can see by all my other choices, it’s not particularly what I’m going for. I want to play characters that are interesting to watch.”
