Alex Pettyfer, the reticent 20-year-old English actor who stars in superhero origins film I Am Number Four, yearns to be number-one choice for more thoughtful projects such as Blue Valentine one day. But for now Michael Bay fireworks are just fine, he tells TARA BRADY
I’M STANDING up to leave when Alex Pettyfer jumps to his feet and starts to chatter about Gosford Castle and how much he loves Armagh. “I lived at Gosford for six months,” he gushes. “It’s probably my favourite place on Earth.”
Huh? Is this the same careful, reticent young man I’ve been attempting to interview this morning? If only I had known, I might have ostentatiously turned off the recording device long before now.
“I am very quiet,” he concedes.
He's not lying. Six years ago Pettyfer starred in Stormbreaker, a James Bond yarn aimed squarely at the tweenie market. Acting under the advice of co-star Ewan McGregor, the younger actor returned to school after the shoot without mentioning it to any of his classmates.
“I never liked showing off,” he shrugs. “I was always a bit of a class clown and a prankster. But not a show-off or attention seeker. I just liked making people laugh. Still do.”
Speaking in a soft voice from under a lowered baseball cap, Pettyfer looks as though he's braced for a storm. Perhaps he is. At 20, the well-spoken young Brit is one of Hollywood's hottest properties. Over the coming months the legions of young ladies who maintain a proliferation of internet shrines in his honour can look forward to seeing their idol in Now,a post-Inception thriller also starring Justin Timberlake and Cillian Murphy, and Beastly,a contemporary retooling of Beauty and the Beastfeaturing Pettyfer and High School Musicalalumnus Vanessa Hudgens.
“I’m lucky,” he says. “You get offered a lot of shite. Or maybe not offered. You certainly read a lot of it anyway. But Beastly is all from the Beast’s point of view, and it’s genuinely heartbreaking. And in Now I’m a gangster – a sort of mixture between Charles Manson and Gary Oldman – who steals time. It has Roger Deakins as DP. It’s going to look amazing. But for me it was just fun being that evil.”
For the moment, however, all eyes are on I Am Number Four, a teen sci-fi adventure from the Michael Bay imprint and the first of 2011's major assaults on the coveted tent-pole spot once occupied by Harry Potterand Twilight. (The vampire sequence, as anyone from Teams Edward and Jacob might tell you, will conclude with next year's Breaking Dawn: Part 2; the boy wizard pants over the finish line this spring.)
Based on the best-selling young adult novel by Pittacus Lore (aka Jobie Hughes and James Frey), I Am Number Fouris a very big deal. The book was still an unpublished manuscript when it became the subject of a bidding war between Dreamworks and JJ Abrams (the brains behind Lost, 2009's Star Trekand Cloverfield). The former label, thanks to the combined clout of Bay and Steven Spielberg, won out with an undisclosed sum for the authors.
A decidedly Stephenie Meyer-style take on the Supermanorigins story, the finished $60 million Dreamworks product stars Pettyfer as an adolescent alien who discovers latent, awesome powers just as his dastardly, marauding intergalactic rivals close in. Special effects and puppy love set to strains of Adele's Rolling in the Deep soon follow.
“When you’re right in the middle of all the action every day it’s impossible not to appreciate the scale of a Michael Bay movie,” says Pettyfer. “But I just focused on the story and the job at hand. You have to. Everything around you is so intense.”
He’s better prepared than most. The son of model Lee Ireland, Alexander Richard Pettyfer has been in the biz since he was six, when Ralph Lauren picked him out of a crowd in a New York toy shop. He subsequently worked as a face for Burberry and Gap until 2006 when he retired from the fashion business to focus on the talkies.
"I remember wanting to be a race-car driver," he says. "But this has been around almost as long." As a punter he lists his favourite movies as American History X, American Psychoand Clockwork Orange, but as an actor, Pettyfer is best known as the teen pin-up star of Tormented and Wild Child.
“There are good movies out there. But not so much when you’re my age. I’m not 30. I am in my own head. But chronologically I’m just not old enough to be going for the Blue Valentines of the world.
“I’m hoping I might serve my time on those films later in my career. For now I want to enjoy the Michael Bay explosions while I can.”
For all the pyrotechnics and kerfuffle around his person, it’s impossible not to recognise the kid who didn’t tell his school chums he had made a movie.
He's perfectly happy to pass pleasantries, of course. He talks about how much he loved the drama Angels in America and how he marvelled at the comic timing of his I Am Number Fourco-star Timothy Olyphant.
He chats about his recent move to LA and how he misses wine gums and paracetamol. “Paracetamol is genius. I don’t know what they use over there but it’s just not the same.”
Still, sitting across from Pettyfer in London’s Soho Hotel, it would be tricky to ignore his succinct, deliberate responses. It would be trickier still not to note the two assistants placed at the ready in case of indelicate inquiries.
This, one suspects, may be as much to do it Pettyfer's own reserve as studio paranoia. Who could blame him? It can't be easy keeping your private life out of the newspapers when your former girlfriend is Emma Roberts, niece of Julia, nor when your current squeeze is Glee's Dianna Argon, his I Am Number Fourco-star.
Argon, who is currently deep in awards season, has not accompanied her boyfriend and co-star on promotional duties.
“This is a job where you have to be careful to make time for yourself and for others,” he offers cautiously. “But the job never takes me away from the people who matter to me. Not in any real way. It just makes me miss them and makes the time I do get to spend with them more special.”
At any rate, he can't complain. The global publicity tour for I Am Number Fourhas, after all, given him a chance to stop off on his native soil and stock up on wine gums before heading home to Hollywood.
“You do have to figure out a sensible path in LA,” he says. “There are a lot of empty promises and dreams out there. You need to figure out exactly what you want to get out of it. But if you have a good grounding and a good base, LA is a great place, with or without wine gums.”
He is similarly philosophical about his propensity for attracting hordes of screaming girls.
“I have them on my iPod now. Wherever I go I can keep the sound ringing in my ears. That’s just the kind of guy I am.”
And he peeks out from under his baseball cap to emphasise he’s not in earnest, then carefully retreats once more.
I Am Number Fouropens on Wednesday
