Kim Cattrall

World Screen Weekly, December 06, 2007

Actress

My Boy Jack

Best known for her Golden Globe-winning role as the sassy public relations executive Samantha Jones in the HBO series Sex and the City, actress Kim Cattrall offers viewers a much different persona in the British wartime drama My Boy Jack, distributed by Granada International.

In the movie, based on a true story, Cattrall plays Carrie, the American wife of British author Rudyard Kipling. The couple embarks on a frantic search for their 17-year-old son Jack, who suffers from poor eyesight and has gone missing shortly after going into combat during World War I.

Cattrall, in an exclusive interview with World Screen, admits that My Boy Jack director Brian Kirk was hesitant about her taking on the role as Carrie. “I met the director, who at first was a little reluctant,” acknowledged Cattrall. “Then he watched the films that I’ve done and said, ‘Well I think Kim would be great.’”

My Boy Jack is not Cattrall’s first foray into British film and television. Last year, she starred in the Channel 4 Film The Tiger’s Tail, a dark comedy directed by John Boorman. Stateside, her career has included roles in movies like The Bonfire of the Vanities, alongside Tom Hanks, and Disney’s Ice Princess. Offscreen, Cattrall has taken up a number of roles on London’s West End, including the play Whose Life Is It Anyway?, in which she plays quadriplegic Claire Harrison.

In fact, it was her stage work that had caught the attention of the casting director for My Boy Jack, who had seen her performance in David Mamet’s play The Cryptogram at London’s Donmar Warehouse and sent a script to Cattrall from his office to her London agent. The script was written by her co-star David Haig, who plays Kipling and also wrote the play that the movie was adapted from. “I read this play and said, ‘I would really love to do this,’” says Cattrall. “And I didn’t know that Kipling married an American. I had assumed he had married an English woman.”

Cattrall, who was born in England, also had her own personal reasons for taking on the role as Carrie, noting that her grandfather had fought in both World War I and II. “I have a military past, which I wasn’t really connected to in any shape or form,” she acknowledges. “This really made me very curious, looking back, not just in time, [to] what happened in World War I, but all these young, young men being slaughtered. [They would] literally come out of the trenches and just get shot."

To prepare for her role as Carrie, she read a number of books by Kipling, a biography of the novelist, and a lot of letters written between members of the family. Cattrall even spent the night in Kipling’s house in Vermont.

She expresses admiration for the character she played. “[Carrie] was this American woman from a very quiet, rural town,” says Cattrall. “She spoke her mind and she was tough. She was not liked at all. She became the gatekeeper between Kipling and the rest of the world, especially after Jack died.”

The film was shot over a period of six weeks last summer, with four days at Bateman’s, Kipling’s estate in East Sussex. It examines another side to the life of a “very private” man, says Cattrall. “He was the first mega celebrity. You see Carrie yelling at these paparazzi, calling them ‘kodaks,’ because they had Kodak cameras. They were constantly knocking on the door at any time of the day or night, to get an autograph or pictures.”

Cattrall also found that she had several things in common with her co-star Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Jack in his first television role since Harry Potter. “It’s really exciting for Daniel to play an officer,” says Cattrall. “I think, like me, he plays a character that’s different from what you’re known for.”

Of working with her co-star David Haig, Cattrall compares it to the real-life relationship between Kipling and his wife. “The relationship that I had with David Haig was very much like the relationship between Carrie and Kipling—a real respect for one another,” explains Cattrall, “but battles still had to be won and [we had to figure out] how to manipulate one thing to get to another. We really became very fond of one another.”

Currently, Cattrall is filming New Line Cinema’s Sex and the City movie in New York, but is open to doing more work in the U.K. She says that she is more financially stable now and can be choosier about the projects she selects.

My Boy Jack was produced by Ecosse Films, WGBH Boston and Ingenious Broadcasting for ITV, in association with Octagon Films and Granada International. The movie’s premiere on SUnday, November 11 on ITV1 drew 6 million viewers and notched a 25-percent audience share. Since Granada introduced the 95-minute movie at MIPCOM, the movie has already attracted interest from international broadcasters, with signed deals confirmed by the distributor in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Slovenia.

—By Irene Lew