Jamie Bell is still dancing.
Twenty-five years ago, an 11-year-old boy from northeast England filmed a small movie about a coal miner’s son who wanted to dance ballet. Three years later, that boy, a 14-year-old Jamie Bell, stood on a BAFTA stage holding the prize for best leading actor, the youngest person ever to win it in the category. Stephen Daldry’s “Billy Elliot” remains the kind of debut most actors spend a career trying to recover from. Bell, now 40, has been working steadily ever since to make sure it isn’t the only thing anyone remembers.
“Nothing is a given,” Bell tells Variety, sitting in a Los Angeles airport terminal, getting ready to get on board back to London. “When you come out of the gate with something that is so loved in that way, it’s a great gift, but it can also be a bit of a curse, because you have to carry that around with you and you almost have to live up to it. It’s a responsibility to go and have a great career, but it’s easier said than done.”
The career that has followed has been the rare one that survived a child-star debut without ever congealing into the obvious next thing. Ones like the action film “Jumper,” the period drama “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” the fantasy-musical biopic “Rocketman” and the emotional ghostly drama “All of Us Strangers.” And now, most recently, the HBO limited series “Half Man,” in which Bell plays a man nose-diving through his own life. It’s a towering performance that has reset the conversation around what he is capable of as a dramatic actor in this Emmy cycle.
