Actors like to talk about their years in the wilderness before fame hit. Harrison Ford was a carpenter. Jon Hamm spent decades waiting tables. Channing Tatum stripped. It gives them some regular-Joe mass to weigh against their new celebrity. Sam Claflin, 29, star of The Hunger Games and Pirates of the Caribbean, is no different.
“Everyone has their struggles, I think. After I left drama school I had six months of rejection after rejection,” he says, sipping on a pint in Kentish Town, north London, in unseasonable autumn sunshine. “I thought about a plan B.”
Wait a second… Six months? Six months isn’t a period in the wilderness. In acting terms that is a mere long weekend of unemployment. After which Claflin was cast in Pirates of the Caribbean, Snow White and the Huntsman, then The Hunger Games and The Riot Club, the film version of the play Posh, a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon Club. This was in addition to TV roles in Any Human Heart and The Pillars of the Earth. By any actor’s standards, hardly a rocky road.
Still, it’s easy to understand where he’s coming from. The speed of Claflin’s ascent to matinée idol, courtesy of two of the biggest franchises of the 21st century, would embarrass any normal bloke. And apart from his career, everything about Claflin screams normal bloke. He is friendly and self-effacing, handsome and articulate. He complains about the trousers he’s wearing for our shoot being too tight for his “footballer thighs”. He was a promising junior player growing up in Norwich (you can still hear a faint Norfolk lilt in his vowels). There’s a swallow tattoo on his bicep that he got for his 28th birthday and only after years of planning. He lives in Chiswick, west London, with his wife, fellow actor Laura Haddock, because he’s “not cool enough for east London”.
Claflin says the trousers he’s wearing for our shoot are too tight for his ‘footballer thighs’
He certainly seems more at home outside a grim Kentish Town pub than he was being fussed over by make-up artists in the hot studio. Does he even enjoy the fashion shoots? “I fucking hate them! Well, no…” he adds, perhaps mindful of his PR obligations, “I just can’t understand why people would wear any of those things. But I’ve learned to enjoy myself on the day.”
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