Jamie Bell keeps a low profile unless he’s actually promoting a movie. The paps haven’t nabbed gossip-worthy photos of him since his early 2014 divorce from Evan Rachel Wood. He’s actually a “serious” actor who isn’t into working an image. I remember being impressed by his performance in Snowpiercer, which was filmed just as his marriage crumbled. And I always forget Jamie is a former child actor (he appeared in Billy Elliot at age 13). Right now, he’s pushing his role in the Fantastic Four. Comic book fans weren’t clamoring for a reboot, but it may make money anyway. Jamie plays the Thing with a lot of CGI help.

Bell has a new feature in Interview magazine, and Robert Pattinson did the interrogating. This talk reveals more about Sparkles than it does about Jamie. Sparkles bursts into the phone conversation with a “Let’s not talk about any of your work. Let’s only talk about your personal life. Your crack usage. Who are you f***ing? Okay?” Oh, Sparkles. Jamie never answer those questions, but here are some excerpts:

Playing the Thing: “[Y]ou won’t see my face at all. Oh, no, you will. He’s a human being before he turns into Thing. But there is certainly something about the anonymity of the character that is kind of intriguing. I like that. I think your anonymity has been somewhat jeopardized. I also think the idea of me playing that role, a six-foot-eight rock creature, was kind of bizarre. As you know, I’m a five-foot-seven, rather squat Englishman. All of that combined was kind of interesting.”

He doesn’t like his work: “I don’t really enjoy watching any of my work at all. To get me to sit down in a screening, you almost have to nail me to the f***ing floor. I just never want to watch anything. I’m proud that I’m still working. But there’s not one thing that I can put my finger on and say, ‘That is my greatest achievement. That’s my proudest moment.’ That’s so tricky to me.”

How he avoid the child-actor cliché: “I am quite unashamedly Jamie all the time. I think that definitely helped even in terms of sanity — not in terms of career, just in terms of keeping your head, especially when you start so young. I get asked a lot in interviews, you know, “How come you’re not, like … in rehab or anything?” I probably should be. The pitfalls of child actors … It was drilled into me when I was a kid: ‘You have to be you, and you must be the best version of yourself.’ I think a mantra I always told myself is, ‘No matter how many times somebody pitches the ball at you, if you swing every time, eventually one of them is going to connect.’ Being yourself and persistence are two things that became my daily mantras, I suppose. I think my demons are my demons, and we all have them, and we work on them.”

[From Interview Magazine]

Sparkles ends the interview by calling Jamie, “the lost humble orphan lamb.” That’s just amazing. You know what I’d like to watch? An interview where Robert Pattinson drills Robert Pattinson for answers. Jamie plays it close to the sleeve and never lets loose with answers, which is fine, but it doesn’t make for a good pull quote. Sparkles has been though enough with the press to know what the people want to hear. He’s hilarious.

This Fantastic Four reboot will be a disaster, right?

Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet & WENN