His own dark knight

There was a time only several years ago when the English actor Clive Owen would fly to L.A. to make the Hollywood rounds, meeting as he says, “the assistants of the assistants of the assistants.” He never met anyone who could make any decisions. Most had never seen his work so said things like “I hear you do a lot of theater,” or “Are you a good guy or a bad guy? You have to make a choice.” “It’s quite soul destroying,” he remembers, dryly.

Owen opted to preserve his soul, or at least his ego. He quit hustling in America, returned to England to the artistically satisfying, if not particularly remunerative, world of British TV and little films.

Five years later, he’s had the last laugh. He’s back in L.A. top-lining a major American movie, a Jerry Bruckheimer juggernaut no less. The 39-year-old Owen stars as the title character in “King Arthur,” Disney’s reimagining of the classic Arthurian legend.

Forget the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle and romantic notions of chivalry that have formed the pith of countless versions of the Arthurian legend. This is not the familiar story from “The Sword in the Stone” or “Camelot” but a unification tale, imbued with the “Braveheart” aesthetic, with grime on every surface and belligerence to burn, written by the scribe of “Gladiator” (David Franzoni) and helmed by the director of the urban drama “Training Day” (Antoine Fuqua).

The film, opening Wednesday, is inspired by the hazy shards of fact that underlie the legend. Set in the 5th century as opposed to the later Middle Days, and missing magic, this is noble warrior Arthur, part British, part Roman, striving to protect the island from marauding Saxons (led by a delightful Stellan Skarsgard in a long blond wig) as the Roman empire disintegrates.

This is the first Bruckheimer $100-million extravaganza anchored by someone almost completely unknown to American audiences. If Owen feels daunted by carrying the weight of summer tent pole expectations on his shoulders, he certainly doesn’t show it. “When I got the part, all I thought about was how can I do this. The rest of it is other people’s responsibility. I don’t market the film. There’s a whole world of people being paid to do that job,” he says.

In person, over coffee in the garden of Orso, Owen appears to exhibit little of the flinty masculinity that he’s well known for on the British stage and screen. Gone is the white, never seen-the-sun pallor that’s haunted many of his performances. The slash of cheekbones has been softened by a slight tan. In fact, he’s just come from Texas, where he’s starring in Robert Rodriguez’s film “Sin City,” playing his first American. Dressed in khakis, a black polo shirt and blue leather flip-flops, he appears relaxed and amiable, though when he doesn’t want to answer a question, he just smiles conspiratorially, fingers crossed in front of his mouth, and refuses to budge. His teeth gleam much brighter and straighter than in his Brit film days, though he denies with a charming lack of conviction that anything’s been done to them.

“As soon as I saw him, I knew he was King Arthur,” says Fuqua, who wanted a new face, preferably a Brit, because Arthur is a staple of British lore. Like much of Hollywood, he’d first seen Owen in the art house hit “Croupier” which debuted in America in 2000; he noticed he had “a Steve McQueen thing going in a European way. I didn’t want the pretty boy king with the long blond hair, like the cover of some romance novel. I wanted a guy who wasn’t pretty but who had something to him, a little more brooding, who didn’t wear his emotions on his sleeves.”

Owen pointedly doesn’t come from the Hugh Grant, swell toff, erudite school of English actors. He hasn’t appeared in a Richard Curtis film, and in Robert Altman’s Upstairs-Downstairs murder mystery “Gosford Park,” Owen was definitively downstairs, playing a murderous manservant.

On screen, Owen is a throwback to an era when men were still willing to do the hard work of being men and not whine about it.

“In England, we don’t produce that many of them either,” says Patrick Marber, who wrote and directed Owen in the 1997 stage version of the relationship drama “Closer.” The film version, starring Owen and Julia Roberts and directed by Mike Nichols debuts this year. “He’s a global anomaly. It’s a particular kind of masculinity that isn’t macho, but you kind of know it when you see it. He’s not drawn to heroic characters but tends to go for troubled, brooding characters. There’s something of Richard Burton in him, or Laurence Harvey. [He has] ... that ability to be very powerful and very strong and very vulnerable simultaneously. It’s a very attractive quality in a male actor. He’s not vain, which really helps.”

“It was a very narrow list [of who could play Arthur],” says Bruckheimer, who’s had a long and significant role in shaping masculinity in American pop culture, from Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” to Johnny Depp in last summer’s “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “We were wondering ourselves, if we hadn’t chosen Clive, where we would have gone.”

Arthur is in fact Owen’s third major role in a big Hollywood film. The others, which include “Beyond Borders,” “flopped ignominiously,” a reality he reports with a certain ironic glee.

It’s his first classic hero, not that Owen sees him that way. “You can’t play heroic. How can you walk out and say, ‘I am heroic’? It’s boring,” he says dismissively. “All heroes have to go on some journey to become heroic. For me, the character is half Roman, half Briton who’s slightly in denial about his Briton side, who feels very Roman but the empire is changing, and everything he believes in is shifting around him. He’s grappling with that. You’ve got to have subtext as an actor.”

