I'm looking for the next job to pay for the wedding.
it," Ioan Gruffudd says of the attention from his female fans.Photo: Natalie Boog
FOR DAVID WENHAM, it was SeaChange. For Colin Firth, it was Pride and Prejudice and for Russell Crowe, it was female lust.
the front door. For a little-known Welsh actor with an unspellable name, it was the television series Hornblower.
adventures during the Napoleonic wars.
On fan web sites, Gruffudd Fantastic, the stretchy superhero, in the comic-book be a sequel, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, which brings him to a Sydney hotel room, dressed in a fashionable suit rather than a ruffled shirt and captain's hat.
As he has his photo taken, I mention that I liked the white jacket he was wearing at a screening the previous evening. With a Welsh lilt, Gruffudd disarmingly says he was worried people would order drinks from him.
No Hollywood vanity there.
Hornblower?
projection onto you.
But with that comes responsibility. [As the love to continue to do."
attention?
Gruffudd laughs. "You'll have to ask my fiancee. I'm getting married in September.
It's just part of my work. You can't ignore it. But you have to enjoy it and be grateful for it.
"
With parents who were teachers, Gruffudd grew up in a musical household in Cardiff, playing that unsexy instrument, the oboe. "I never really had a want for anything," he says. "I had everything lovely, a roof over my head, food.
That's stood me in good stead really for this sort of crazy career as an actor, which is so up the Valley inspired an interest in acting at 12. "My mother keeps reminding me that one day I said, 'Mum, I'm going to audition for a soap opera.' She said, 'Oh, really, where did this come from?
' doing it, I fell in love with it. I was very fortunate that I got given that opportunity at a very young age."
Angeles with his fiancee, the English actress Alice Evans.
Now that he's cracked a comic-book franchise, you have to wonder whether this polite Welshman has gone Hollywood. "I certainly don't get caught up in the big house with a swimming pool," Gruffudd says. "But I do have a house with a swimming pool and I do enjoy driving around in my little Jaguar.
Those are the only frivolities that I have - a huge mortgage and a fancy car. I'm getting married wedding."
deluge of movie offers.
But after shooting Fantastic Four in 2004, Gruffudd was unemployed for six months.
that it's such a competitive industry," he says. "Certainly there Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal, Toby Maguire, DiCaprio and all those guys are the ones getting the first bids, which is fair enough.
"Financially, there was no need to work. I've been blessed in that sense that I don't have to take whatever job comes along. I'm able to construct and manage a career.
"
that show his range. (Let Hugh Grant's performance in the thriller Extreme Measures serve as a warning.)
a bit darker and a bit more mysterious," he says.
"But in the same breath, I'm realising there's a bit of a niche in the market to play that leading man - that classic Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, everyman sort of character, like Tom Hanks does so well.
News RSS