Aaron Johnson, star of the new superhero movie 'Kick Ass' has had an interesting year – from relative obscurity to fame, marriage and fatherhood. . . and he's still only 19. DONALD CLARKEmet him in Dublin
AARON JOHNSON doesn't give the impression that he is letting Man-of- the-Moment status get him down. If you've been anywhere near a billboard or a bus over the last week, you will have seen a bloke in a green costume scowling crazily at you. That's Aaron as the titular hero of Matthew Vaughn's controversial superhero film Kick Ass. He was all over the papers a few months ago when he appeared as John Lennon in Sam Taylor Wood's impressive Nowhere Boy. In the run up to that film's release, it emerged that he and Taylor-Wood, his senior by 20 years, were engaged and that she was pregnant with his baby. Cue a shift from the snooty arts pages to the more breathless corners of the tabloids.
He’s still only 19, but, with all the buzz around him, I half expect to find him sitting on a throne being fanned by lickspittles. Instead, when I enter his room in a Dublin hotel, he’s squinting curiously at a scribbled notepad.
“I was asking the other guy what pub I should go to,” he says. “What’s this? Dotheny. . . Dosheny . . .” I think that would be Doheny and Nesbitt.
“Yeah, cheers. He also said I should go to The Long Hall. Where else?” I suggest The Stag’s Head. He thanks me and scribbles down the name of that popular watering hole. Clearly, an evening of high culture awaits.
In short, Aaron comes across like a pretty typical 19-year-old. He may have enormous pressures building up upon him, but he’s not going to let it stand in the way of a good gargle. Apparently shy, he delivers his answers in the sort of weary mumble you’d expect to hear emerging from somebody born (Oh lord, really?) after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
So, how is the prospect of becoming a husband and a father affecting him? Which is the more daunting? “Well, I’ll be taking a little time off, hopefully,” he says. “Neither is daunting. I am just trying to fit it all in. I proposed to her months before we found out. We just have to work out a time when Sam feels comfortable in a dress before we get married. No, it’s not daunting. It’s exciting. I’m so excited about having a kid.”
Aaron already has, it should be noted, considerable experience in this business. Raised in a decidedly unglamorous corner of the English home counties, he first turned up on stage at the age of six. Before he reached double figures, he had appeared as Macduff’s son opposite Rufus Sewell’s Macbeth in the West End and done further work in the National Theatre. Yet, he is not from a theatrical background and he did not go to stage school.
“No, not at all,” he mutters. “My parents had no idea what acting was. I certainly wasn’t born into that sort of family. I did a bunch of activities after school and drama was one of them. There happened to be an agency attached and briefs got sent out about casting. I’d go to the audition and there’d be, like, five stage school kids there and me. I think I had a different sense of reality to the stage school kids and that helped me.”
I can see what he means. Graduates of stage schools tend to burst into the room and address the press as if they were sitting in the 14th row of the highest balcony. Every syllable is geared to put across their theatricality. By way of contrast, Aaron Johnson seems almost contorted by shyness.
Mind you, though he worked steadily throughout his teenage years, he had to wait for Nowhere Boyto achieve serious attention. It was a nicely nuanced performance in an unusual film. In the months since its release, Taylor-Wood, previously one of the UK's most respected visual artists, must have revealed what she saw in this young unknown. It was, after all, a part to kill for.
"Well, I think I managed to get across the enthusiasm I had," he says. "I was still filming Kick Assat the time. I had been doing an American accent during the day and then, in lunch breaks, looking up clips of John Lennon. I slicked back my hair. I had the dark jeans on.
“I wanted to get at that inner vulnerability before we started. I think that came across.”
Kick Ass– released later than Nowhere Boy, but filmed sometime before – looks like a step up to mainstream commercial film-making and, indeed, that is how it's turned out. But the picture was actually something of a gamble for all involved. Matthew Vaughn, director of Layer Cakeand Stardust, put up most of the money himself and could never definitively assure the cast that it would receive distribution.
Based on a comic by Mark Millar, the resulting picture – in which Aaron’s weedy schoolboy becomes the world’s least terrifying superhero – went on to generate superb early buzz and is now being handled by mighty Universal Pictures in this territory.
“We’ve achieved something really great in that we’ve taken an independent film and made it look like a proper blockbuster,” Johnson says.
“When you see ‘indie movie’ in brackets you often think: depressing urban landscapes. This shows the wide range that independent films can achieve. It was a massive risk and it’s paid off.”
Johnson’s character gets involved in a great deal of aggravation during the picture. Every 10 minutes or so, the hapless Kick Ass gets flung from a building or smacked in the gob. We know, of course, that there’s sleight of hand involved in film-making, but he must have got pretty darn fit while making the picture. How tasty is he with his fists now? “Well, unfortunately I didn’t get taught those skills,” he laughs. “I luckily got to do as many stunts as possible and that really helped me. They were able to get plenty of shots that actually had my face behind the mask, which made life easier. Also that’s a pretty tight suit, so you might have been able to tell if it was some other guy in it. Ha ha! But, you know, I used to be a dancer, so I am okay with all that choreography.”
Johnson has another interesting project in the can. While he's preparing for fatherhood, we can watch him in Hideo Nakata's film version of Enda Walsh's play Chatroom. It's a genuinely enticing prospect: the Japanese director of such horror classics as Ringuand Dark Watertackling a play by the writer of Disco Pigsand Hunger.
“Yeah. It’s about another kid – like Lennon or Kick Ass – seeking some sort of escape. This time, he finds it online and ends up manipulating other people caught up in depression. It should be really interesting.”
As I leave the room, he returns to his notepad and once again begins plotting his assault on the saloon bars of the city. Once you get past his shyness, he comes across as a pretty nice, pretty ordinary class of Buckinghamshire bloke. It’s a marvel that he seems so relaxed about all the demands building up on his shoulders.
“Ah yeah. What’s great about this job is you don’t have to go into an office,” he says. “I can have time off and I can tell you I’m not going to waste it.” That’s the spirit, Aaron.
Shot to shock: Controversial child performances
A DEGREE of controversy is building up around Matthew Vaughn's Kick Ass. Sure, the film – a superhero spoof based on an influential comic by Mark Millar – features a staggering amount of evisceration and decapitation. Yes, it seems half in love with its own savagery.
But the real scandal focuses on young Chloe Moretz’s performance as a particularly ruthless 11-year-old superhero. She guts villains. She gouges them. Most notoriously, she briefly utters – shouts, actually – the most dreaded of all swearwords (it begins with a “c”).
Cinema's history is peppered with shocking performances from children, but, despite the expected howls of outrage, the young actors rarely show any ill effects. Linda Blair did awful things to herself with a crucifix in The Exorcist(1971) and still managed to live (by Hollywood standards) a reasonably normal life. After that iconic horror film, she appeared in any number of straight-to-video shockers and now spends her time campaigning for animal rights.
Patty McCormack, the original possessed child in The Bad Seed(1956), recently turned up as Pat Nixon in Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon.
Brooke Shields, who starred as a child prostitute in Louis Malle's Pretty Baby(1978), went on, it is true, to have a worrying relationship with Michael Jackson, but seems nevertheless pretty robust — not least when laying into Tom Cruise for condemning her use of antidepressants during post-natal depression.
The most notable survivor of Child Sex Shocker Syndrome remains, however, the perennially well-balanced Jodie Foster. Despite doing her duty as another underage sex-worker in Taxi Driver(1976), she somehow survived to attend Yale, win two Oscars and direct four films. Young Ms Moretz should be okay.
