Luke Mably's

Royal Romp

by Lynn B.

Cute Luke Mably is part of the hot Brit actor invasion that is sweeping tinseltown. When the producers of the new romantic comedy The Prince and Me, had popular actress Julia Stiles signed on, they had to search for her “other half”. Director Martha Coolidge discovered that the best chemistry existed between Julia and relative newcomer Luke. Mably really does look a bit like the Prince of Denmark, a royal who is actually engaged to a commoner. Luke even posed as a prince at a restaurant to see how he’d be treated. Mably has had a few small parts, among them, the sci-fi horror flick 28 Days Later and in the holocaust drama “Uprising” co-starring Leelee Sobieski but “Prince” offered his first big lead role.

We wondered how the actor was holding up after being suddenly thrust into the glare of the press. He bounced into the room looking a bit different than he appears in the film; blonde locks are brownish and spikey and, in tee shirt and jeans, the actor looked more like a college kid kicking back on Saturday than the son of a royal family. Picture a hot Paul McCartney accent when this hottie speaks.

AGW: You must find all this a bit weird.

Luke: It’s a little bit surreal yeah. Sometimes I get asked questions that I haven’t really given much thought to. That’s when I get embarrassed. I think, ‘I should have thought about that’.

AGW: We hear that you had kind of a Spielberg thing going on as a kid making your own horror films.

Luke: Yeah, but just messing around. One of my close friends when I was about 8 or 9 his dad brought home a video camera one weekend and he told us to look after it and said ‘This is the record button and this does that just don’t break it’. We were just like “whoa” really excited and we just let loose with it and before we knew it we were experts on how the camera worked. We were zooming and focusing and writing story boards and getting tomato ketchup on our faces and making these horrible horror films and then my sister got involved and a few of her friends and it became a sort of weekend thing.

AGW: Did that make you want to become an actor?

Luke: Well I did that and I really enjoyed it and I remember taking it up at school and the teacher said ‘do you enjoy it’ and ‘maybe this is something you should pursue’. But I didn’t really think that I wanted to be an actor and then I went to drama school for three years. Once I got into that, ‘boom’. It was called ‘speech and drama’ or was it ‘screech and trauma?’ From then on I was on a mission to go for this.

AGW: How did you get this part?

Luke: It was completely out of the blue. I’d done 28 Days Later with Danny Boyle, a relatively small part, and then after that, money ran dry and I was doing a courier job. I did a few short films and then out of the blue this came. I met Martha Coolidge and I read for her and she seemed to like what I did. Before I knew it, I was in New York doing a screen-test with Julia and then two weeks later I had the part. It was a crazy month.

AGW: Did you feel any pressure in being in a role as the male lead of a Hollywood studio film?

Luke: Yeah. You wonder if you can come up with the goods and most of the characters that I’ve played before this have been quite sort of bad boy, arrogant, not very nice guys so this is my gentleman part.

AGW: Was there any thought of what your princes in the U.K. are going through?

Luke: Prince William and Prince Harry? I read a lot about Prince William, both of them, I tried to get as much video footage as possible, but the problem is that all of the footage you have is of him in public and you don’t know what he’s like when he’s in his room or when he’s at college. Ideally it would have been great to meet him and sort of absorb him. I didn’t base it just around him. There’s a bit of me in there. He has got a pretty tough life. He’s very privileged but he was born into a life of rules and protocol and everything’s done for him. He’s in a sort of bubble.

AGW: How was the culture shock for coming over? Did you ever see anything like those lawn mower races in the film?

Luke: Did you know that was invented in England? It was. We just use [them] to cut our grass now. No I hadn’t done that before. I had to have training in lawn mower racing, which sounds ridiculous. They go about 60 mph these things.

AGW: Were there any off camera races just for fun?

Luke: Yeah. There’s a whole community of lawn mower racing. These guys take it really seriously, not just guys, gals, everyone. They sell their houses to put money into these things. I think one guy had a Ferrari engine in his. They modify them, they spend up to 30,000 pounds on these things. When I first read it in the script I did laugh and I though ‘ what?’ but it’s a lot of fun and I had to learn to do that.

AGW: What about milking cows on a farm?

Luke: Milking cows wasn’t totally new. My grandma used to live close to a farm in the lake district in England so we used to go up there, the family, and we used to find the cows and milk them.

AGW: Did you have to learn protocol; how a prince should stand or greet people?

