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The real-life father of two young daughters and a man whose own father abandoned him when he was three, Owen says his feelings about parenting led him to the role, which turns out to be his most nuanced and emotional performance yet.
There is already talk of an Oscar nomination. The role even seems to have enhanced his heart-throb status: the screams prompted by Owen's red carpet appearance at the British premiere of The Boys are Back are deafening.
"There's nothing hotter than a gorgeous guy who is also a great dad," says a woman waving an autograph book.
It's the London Film Festival; Owen has already spent much of today giving interviews to international press at a trendy Soho hotel. It's the same hotel where, more than four years earlier, he sat in a windowless meeting room with Hicks and scriptwriter Allan Cubitt and pored over a screenplay adapted from The Boys are Back in Town, a 2001 memoir by British political sketch writer Simon Carr. ("Clive Owen is what I look like on the inside," Carr has quipped.)
But after putting his hand up to play Warr, the in-demand actor couldn't find time in his schedule - between the likes of sci-fi thriller Children of Men, action flick Shoot 'Em Up and spy caper Duplicity - to make the film. Then, when he did have a window, Hicks was busy making his feature-length documentary on American composer Philip Glass and the Catherine Zeta-Jones drama No Reservations.
Neither man, however, would let it go. They kept meeting, chatting, honing the script. Owen signed on as the film's executive producer, confirming his awareness of his A-list cachet. "Scott and I were both trying to make the same film," he says in his velvety baritone, having settled his besuited, surprisingly slight 185cm frame into a designer armchair.
"So, because I was a key ingredient, I wanted to protect that vision, give it an extra standing when the script's being discussed with people that are putting the money in or whatever. I would never do a producing credit simply as a vanity exercise," he adds, his green-eyed gaze unwavering. "There has got to be a reason."
Without Hicks and Owen The Boys are Back might easily have moved into two-hanky territory, but the film's black humour and tears feel as if they're drawn from real life than from anything manufactured.
Not a natural family man, Warr moves from playful to grief-stricken and back as he tries to do the right thing. It's the sort of acting everyone suspected Owen was capable of, and that Owen was keen to explore.
"This script embraced a big part of my life, parenting, in a very beautiful way," he says. "It's something that I've always felt to be separate from my work, but it's what I am. I'm a dad.
"I didn't want Joe to be too likable. I wanted him to be tough, difficult. He's trying to do as best he can and, like all of us, he gets things wrong. The boys are too young to formulate the impact of their mother's death and the film is all the more moving for that."
While it is hard to feel too sorry for a single dad with a full-time sports-writing job (for The Australian, no less), a dream home in a valley with a view of the sea and neighbours who look as good as Australian actress and model Emma Booth, the film works by concentrating on characters and relationships rather than plot. Hicks used the same tactics on his 1996 Academy Award-nominated film, Shine.
And just as he insisted on a theatre actor named Geoffrey Rush for the lead role (as piano virtuoso David Helfgott, for which Rush won an Oscar), he was adamant that Owen and only Owen could play Warr.
Owen first came to Hicks's attention with his Golden Globe and BAFTA-winning portrayal of an unreconstructed dermatologist in 2004's Closer, a cinematic adaptation of the hit West End play by Patrick Marber (in which Owen had starred as the other leading male character).
"I remember watching Clive back then and thinking, 'That's him! That's my guy!' " says Hicks. "Clive has this tremendous strength on screen. There's a great stillness about him that speaks of under-the-surface emotions. Then I was on tenterhooks in case he turned me down. So it was wonderful that he wanted, like really wanted, to do it."
Before the cameras started rolling on South Australian locations including the Fleurieu Peninsula and Adelaide Hills - where Hicks and his wife, Jill Heysen, maintain their Yacca Paddock Vineyard - Owen devoted himself to bonding with young McAnulty, with whom he spends most of his screen time. His work paid off: whether riding dangerously, joyously on the bonnet of his father's Land Rover as it speeds along the beach, wondering if his mother is going to "die before teatime" or throwing an angry tantrum on a father-son road trip, McAnulty delivers a dazzling, almost scene-stealing performance.
"Our connection was vital to the film so we scheduled in plenty of Nick and Clive time first," says Owen.
"I took him to safari parks and fun fairs and away from his parents and the film crew. It was important that he felt safe and trusted me." He shakes his head in wonderment. "You watch that film and that boy and you go, 'Wow, what a natural.' Scott showed enormous sensitivity, skill and patience in bringing that out."
He agrees the film might have been very different if Warr had been rearing two girls instead of two boys. "I think boys are more volatile and energetic than girls. My friends have boys the same age as our daughters" - Eve, 10, and Hannah, 12 - "and I think very often girls are generally ahead in the maturity stakes." Nonetheless, he and Sarah-Jane Fenton, his wife of 15 years, still forbid their kids from watching the news. And their father's steamy, shoot 'em up back catalogue: The Boys are Back is the only one of his films they have seen.
"Now they get what it is I actually do!" Owen's laugh bellows around the room. "There isn't a film I've done where they haven't visited me on set at some point, but usually once the film is made it's 'Uh-uh-uh'," he says, wagging a finger. "Maybe I'll give them a library of my films when they're 18. Or, er, maybe I won't. There's a few I wouldn't want them to see at any age."
