Jousting With Destiny: A Reluctant Actor’s Tale

Paul Bettany gives a cheeky performance as England’s great writer and poet Geoffrey Chaucer in the action-adventure “A Knight’s Tale, “ which opened Friday. Better make that a “revealing” performance, since Bettany is buck naked for his rather lengthy introductory scene.

“All together it represents five days of nudity,” Bettany says rather sheepishly, adding that nude scenes are “just not fun. It’s sort of humiliating and you feel very vulnerable.”

Writer-director Brian Helgeland (co-writer of “L.A. Confidential”) basically dared Bettany, 30, to do the sequence that finds a penniless Chaucer stripped of all possessions and clothing because of his gambling debts.

“It is a funny introduction,” says Helgeland. “I sent the script to him and didn’t tell him about that part. He said, ‘You bastard. I am naked all the time.’ I said, ‘Can you do it or can’t you do it?’ He said, ‘I can do it.’ ”

Filled with such classic rock songs as Queen’s “We Will Rock You” and Bowie’s “Golden Years,” “A Knight’s Tale” is set in 14th century Europe. Heath Ledger plays the lowborn William, who, with the help of Chaucer’s rapier wit and wordplay, reinvents himself as a dashing nobleman and becomes the hot new star on the medieval jousting tournament circuit.

Chaucer also serves as William’s announcer at the tournaments--a sort of medieval Michael Buffer. But instead of booming “Let’s get ready to rumble,” Chaucer introduces William with such flowery prose as:

“The rock, the hard place.

Like a wind from Gelderland he sweeps by.

Blown far from his homeland in search of glory and honor!

We walk in the garden of his turbulence!”

Sipping on a Czech beer at the lounge of the Four Seasons, Bettany--tall, rangy and rather serious--confesses those speeches were terrifying to perform in front of 3,000 extras. “You go home at night and work on your speeches, you shoot them and then nobody laughs. It’s at that point you realize, yes, I am in the Czech Republic and no one speaks a word of English.”

So Bettany developed a flag system, so the extras would know when to laugh. Bettany wrote in the script where he wanted them to respond. “Then they would lift the flag up and they would laugh.”

Helgeland and Bettany became good friends while making the movie. In fact, Helgeland considers the actor to be his alter ego. The two met a few years back when Helgeland had hired him to be in another film, the gothic horror story “Sin Eater.”

“It’s just one of those things that it didn’t happen,” says the director. “We could never get the budget down. When that didn’t end up going, I sat and wrote [“A Knight’s Tale”]. I always knew I was going to write a part for Paul in the movie. I was looking at my history timeline book and Chaucer was in his prime then. He has all the best lines which a writer should always have.”

Bettany, says Helgeland, makes his performance look effortless but “he does his homework and tries to figure out what a scene is about.”

“I have never done comedy before,” says Bettany. “I really loved doing it. I slept better at night because the part wasn’t eating away at my head. It was like a holiday. I think what you see on the screen represents 4 1/2 months of real love and affection. It truly was like a paid holiday.”

Despite the fact that his father is an actor--he’s in theater and lives in Scotland--Bettany never took an interest in the profession when he was growing up. “I left school at 16,” he says. “I was lost for a couple of years.”

During his “lost” period, Bettany eked out a living as a busker--singing and playing guitar in the London subways. “There is no skill to do it, you just have to be very loud,” says Bettany. “It was the hardest work I have ever done.”

After two years at busking, Bettany enrolled in London’s well-regarded Drama Center, where he studied acting for three years. “The impulse [to become an actor] was a negative one,” Bettany explains. “I like writing songs, but I don’t like anyone I don’t know listening to them. They are quite revealing, I think. The thing about acting is people can go, ‘I bet that [character] is what he’s like.’ But they never actually know.”

After graduation, Bettany landed a major role on the London stage in Stephen Daldry’s award-winning production of “An Inspector Calls.”

“I had money to pay my rent,” Bettany says. “I was in shock. I was thinking, somebody is paying me 500 pounds a week, which is an extraordinary amount.”

TV and film roles quickly followed. Bettany is most proud of his work in the ‘60s-era mob film “Gangster No. 1,” in which he plays a volatile mobster. The film has yet to open in Los Angeles. “It’s a flawed film,” says Bettany. “But I think it’s a beautiful film.”

Bettany is currently filming Ron Howard’s “A Beautiful Mind,” in which he plays the best friend of Russell Crowe’s character.

Bettany and Helgeland may team up again soon. Helgeland has just written a new adaptation of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” This time around, he hopes to cast Bettany as the obsessed Captain Ahab.