Ahh, there we are. Great. Grand. Let’s carry on then.
Hang on just one quick sec, if you would. Matthew Goode needs to light a cigarette.
Oh, you hadn’t? Because you’ve never heard of him? Well, let’s get cracking straight away to change all that.
A bit of Googling will place our chap in the same sentences as guys such as Hugh Grant and Brad Pitt, which should give you a frame of reference, though it might seem a touch premature and a little off-base, seeing as he has appeared in fewer than a half-dozen movies and in his latest, “The Lookout,” he plays the vile, skinheaded bad guy.
Here, let him set a scene.
“I’m sitting here on the — near the — balcony — the phone doesn’t quite stretch, of course — looking out over L.A. on a very beautiful, although slightly smoggy day. Slightly smoggy — shock, horror,” he says, words tumbling on top of one another. “And although I do appreciate the weather and stuff, it’s not a town I feel that comfortable in. I’m much more a New York and London boy.”
Fair enough. Luckily for him, the 28-year-old actor, who first hit theaters as Mandy Moore’s boyfriend in “Chasing Liberty” (2004) and garnered more serious attention after landing the part of the spoiled little rich boy in Woody Allen’s “Match Point” (2005), has never actually had to film a movie in Tinseltown.
But still, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s rewind things, so you’ll understand how Goode came to be in Los Angeles on this slightly smoggy day.
He acted in small shows and school plays as a child. (“It was one of those things that I really enjoyed and hated at the same time. ‘Cause I used to blush remarkable amounts,” he says. “I’d be blushing onstage, knowing I was doing it but actually at the same time having fun.”) Then came adolescence and a load of sports — cricket, rugby, soccer, tennis — followed by a need to study something in university.
“And I thought, ‘Well, it’d be interesting to do drama.’ My mother was thrilled about it,” he remembers. “My father was like, ‘Uh-huh, right, you’re going to be a dropout in life.’ “
Ahh, but not with a smile like that. No, no. He got an agent and a few small roles and the gig with Moore, which “people look back now and expect me to be embarrassed about, because . . . it was this romantic comedy and it wasn’t hugely successful.
“I read the script in the bath, and I refilled it about three times — ’cause I read scripts in the bath — I know, I’m crazy. And I read the whole thing in there. Which is a very good sign,” he says. “And I loved the character. I loved the story.”
The story of “The Lookout,” which stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, belongs to a young man whose life is thrown off course by a brain injury and who finds himself being manipulated by a bunch of thugs, led by Goode’s character, into taking part in a bank robbery.
“So it’s been really hard but also really fruitful,” he says. “I think if you get everything you want, at once, you can possibly lose your head.”
Anyway, he’s awfully sorry, but he’s got to run now. They’ve got these interviews packed in tight, and though he’d love to chat longer, another has been left waiting too long.
But “it’s been a real pleasure,” he says. “Thank you very much, indeed.”
And that seems all right. It couldn’t possibly take you more than 15 minutes to be fully charmed, right?
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From highbrow to lowdown – LA Times – 18th March 2007
Paul Cullum
TRAINED at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London, Matthew Goode is known here for a series of upper-crust British roles — not just Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” but thankless male ingenues found in the likes of “Imagine Me & You” and “Chasing Liberty,” opposite Mandy Moore.
Sporting a flawless American accent — “I was British, but my father was American, apparently,” says Goode — and virtually unrecognizable from his previous roles, the veddy British Goode maintains his stateside makeover just showed up on the set, along with the character: “The moment I spoke the lines and had the idea of the character — that was the accent that came out.
“I prepared for it rather like a theater role, because there’s a lot of open-endedness about Gary: We don’t know where he comes from or why he’s doing this. He is maligned by life, slightly. He’s quite an intelligent chap. But it hasn’t gone very well for him. He’s a chancer, really, on the wrong side of the law, morally ambiguous.
“And it’s a shame, but there were a couple of scenes in the film that didn’t make it in where he’s physically very violent as well. It shows what a nasty piece of work he is.”
Of the filmmakers, Goode says, “They took a real chance on me. At that point, I was just an English bloke who didn’t know anyone. But then, it makes it a lot cheaper.”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-mar-18-ca-lookoutgoode18-story.html
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THE ORIGINALS – Matthew Goode | Actor – New York Times – T Magazine – 11th March 2007
By PAUL L. UNDERWOOD
Despite idolizing Dapper Dans like Richard Burton and David Niven while growing up, Matthew Goode considers himself a jeans-and-T-shirt type of bloke: “I like minimum fuss — elegantly disheveled.” He has played upper-class Britons in films like Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” but in his next movie, “The Lookout,” Goode appears as a psycho with a shaved head and a beard, a look he came to love. “I don’t really like my hair long; it makes me start to get a bit vain,” he says. So, he prefers the monastic look? “Yeah, but without the morals.”
[Robert Maxwell]