'Perfume' - Ben Whishaw Q&A

The stage star talks to Time Out about his role in this thrilling literary adaptaion.

Dec 22 2006

The star of 'Perfume – The Story of a Murderer' discusses playing one of modern literature's most mysterious characters, and his role in Todd Haynes new Bob Dylan biopic.

How did you first come into contact with this story?

I first heard about it because my agent was a big fan of the novel. He discovered that Tom [Tywker] was making it into a film and I think he pursued Tom a bit really on my behalf and I was doing 'Hamlet' at the time, in London, and my agent sort of begged Tom to come and see me and eventually he did. Tom and I just had a drink a couple of weeks after that and we felt a really good kind of rapport immediately. I think that's something that's very important to Tom… that he has a personal connection with the people he's working with. Then we did a bit of work on one of the scenes, and that was it. It was really quite straightforward. I think the difficult part was really Tom having to convince the financial people that it was a good idea to cast somebody who wasn't very well known at all, in a film that was going to cost a substantial amount of money to make. I think that was the gruelling part of the process, but the audition was pretty brief. I mean, I hadn't read the book at that time so my first encounter with the story at all was through the screenplay. And again I'm grateful that was the way it worked out. I think it would have been much harder if I'd have had some relationship with the novel. I'm pleased that I could be objective about it.

How would you describe your character for people who might not know anything about him?

I think he's a character who's completely disconnected from social interaction. Completely disconnected from human beings, he's an isolated character, a kind of outcast and he's almost I think, a character somewhere on the autism spectrum. He finds simple things impossibly difficult, but he has this talent which sort of sets him apart and makes him a sort of artist really. This super-refined sensitivity to smell. Almost like an animal, an animal's awareness of smell. And the big turning point in his journey is the discovery, halfway through the film, that he doesn't have any smell of his own, which leads to a kind of crisis. A kind of existential crisis about his identity and what he is, and that’s what propels him to murder in order to create a smell for himself, in order to be a person who smells and therefore exists and can be seen, as it were, by other people. Because before then he's kind of invisible. He's like a spirit roaming the streets.

Did you try to empathise with him?

Yeah, I try to find something in a character that I can relate to or that I see in myself a bit and I think there's something about his introspection and his insularity and the way he's totally withdrawn from human beings which I think we can all probably connect with at some point in our lives. It was really important to me that we try to make him, if not necessarily sympathetic, then at least understandable. He's not totally alien but he sort of represents something that's common to us all, but it's writ large. The colours are turned up.

You've created this guy who's totally sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time. I don't know how to react to him.

That's what excited me about it, that an audience could be in that position of feeling that, urging him to kill the girl and that a part of you knows that its disgusting and obviously that it's wrong. But I think that's something that cinema can do, and I think that's one of the reasons that people go – I'm sure it must be – to the cinema. To sit in a dark room and find yourself sympathising with someone who does barbaric things, or fall in love with somebody who does something that's horrific. Cinema gives you that opportunity.

He's a man of very few words as well. Was that a challenge in your performance?

Yeah, it was really one of the key problems that we talked about, but Dustin Hoffman said to me on his last day of shooting – we shot pretty much all the dialogue stuff in the first two weeks of the shoot and then Dustin went off and he said 'From now on Ben, you're pretty much making a silent movie… so good luck!' And that's what it felt like, everything had to be in the eyes and the physicality and details of expression. I think it's probably quite difficult for an audience, it's not something you normally come across often, to understand somebody who's not speaking, but you have to read those details and get something out of it in that way.

What research did you do for the role? Did you look into the perfume making yourself?

Not very much – a little bit obviously. Tom did masses, he was sort of an expert on it by the time we came to shooting. But when I started going down that path it felt like that wasn't really helping. I was getting no closer to understanding how to do it. It wasn't really opening any doors. The thing that was useful was thinking about him as autistic, because that’s something concrete that you can actually study a bit. And it's psychological so you can get into what's happening in somebody's brain. So we looked at that and we looked at animals, just for, I'm not sure how much of it is even visible onscreen, but we just looked at the way animals interact with the world through smelling and what that does to their bodies and that kind of thing. We also talked an awful lot about motivation. We were keen that he shouldn't just be a monster, or some kind of hunchback of Notre Dame stock figure, but that there's something human that's motivating him. That's what we tried to concentrate on.

The teacher student relationship you have with Dustin Hoffman in the film looks like it could have spilled over into real life. Was that the case?

Yes, it was something that Dustin mentioned to me actually. I think he was quite conscious of it, that he has a wealth of experience and I'm just starting out. So that dynamic was definitely feeding into what we were doing together in the scenes. So I think it really helped actually.

Your character's a little nervous in the room with him. Were you?

I was nervous at first. Very, very nervous. Because he is a kind of legend and meeting a legend is always pretty frightening. I couldn't really believe it at first, I couldn't believe I was in the same room acting with him, it didn't seem possible. And so the nerves are probably pretty real. As I said, we did all of that stuff in the first two weeks of the shoot so it was a tense kind of period anyway, when you're making your first steps into something. There was a lot of tension in everybody. But Dustin, because of his personality, he's pretty brilliant at dispelling all of that and making people enjoy what they do. I think that’s very important to him. It's quite amazing to see in somebody who's been doing it as long as he has, the kind of energy that he still brings. That was pretty amazing.

What's your favourite smell?

My favourite smell is the smell of Autumn, particularly around Guy Fawkes night, with bonfires and fireworks. I love that firework smell and autumn and things decaying. I like that a lot.

And what have you been up to since you finished 'Perfume'?

I started doing a film called 'The Restraint of Beasts' which we haven't finished yet, I don't know when we'll finish it. And then I did a play for six months called 'The Seagull' at the National Theatre. And then I just did a part in this film about Bob Dylan, which is really interesting. With a brilliant director, Todd Haynes.

Are you playing Dylan in it?

Yeah. One of the seven versions.

Are you a Dylan fan? I'm a bit obsessed with him.

Me too now, I'm completely in love with him. The deeper you go, the more obsessive you become. I'm completely and utterly obsessed. I think he's absolutely fucking incredible. What's your favourite album?

I like 'Highway 61'. And you?

If I had to choose it would be 'Bringing it All Back Home'. I love that album.

Hasn't he allowed his own music to be used for the first time in the film?

Yeah so he's obviously behind it in some way. He certainly wasn't around when I was there. The film is exploring his chameleon quality, how he's kind of different every time he appears. How he reinvents himself. That's what Todd's fascinated by, this kind of constant reinvention, that shape-shifting personality.

'Perfume – The Story of a Murderer' is released on Boxing Day.

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