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Dorchester Group Magazine - May 2004 - Issue Ten .. willing and able NOT MANY FILM STARS START THEIR LIFE AS CLASSICALLY TRAINED BALLET DANCERS, BUT THEN WILL KEMP IS AN UNUSUAL ANIMAL - AND WE’RE NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT HIS CURRENT ROLE AS A WEREWOLF. CHARLES GANT MEETS THE SOMETIME SWAN AND GAP POSTER BOY AT THE DORCHESTER Dancer, actor and future megastar Will Kemp lounges on a sofa in room 711 of The Dorchester, and recounts the story of how he landed the part of The Wolf Man in this summer’s surefire-blockbuster movie Van Helsing. It’s difficult enough to go into a casting director’s office and perform in front of a little hand-held video camera, when only given the customary few pages of ‘sides’ to work with. But when those pages include scenes requiring you to transform, physically, from gypsy prince to werewolf, the challenge becomes somewhat trickier. ‘I was thinking, “How am I going to do this?” I can’t just go, “Grrrr…Oooh I’m changing! Grrr…” So I thought, “to hell with it! I’ve got nothing to lose, I’m just going to go for it.” So I worked myself up, went back in there, and ripped her office to pieces. I was throwing myself against the wall, [extravagant wolf-roar], ripping at my shirt and making all these big wolf-like movements. [Laughs.] You should have seen her face behind the camera! I don’t think she quite knew what was happening. I left thinking “oh well, that was a laugh and I had a good time anyway”.’ Kemp’s next audition was with Van Helsing’s producers and its director Stephen Sommers (The Mummy). He figured that his recall indicated that they must have liked the audition tape. ‘So I went in again, and I’m doing my [even-more-extravagant wolf roar] and my veins are popping out, about to do this dramatic transformation scene, and half way through the director Stephen jumps up and says, “Stop stop stop! That’s fine, Will. Great. Please don’t hurt yourself. Thank you. Thank you very much.” And I thought, “Oh great. I just made the biggest fool of myself.” I concluded they probably only called me for some light entertainment.’ As it turns out, Kemp was just what they were looking for: an actor who was willing to go for it and risk appearing ridiculous. His reward was a six-month shoot in Prague and Los Angeles in a $95 million movie that will place him – alongside co-stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale – at the centre of a massive global marketing campaign. It looks set to transform 26-year-old Kemp from ‘that sexy guy in the Gap commercial’ to fully-fledged Hollywood hotshot – ‘the next Orlando Bloom’, as Britain’s Empire magazine put it. Kemp first made his name in the all-male Swan Lake, from choreographer Matthew Bourne’s Adventures in Motion Pictures dance company, which he joined fresh from the Royal Ballet School at the age of 17. Bourne then created lead roles for the talented youngster in his productions of Cinderella, The Car Man and Play Without Words, anointing him as a star who began attracting such sobriquets as ‘the James Dean of ballet’ and ‘the Tom Cruise of the dance world.’ His improvised sexy moves for Gap’s fall 2002 ad campaign broke him to a mass audience, which gleefully appropriated him as cubicle pin-up and desktop screen-saver – too bad for his growing legion of fans that in December 2002 he married his singer/songwriter girlfriend Gaby Jamieson. Kemp began dancing at the age of nine. It was his parents’ idea. They had moved to Kings Langley in Hertfordshire so that Will – and eventually his younger siblings Roland and Daisy May – could attend the famously unstructured Rudolf Steiner school there. Young Will’s creative nourishment extended to a parental disapproval of television, forcing him to create his own entertainment. The plan succeeded too well. Delving into a treasure chest of costumes – Popeye, Superman, Robin Hood – made by his grandma, pretty soon the boy was addicted to racing around the garden, noisily losing himself in these diverse characters. On his own. ‘I’d reached a point where that’s all that I would actually do,’ recalls Will. ‘I almost went so far into role-playing, I found it hard communicating with other children. I would actually panic when I was being thrust into a room with a load of other kids that I hadn’t met. I would get so nervous that I found it hard to talk.’ The solution was tap class. ‘My mum put me into this class with a room full of girls, and I had to communicate. But I communicated through the tap dancing, through listening to music and smiling at people [taps his foot], “One, two, three four, five, six.” It was a great way of learning a craft which is all about communicating with your body through choreography and characterization.’ Four years later, Will emerged as that rare being: a teenager who knew what he wanted to do with his life. ‘Come the time I was 13, I knew I had a passion. I knew that if I worked hard enough there was a place for me in the dance world – that somebody would actually pay me money to dance.’ Dance is a tough, competitive world, but failure was not an option. ‘I just knew there was nothing else; this was it and if it wasn’t going to work then there was something wrong in the world. I didn’t have a natural body for classical ballet – there was nothing about me that would make a person say, “He's obviously going to go to the Royal Ballet School.” It was just a sheer passion. I can work hard. And if you teach me, I can do it.’ When it comes to his career, Will is ‘capable of just letting it happen’ but also believes that ‘you create your own reality’ and that ‘luck is when opportunity meets preparation.’ It was in the latter spirit that he chose to join Adventures in Motion Pictures. He suspected, rightly, that here was a company with the creative freedom that would let him flourish. ‘There was something about Matthew and the way he approached his work that was very character driven. It was almost like coming home, coming back to that treasure chest of costumes, character work and communicating through movement – all those elements that I latched on to as a child.’ The dance company’s global tours made Kemp a star not just in the West End but on Broadway and in Los Angeles, and he soon landed a Hollywood agent in the form of Joel Lubin, this year joining CAA to balance out his London representation, Julian Belfrage Associates. Lubin assiduously submitted film scripts, but Will wasn’t ready. For 18 months, he attended acting workshops and classes, read Stanislavsky, and saw as much stage work as he could. He seriously considered taking three years out to attend drama school, but finally decided that the brave thing was just to ‘trust that I am able to do this’ and to learn on the job. Kemp’s first movie role was in Mindhunters, also to be released this summer, a smartly written genre piece about a bunch of FBI trainees who, despite their expertise in psychological profiling, are targeted by a serial killer. Directed by Renny Harlin and co-starring Christian Slater, Val Kilmer and LL Cool J, Kemp calls it ‘a baptism of fire’ and ‘a huge learning curve’. It was, he confesses, ‘a mixed group of personalities’. It’s notable that, despite being mostly resident in west London, both of Kemp’s big-screen roles have been in Hollywood productions. ‘In my experience, there has been an enthusiasm in the US for honestly saying, “Give me a chance, I know I can do this.” People seem to want to believe in you, if you can prove to them that you believe in yourself.’ As for work in his home town he says, ‘I would love to do a British film or, better still, a really gritty role in a play.’ Kemp’s next assignment will keep him in London, on the stage once again. He stars as the narrator in Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale at the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre, choreographed and directed by William Tuckett for whom Will previously starred as Ratty in The Wind in the Willows. Since actors can’t very well be expected to dance, the cast consists of dancers who will also act. ‘For all of us it’s a great opportunity and a real challenge,’ says Kemp. ‘I am working with a group of friends who are all really talented performers. New works always offer up a sense of excitement and fear. It is always a little scary, but without that feeling I might become complacent. To rise to a challenge, to be able to take that risk of, “well, this might not work” – It's what keeps me wanting to do new and more diverse projects.’ It’s time for our cover star to go and explore the hotel for the photo session. ‘The Dorchester has some wonderful memories because we had our wedding blessing here,’ he recalls fondly. ‘We had two big rooms here on New Year’s Eve, fantastic food by Guillaume who works here, and were able, with The Dorchester’s help and superb organization by Keith Iddins, to have the most amazing New Year’s Eve wedding party ever. One room was snow-kissed, sparkly Narnia. The other room, which we opened closer to midnight, was a red-lit den of iniquity…it had a really cool vodka bar made of ice. So we had this Heaven and Hell, His and Hers thing going on. We arrived here for afternoon tea which our families really enjoyed. At Christmas this place looks amazing. There’s a big ice sculpture in the drive that says “Happy New Year”, there are wonderfully decorated Christmas trees. The hotel looked so beautiful, my Grandma and my Nan were in heaven. They kept saying, “Oooh, William, look at this, who would have thought…!” It just was absolutely perfect.’ Photographs by Giles John Copyright: Dorchester Group Magazine (May 2004) |