The classically trained Owen provides gravitas and compassion to a rather stoic characterization of Arthur, as the leader of a “Dirty Dozen”-like band of knights who’ve been indentured to the Roman Empire. His Guinevere (Keira Knightley) is a Woad, a member of the British Isle’s indigenous peoples, who are fighting for independence in blue body paint, and in Knightley’s case, fetching Versace-like bandeau body armor.

Owen says the only thing that made him nervous about playing Arthur was the riding. He estimated that two-thirds of the film took place on horseback, and he’d been thrown off his last horse. “I had this experience on a movie where I’d been put on a horse way out of my league who was a very nervous, anxious horse. That ended up freaking me out. I freaked it out and it was all horrible. There was certainly a sense of wariness.”

These days, Owens rides with aplomb, courtesy of months of training with his stunt double, who built back his confidence. Seeing him bear down on a big white Andalusian horse, an unyielding warrior in full chain mail, one would never know that Owen didn’t naturally emerge from the England of foxhunts and Wellies.

“He was pretty sore,” Bruckheimer says with a laugh. “It’s a physically tough thing to do because of the way he had to do it -- he actually had to have one hand free for a weapon. All that stuff was him actually doing it.”

Never in doubt

Owen insists he’s one of those walking cliches, the kind of kid who always knew he wanted to be an actor ever since he played the Artful Dodger in a grade school production of “Oliver.” One of five sons, raised by his mother and his stepfather, a railroad ticket clerk, Owen found refuge in acting.

“He comes from a fairly tough family in the Midlands, so he knows what poverty’s like, what violence is like. He comes from that background so he can always draw on those experiences,” says director Mike Hodges, a friend who cast Owen in the career-making “Croupier.” “There were a couple of brothers, and the implication is they were up to no good some of the time. They were a family of lots of testosterone. He’s the one that managed to escape.”

After graduating from high school, he spent two years on the dole, unable to break into professional acting. “At the time, I was a cocky little ‘so and so,’ and I didn’t think you could teach people to act,” he says. “After two years of unemployment, I thought, ‘Somebody, please get me into drama school.’ ” Getting into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts freed him; “If you have a pivotal time in your life where things change -- that was by far the biggest.”

Soon after finishing drama school, he landed the lead role in “Chancer,” a hit English TV series about a whiz kid who takes over a failing classic car company. “He pulled scams every week and gradually you realize that he’s a bit of a Robin Hood, that he’s defending these people.... It’s very ‘80s,” Owen says with a shrug.

The young, handsome star became catnip for the hyper-aggressive English tabloids and didn’t like it. “I was very young and very uncomfortable and I sort of thought you just have to do it ... talking to the Sun newspapers, and it was horrible.... Someone said to me, ‘You can always say no.’ When I went to do the second series, I said, ‘No.’ I didn’t want to talk to anybody. And I got this reputation as being difficult because I wouldn’t talk .... Experience and age,” he sighs. “You get better at dealing with these things. I’m a very different guy.”

Owen might have continued as a staple of the British theatrical world had it not been for “Croupier,” which was barely released in the U.K. but went on to become an unexpected art house hit in America. “It could have gone straight to video, but suddenly it made this impact and introduced me to an American audience. [I] feel incredibly lucky.”

Recently he reteamed with Hodges, a granddaddy of the British gangster genre, to play a grieving crime lord in “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which debuted in Los Angeles on Friday. Like Arthur, the character hews to his own code of honor.

“You have to play someone who’s very full up, and then put the lid on it,” says Owen, describing the air of furious containment that drives his performance. “Although he doesn’t speak very much, you don’t just breeze through. I like films where characters don’t talk that much. There’s often too much over-explaining. We’re all smarter than we’re often given credit for in terms of understanding people and characters.”

“What’s remarkable about him,” Marber says, “with all the success he’s had since 1997, he’s pretty much the same, just a bit more confident.”

Owen is married to Sarah-Jane Fenton, whom he met when he played Romeo to her Juliet in a Young Vic production of Shakespeare’s play. They live with their two daughters in London. Owen seems to expand when he reminisces about his family, although his burgeoning success takes its toll.

“It’s tough on the little ones, going away,” he says. “Mine are 4 and 7 and they don’t understand it.... When Dad’s gone to America, it’s disorientating. They’re never quite sure when Dad might take off. I just feel my downtime has to be reassuring and being with them, and that has to be the absolute priority.”

As Owen’s star ascends, one question continually dogs him: Is he going to be the next James Bond? It’s been rumored on the Internet and in the British tabloids, and Owen could certainly bring contemporary edginess back to the part of the womanizing superspy. Yet he swears he’s never negotiated the possibility, that this is just a case of mass hypnosis.

Once a paparazzo snapped a picture of him emerging from a London restaurant in long matted hair and burly black beard, part of his costume for “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead.” A few days later, a tabloid wrote that he was going to be the next James Bond, and “that the Bond people had asked me to go in disguise until they were ready to announce me,” he says. “That’s why I was in beard and hair. I was hiding myself!”

Of course, the question remains, would he play Bond if asked?

“I have no idea. I’d have to think about it. I learned a long time ago, only deal in facts,” he says, before bursting into a high-pitched giggle, unexpected for a man who’s bringing macho back to the theaters. “Especially in Hollywood.”