Rupert Friend likes to lean into “the strange, the unexplained” in both his life and in his work. The star of , and suspects it’s a form of rebellion against “growing up in a family that was obsessed with interpretation, leading me to become quite anti-interpretation”.
So his new role as the bullying/baffled husband of a genius astronomer in Lili Horvát’s beautifully ambiguous new sci-fi romance, , has been right up his alley and he’s thrilled to hear that it left me feeling disoriented. “Good!”
“My dad was an art historian,” he explains, video-calling from the home he shares with his wife, the former Paralympian Aimee Mullins, and their two-year-old daughter in upstate New York. “So I spent much of my childhood being dragged around countless art galleries.” He enjoyed the pictures. But he loathed having them decoded for him. Even if he could tune out the parental commentary there were those pesky little explanatory panels beneath the frames.
“If you’re lucky,” he says, “they just give you the artist’s name and dates. But more often than not you get a blurb of what you’re supposed to think or take away from the thing. It’d say,” – he affects a dull drone – “‘so-and-so is dealing with form and space and the interplay of light…’” A shudder. “It just felt scholastic, primitive, reductive.” For Friend, at least, those explanations “limited the experience of what art can be”.
Perhaps this prickle of defiance in the 44-year-old English actor contributes to a career built on playing rule-breakers. He found fame as apprentice rake to Johnny Depp’s debauched aristocrat in (2004) before being cast as serial seducer George Wickham in the 2005 film of (eloping with the irksome Lydia Bennet on screen, but beginning a five-year romance with star Keira Knightley off screen).
He was an unresolved knot of trauma as black ops assassin Peter Quinn in Showtime espionage series (2012-2017) and brilliantly unhinged as Vasily Stalin in Armando Iannucci’s Soviet satire The Death of Stalin (2018). More recently, he’s played Sharon Horgan’s “institutionally single”, charming yet flighty love interest Patrick in the HBO Max series .
Even in mainstream Hollywood blockbuster , he brings a playful smirk of menace as dino-DNA-stealing pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs. “I’m too smart to die,” Krebs says before being chomped like a chocolate bar by one of the movie’s monsters.
“I am still a Spielberg storytelling kind of actor at heart,” he grins, sitting in front of a huge glass window with a wall of trees swaying behind him as he talks. There’s something about the casualness of the set up that makes me yearn for a pterodactyl to poke its beak through the leaves behind his shoulder and I reckon he’d be delighted by that. The original film was a formative cinema experience for him. As a small boy he wanted to be an archaeologist, not an actor, after being smitten by the adventures of Spielberg’s . “But books came first for me,” he says.
Born in 1981 and raised in rural Oxfordshire, Friend was a voracious reader as a child. “We’d go camping for our summer holidays and I’d have a little suitcase of books and just sit and read after the rainy walks were over. Reading outdoors is just the best,” he enthuses. “Especially when you’re knackered and cold and wet and you’re sort of thawing out by a fire.”
There’s something about his knack for a haughty lip curl that made me assume he was privately educated. But he tells me he went to the “oversubscribed and understaffed” local comprehensive school where he remembers having to share textbooks between groups of four. “I remember taking turns to take the books home.” A tut. “I make it sound like a Victorian workhouse but, in the 90s, if you weren’t clearly good at something off the bat then you weren’t given much encouragement at English state secondary schools,” he tuts. “I remember a zoo of rioting and bad behaviour, where teachers just threw up their hands and waited for the bell.”
Friend recalls being “very badly bullied” in this environment. He downplayed his cleverness from his peers in an effort to fly under the radar – “I would have done anything to fit in. I didn’t express my intelligence, I self-sabotaged and of course it didn’t work and there was an ostracisation…” So you weren’t even a well behaved kid? “No I was a total…” He shudders.
The young Friend wasn’t totally friendless, though. His bestie from the age of eight was the artist Ed Atkins, who now makes CGI video art that challenges the boundaries between the real and the fake, the digital world and human emotion. “Ed’s work does something that [ director] Lili Horvát does,” says Friend. “Her work ruptures the ‘safe’ framework of the Hollywood style of filmmaking, which tells you how to interpret a film so you all watch it the same way.” He still enjoys those films. “But they can be a bit like cheap white bread, leaving you full but not sated.”
– Horvát’s first English-language film – is much chewier than that. It stars Mackenzie Davis as Margot: a Mars-obsessed physicist who appears to have suffered some form of existential breakdown.
She has relocated to Hungary with her horse-breeding husband Sam (Friend), who resents the time she has spent in a world of numbers and philosophy that feels alien to him. He’s all of the earth (hooves on turf) and she is all of the air (equations in space). When she goes missing on a mountain hike, only to reappear as an amnesiac at her own memorial service, the couple get a surreal second chance at a marriage that has died.
“One of the launch pads Lili used for writing this film was an impulse to allegorically explore whether you can ever go back to that point in a relationship where things went wrong and start over with the same person.” He quotes psychologist Esther Perel: “Most people are going to have two or three marriages or committed relationships in their adult life. Some of us will have them with the same person.”
Friend accepts that “for most of us the idea of a blank slate is impossible. I guess that in a relationship where there’s been a failure of trust – an infidelity or something – people have to learn to trust one another again. But you can never go back to that particular fork in the road and undo the violation.” So although he has never been a big sci-fi fan – “I had no interest in watching people in lycra on spaceships” – he loves the way the genre allows Horvat to “explore the way you can stay with the same person as they evolve, as you evolve”.
Friend has been married to Mullins since 2016. But he pushed back when one interviewer referred to this as “settling down”. He says today: “I hate that term! It reminds me of stale biscuits.” He says there is nothing stale about his own dynamic relationship.
Mullins, 50, was born with a medical condition that resulted in the amputation of both of her legs below the knee, and she had learned to walk on prosthetics by the age of two. She became a para-athlete, and the first amputee to compete against nondisabled athletes in National Collegiate Athletic Association events. In 1996 she competed in the 100m and long jump at the Atlanta Paralympics.
Mullins went on to careers in modelling (opening Alexander McQueen’s 1999 show on carved wooden limbs), acting (including ) and giving TED talks. She went into labour with their daughter while he was shooting .
“I’m hoisted up on a wire, a hundred feet in the air, doing a stunt, the crew start saying, ‘Get him down, get him down,’” Friend told America’s show. It was a mad dash for him to get back from Britain to the US and he ended up witnessing the birth of his “Jurassic Baby” on FaceTime at the airport, “crying my eyes out with all the air hostesses thrusting champagne at me”.
Today he tells me that the couple continue to look up and outward. “When we were eight years old, Ed Atkins made a will leaving his telescope to me in the event of his death,” he says. “Quite a sad thing for him to do at that age.” And now he won’t need it because Mullins bought him his own telescope for his birthday.
“The idea of the cosmos is fascinating,” he sighs. While watching can give viewers a kind of existential vertigo, Friend finds that “the idea of how potentially irrelevant we are is quite important to remember at a time when we apparently still have a need to have wars and whatever”.
He turns to study the trees behind him. “Because we’ve got a two-year-old, we’re always asleep when we should be stargazing,” he says. “But I’m looking forward to some night-sky adventures.”
screens at the 70th BFI London Film Festival on 16 and 18 October. Tickets available now