Taking a Bite Out of Stardom

He might be the most notorious vampire you’ve never heard of. Stuart Townsend, that is, the Irish actor tapped to play Lestat de Lioncourt in “The Queen of the Damned,” the upcoming sequel to “Interview With the Vampire.”

Well-known in Ireland and England, the 28-year-old may only be familiar to U.S. moviegoers who frequent art houses, thanks to his performances in this year’s “Simon Magus,” as a Jewish scholar, and last summer’s “Wonderland,” as an Irish photojournalist on the London dating scene.

Although Anne Rice fans will have to wait until 2002 to assess Townsend’s turn as Lestat, he hit U.S. screens Wednesday with “About Adam,” a romantic comedy set in Dublin. In the title role, Townsend plays a mischievous Lothario who seduces three sisters--Kate Hudson, Frances O’Connor and Charlotte Bradley--as well as their brother (Alan Maher).

Filmed before Hudson, O’Connor and Townsend landed their respective roles in “Almost Famous,” “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” and “The Queen of the Damned,” “About Adam” was released this January in Ireland and in England in March.

Townsend’s challenge was to tailor his performance to match each character’s view. One sister sees Adam as a tragic figure, another as a sexual partner and the other as a potential husband.

“I didn’t want to put on a fake mustache for different scenes,” the theatrically trained actor says over breakfast at a West Hollywood cafe. “Adam is the one person you don’t get inside, you don’t see his perspective. He’s an ambiguous character. The only way to play it was to play it off the other characters.”

“What Stuart did extremely well,” says “About Adam” writer-director Gerard Stembridge (“Guiltrip”), “was not to make the different versions of Adam completely showy. Stuart just subtly shifted in different directions--he’s kind of shy, kind of brooding or more of a sexual predator--while the character remains the same character throughout.”

Stembridge, a well-regarded Dublin-based playwright and director, says originally he and the film’s producers thought they were going to need a higher-profile star. But when Townsend’s name came up, Stembridge thought he’d be ideal, having attended all of Townsend’s Dublin stage performances.

Eager to Escape Life in Ireland

Townsend grew up 20 minutes outside Dublin in Howth, which he describes as a “picturesque fishing village,” population 5,000, where “everybody knows everybody.” While he politely declines to offer any further details about his upbringing (“It’s funny when a lot of actors talk about their personal stuff”), he does acknowledge that he had no interest in acting as a youth, although he held a burning desire to flee Ireland.

“I wanted to see deserts,” Townsend recalls with enthusiasm. “When you come from the sea there are no deserts; it’s all green. We grew up saturated with American culture. We’d see all of these glorious deserts and never-ending roads. It was a romantic image for me growing up. I just wanted to travel.”

At 18, Townsend began dating a woman who attended drama school. Intrigued, he signed up for a two-week course that led to his enrolling in Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting for a two-year program.

“It changed my life,” Townsend says. “No joke. It was great. I got to meet different people; I got out of my village, moved to town. I began to live for myself.”

Once he was finished with school, Townsend established a theater company with fellow students and awarded himself his first job in an improvised piece called “True Lines,” which eventually landed a run in London. From there, Townsend says he worked in “some big commercial shows in Dublin and then I got sick of theater. I did it every day for three years. I decided I wasn’t going to work again until I got a film.”

Fortunately, Townsend did get a film, a supporting role opposite Stephen Rea in “Trojan Eddie.” “Finally my dream of money and travel came true,” he says. “I went to Central America and when I came back I spent a month in Dublin, got a good agent and moved to London.”

From there, Townsend appeared back to back in “Shooting Fish,” “Under the Skin” and “Resurrection Man” before landing “Wonderland” and eventually the role of Aragorn, the rightful king of Middle Earth in New Line’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Shooting began in New Zealand in October 1999 under the hand of director Peter Jackson, but the experience proved short-lived, with Townsend off the project in just a few days, replaced by Viggo Mortensen. At the time, New Line’s official position chalked up the dismissal to actor-director “creative differences.”

Although he’s uncomfortable serving up his version of events--”It’s a long story,” Townsend says--he does concede that it was a “nasty experience.”

“Like any experience good or bad, it was a lesson,” he continues.

“Although you may not have a map through life, there is a plan somewhere. As you get older you learn to let things go.”

Still raw from his “The Lord of the Rings,” experience, however, Townsend says that as the August 2000 production date for Warner Bros.’ “The Queen of the Damned” approached, he felt a twinge of trepidation. Not due to the pressure of following up “Interview”--although who could blame him, considering Townsend inherited Lestat’s cape from Tom Cruise and faces the critical eye of Lestat creator Rice as well as her legion of fans?--but because it could have been another possibly perilous Hollywood studio effort.

With the role behind him, Townsend says, “This film was cool,” crediting director Michael Rymer (“Angel Baby”) with creating a protective on-set atmosphere. “There was never any pressure on the actors, no one forced you to do anything that you weren’t comfortable with.” A strange compliment considering the rigors Rymer ran Townsend through.

In “Queen,” Rice’s third installment of her “Vampire Chronicles,” Lestat has become a rock ‘n’ roll superstar, and the role, says Rymer, is “the hardest I could imagine concocting for an actor.” To play Lestat, Townsend would have to perform a live concert show on the outskirts of Melbourne for 3,000 extras. He would not only need to master a complex set of lyrics and music (composed by Korn’s Jonathan Davis) but genuine rock star moves, and a swoop through the air from 100 feet up.

“He was petrified,” Rymer recalls. “I kept saying to him, ‘Stuart, when’s the next time you’re going to get to play a rock ‘n’ roll vampire? Enjoy it, get a kick out of it!’ ”

“We had 300 actors in the front who were meant to go, ‘Ya-a-a-a-y! We love you!’ but the rest were just there and not paid,” says Townsend. “It was scary. I had to put a whole bottle of tequila down me before I went on stage.”

Rymer says he screen-tested Townsend after seeing the actor in a preview of Nicholas Hytner’s London production of Tennessee Williams’ “Orpheus Descending,” opposite Helen Mirren.

“The main thing was that the person playing Lestat had to be a convincing French nobleman from the 18th century who’s made into a vampire, wakes up in the 21st century and becomes a rock star,” Rymer explains. “I think I was most nervous about the rock star part. . . . But I think Stuart had . . . that slightly irreverent, dark, surly edge you need to be a rock star.”

Next up for Townsend is the thriller “24 Hours” for director Luis Mandoki (“When a Man Loves a Woman”), co-starring Charlize Theron, Kevin Bacon and Courtney Love. Filming takes place in Vancouver, with Townsend as a father who pursues his daughter’s kidnappers. “I’m this straight guy, which is kind of good as I just played Lestat,” says Townsend. “This character is quite different for me.”

Townsend, who is single, says he’ll take the summer off and spend it in Ireland, working on his music, which he describes as “ambient and gothic.” He has a demo deal with Warner Bros., and if the label likes his work, he says, “it will go somewhere.”

Despite the possibility that playing Lestat could catapult him into movie stardom, Townsend says he’d like to return to the theater. “You really have to exercise your voice and you work your [rear] off. There’s no limo in the morning, you earn 200 pounds a week, and you get a chance every night to do something different.”

Rymer concurs with Townsend’s self-assessment: “I’m not speaking for Stuart, but I imagine that he’s not that interested in being famous for its own sake. The only reason I could imagine Stuart wanting to be a movie star would be to get the opportunity to do the things he loves.”