Five minutes before we speak, Ben Barnes posts a photo online showcasing the glamour of press junkets. He stands alone in a room, pouring himself a soft drink. He’s spent the day talking about his latest movie, Seventh Son. For someone who jokingly tells me, “You’re number 522,000 of the day,” Barnes is a veritable ball of energy, passionate about his work and the work of those around him. He’s quick to brush aside his own growing presence in an industry he loves to focus on the joy of working with his idols. “I am constantly surprised by the kind of people they allow me to share a screen with,” he laughs.
Co-star Jeff Bridges was the main reason Barnes auditioned for the role. “That was the main draw, to work with ‘The Dude’, and one of The Fabulous Baker Boys – I’d be lying if I said that one of the main draws wasn’t to work with a couple of my heroes.”
Bridges plays Master Gregory, the mentor to Barnes’ character, Tom Ward, and a man on a mission. “He has a week to try and train me to be his apprentice,” says Barnes. It’s the time of the rare blood moon, “which means that Mother Malkin – played by the very glamorous Julianne Moore – and her evil sidekicks, including warlocks and witches, their power is growing”.
Though on the surface it sounds like standard fantasy fare, Seventh Son takes the typical hero/villain dynamic and turns it on its head. The heroes aren’t purely good, the villains not without sympathy. There’s something very human about these fantastical beings battling for their own ideas of a safe, free world.
A veteran of fantasy films, including Stardust and the Chronicles Of Narnia franchise, Barnes is also a big fan of the genre. “I think fantasy is so representative of everything else,” he says. “I think that the human story, the mentor/apprentice story, the love story can be set anywhere, in space or in a desert or anywhere. But I think the themes of destiny and good and evil between people work particularly well in a fantasy setting. That, balanced with the escapist nature of it, the kind of humdrum life of a pig farmer versus this kind of adventure and the adrenaline of fighting for innocence and justice over the dark side – I think it’s just a great setting for metaphor, really.”
Seventh Son is an action-heavy movie, and Barnes did many of his own stunts, including a water battle with a boggart. It’s a change from the shape-shifting boggarts of the Harry Potter universe. In the world of The Spook’s Apprentice (the book by Joseph Delaney on which Seventh Son is based), boggarts are giant creatures, blind and aggressive, and the scene in which Master Gregory and Tom run into one of the creatures quickly became Barnes’ favourite to film. “They built this huge mechanical gimbal which would serve as the boggart’s arm, so essentially I could just get very angry at machinery rather than anything real,” he says. “We had some fun; a couple of my favourite little lines were in that sequence, which I shouted at Jeff’s character. It was definitely a lot of fun to shoot.”
With his next projects including the musical flick Jackie & Ryan, co-starring Katherine Heigl, and Sons Of Liberty, a miniseries on the History Channel, one thing is certain – we’re going to be seeing a lot more of Ben Barnes in 2015. “My world has a lot of fantasy,” he admits, “but not a lot of spare time – I’ll always take what I can get and try and pick the most interesting stories.”
Seventh Son is in cinemas now.