Luke: Yes. I was really worried about making him a caricature and I was worried that it might slip into that. I think he becomes more of a real person as the film goes on. I worked closely with a movement teacher and with general posture, not fidgeting, what to do with your hands in public, how to shake hands, I read a lot of books on etiquette, table manners, small details.

AGW: How was working with Julia. Was she what you expected?

Luke: She was so kind, from the screen test onwards. I was pretty nervous when I flew over there and I was meeting Julia for the first time. She was so supportive just checking out ‘Are you alright’ and I’d say ‘Yeah, I’m alright’ and she’d be like ‘You’ll be alright’ and she’d do that throughout the whole shoot which I really appreciated. She really looked after me like a sister.

AGW: They say you guys had great chemistry. Did you work on it or did it just happen?

Luke: Hopefully we have got chemistry in the film and it worked but the way that we generally rehearsed was to not really read the script out loud but to talk through what the scene was really about and then when we came to the day of shooting we’d just kind of go for it and discover ourselves while shooting. I remember going out for dinner with Julia and deciding let’s not get to know each other too much as people. It was Julia who suggested that and I understood where she was coming from and we learned about each other as we shot the film.

AGW: If you didn’t really know each other well, don’t you find the passionate stuff kind of awkward?

Luke: I’ve had experience with that [laughs]. I’ve played characters before who would do kissing scenes. The best way to see it is just as another scene. You know, like ‘When’s the kissing scene?’ ‘Well it’s next Thursday’. It’s part of the story, it’s part of the action.

AGW: Did you actually pretend to be a prince and go into a restaurant?

Luke: [grins] I had a few days off rehearsals and I was pacing up and down my hotel room and thinking ‘what else can I do?’ So I found Ben (Miller who plays the Prince’s assistant in the film) and I said ‘let’s go out for about three hours and be our characters’. This was in Toronto. He came up to my hotel room and we put suits on and I think he had some shades so he put those on and he sort of looked like an FBI [agent]. Then I put a cap on and shades on and I think I had a mobile phone and I put on a European pullover and then we left the hotel room and we got into a taxi. We arrive there and I didn’t do much except pretend to be on the phone to a friend like we were organizing a party. Ben went up and said ‘I’ve got the prince of Denmark with me and we’d like to have a table’ and people didn’t argue with it. They sat us down and I start ordering tea and cake and the waiter asked what kind of tea and I said ‘Earl Grey and Chocolate cake’. Word spread around the restaurant and people were whispering and waitresses were coming up to me not knowing whether to shake my hand or curtsy.

AGW: Did you have to pay?

Luke: No comment! [laughs]

AGW: You and Ben have a very funny relationship in the movie.

Luke: Well, that’s why I wanted to do that. Even getting in and our of taxis he would come around and open the door. Ben said ‘Sir, wait inside’ and the cab driver was like ‘who did I just have in my cab?’ and Ben said ‘the Prince of Denmark’ and he said ‘I knew it was someone famous’ and he was like ‘do I charge him?. Even in the back of the cab we wanted to make sure the conversation was right so he was asking me ‘So this is the diary, what would you like to do on Tuesday? Would you like to meet Aaron Carter? Would you like to go rollerblading’?

AGW: Nobody questioned that you were not speaking Danish?

Luke: With all due respect to the Toronto community, I don’t think we would have gotten away with it in London. I think it’s the accent. He is from Denmark and I did play him with a British accent. I worked with a voice coach and I had some Danish friends that I talked to and I got a Danish accent down and I worked really hard on it. Just before shooting, for one reason or another, we decided to go with closer to my own voice and we would say that he was educated in Oxford and Cambridge and he would have lost that.

AGW: Did you ever meet any royalty?

Luke: No I haven’t. I would love to meet royalty especially one of the princes and absorb him but that wasn’t realistic. I’ve had to pay a lot of interest to the royal family since doing this film and learn stuff that I didn’t even know.

AGW: Has anybody asked you to do something with an American accent?

Luke: Yes. I’ve been working on it but I want to make sure I get it right. I don’t want people to say ‘what’s that English guy doing that American accent?’ I want it to be authentic. I want to knock it down and make sure it’s correct.

AGW: Are you working on anything right now?

Luke: I just finished a film called Color me Kubrick about a man in 1994 in England who went around pretending to be the film director Stanley Kubrick. John Malkovich plays him and I’m playing one of the guys he cons. He’d go around telling then that he’s Stanley Kubrick and promising them to be in his movie. And people got sucked into it and before he knew it he had all these privileges in hotels.

AGW: Humm, kind of like you pretending to be a real prince?

Luke: [laughing] Exactly.

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