Total Film Interviews Ben Barnes
Have you seen the finished film?
I’ve seen obviously the trailer and the first ten minutes and I’ve seen a little bit more than that having done ADR, the voice looping, but little tiny bits. Honestly, they asked me if I wanted to see it as it was but I said that I wanted to see it finished because I want to be as excited as anyone else. I’m a Narnia fan, I read the books when I was eight and watched the TV series and since I’ve been so heavily involved in it I don’t want to see it and have it not completely fulfil my expectations because it was such an amazing experience doing it, went to all these amazing places, to have it then not be completed… I just want to be blown away like everyone else and I know I will be.
In which case, are there any moments you’re particularly excited to see?
I’m very keen to see the scenes with Reepicheep, because that was very testing for me. It was the only real scenario where I had to fake everything because everything else they did for me – they built a castle on the backlot, they had an actor in a green suit playing a badger, with a little tray doing little movement and you have someone to relate to, the centaurs spend a few hours in make-up so they really look like centaurs and they’re on power-risers so it looks great and the fighting is very physical, you really get stuck into it. So everything is real – you go to these amazing places where everything looks CGIed, with a river, a beach, trees, a snow-capped mountain and a sunset… I thought it looked like CGI when I was there. But Reepicheep I’m keen to see because that was literally a wire with an orange dot on the top with someone shouting off from the side. I’m keen to see how that pans out. But all of it! I’m excited to see how all of it looks.
Dawn Treader…
Caspian is old after that – he’s only young in two, but I will absolutely be playing him in Dawn Treader. That was the other thing about the age thing, it’s much easier for an audience to accept a 26-year-old as a king than and a ruler of a land and a captain of a ship because more time passes between the second and the third in Narnia than it does it in the real world, so it’s much easier to age me than to have some 14-year-old trying to play a king in the next one. It was easier for me to play younger in the first one. In Dawn Treader I’ll be more my own age. It’s gonna be great, but he’s still actually, even in Dawn Treader, he’s not a confident a character. He’s very cut up by his lack of family around him and that fact he’s been thrown into this leadership role that he’s very uncomfortable with, he doesn’t feel he deserves it, which I think is quite an interesting thing for a “hero”.
Read the full the interview at Total Film’s website here.
Thanks to icarus for the find!