His wife and daughters joined him in Australia: "I've never been before and I will always have a strong memory of a great family time. I managed to get a few days off and we all hung out on Kangaroo Island. Everything was great: the wildlife, the weather, the beaches. The girls just adored it."
Family is vital to Owen, who can spend months at a time away from his homes in Highgate, a posh northeast London suburb, and Wrabness in England's north Essex.
The fourth of five brothers, he was born in working-class Coventry in the West Midlands to Pamela and Jesse Owen, a country-and-western singer who walked out when his son was a toddler. He was reared by his mother and his stepfather, a railway ticket clerk. Aged 19, he met his father again briefly and hasn't seen him since. ("It was very bizarre," he told Details magazine, "looking at someone you've never known and going: 'Oh my God, that's my father.'")
He has previously described his childhood as rough but doesn't really want to talk about it now. "Childhood is difficult and I think The Boys are Back illustrates that beautifully," he says, deflecting the question with practised ease. Acting offered him an escape, a way out. After shining as the Artful Dodger in the school production of Oliver Twist he announced, aged 13, that he wanted to be an actor. Initially he thought he'd try to bypass drama school, but after a couple of years on the dole he applied for a place at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and, much to his surprise, got in.
He met his wife when he was playing Romeo at London's Young Vic in 1988. She, rather neatly, was playing Juliet.
"It was very schmaltzy," he gushed, uncharacteristically, to Ellen DeGeneres on her US television show a few weeks back. "She was late for the first read-through; she'd been on a cycling tour buying second-hand books and came in with glasses on and books falling everywhere. I fell in love with her straight away."
Though his early success playing the yuppie lead in a 1990 British TV series called Chancer taught him how to deal with fame and its perils ("I realised at a young age that there are huge distractions; that ultimately you have to keep your eye on the ball"), you get the sense that Fenton is his anchor. She was there by his side when he won international acclaim with the 1999 film Croupier, a small-scale British flick about a writer who gets caught up in a robbery, and Hollywood came knocking.
"I was lucky that it became a bit of a cult hit and opened up a new world of film for me," he says. "I wasn't actively hunting."
Next up he plays another father in the David Schwimmer-directed Trust: "About a family ripped apart when a 14-year-old girl is groomed on the internet. Maybe it's 'cause my girls are that age but it's a problem that needs to be dealt with."
Oh, and James Bond? He maintains he was never asked. "I wasn't in the running," he says of the role nabbed by Daniel Craig.
All those appearances on best dressed lists, all those thinking man's action hero roles and 2008 BMW ads (he was a nameless driver-gun for hire in a series of short films directed by filmmakers from Ang Lee to Guy Ritchie) have kept stoking the rumours, regardless. Owen doesn't see himself as cool or sexy; he's a little too working-class Midlands for that. And though aware of his A-list status, he isn't afraid of sending it up: "F. . k off, I'm Clive Owen," he swore, hilariously, on an episode of Ricky Gervais's comedy TV series Extras.
"I don't really spend that much time thinking about the sex symbol stuff," says Owen. "I'd have serious problems if I sat there going: 'Hmmm, yes, well . . .' " He leans forward and strikes The Thinker's pose, resting his cleft chin on his left hand. "I think it's important to try and have as normal a life as possible," he adds, sitting back. "A lot of it is to do with how you carry yourself. I try not to draw any heat. I'm always wandering about London having a coffee here, doing grocery shopping there."
Although he has been answering questions with grace and good humour, one of Owen's legs has started jiggling impatiently. After a day of interviews he would probably rather be down at the pub or getting ready to watch his beloved Liverpool football team take on Lyon in the Champions League. Ordinary bloke, ordinary passions: "I've worked with a lot of big-name actors and I'm never fazed," he says. "The only time I've ever been tongue-tied was when I met (Liverpool captain) Steven Gerrard. Well, him and David Bowie."
But with all this talk of family and fatherhood it's highly likely that Owen will simply make a beeline for home. He may do the laundry. Help his wife make the dinner. Get stuck into the washing up.
"It's true," he says, eyes twinkling. "I go off and make movies and then I go home and be a father."
So does Owen make the rules? "Er, no."
Another smile. "I have no power in my household whatsoever. I am the geek. The dad they roll their eyes at. I am definitely not treated like a movie star."
Clive Owen usually plays cool and mysterious men but his latest film shows his softer side, writes Jane Cornwell
CLIVE Owen has taken on all sorts of tough guys in his impressive film career: a secret CIA sniper in The Bourne Identity, a mysterious bank robber in
Inside Man, an obsessed Interpol agent in The International. Dubbed "the thinking man's action hero" by director Tom Tykwer and the new James
Bond by the internet, the handsome British actor tends to play characters who are complex, quietly observant and more than a little dangerous. But paternal?
Never.
Now here he is in The Boys are Back, playing a grieving husband who is struggling to rear his two sons after the sudden death of his Australian wife.
Directed by Scott Hicks (Shine) and based on a true story, the film is a poignant ode to single fatherhood, buoyed by its idyllic setting on the South
Australian coast.
The real-life father of two young daughters and a man whose own father abandoned him when he was three, Owen says his feelings about parenting led him to the role, which turns out to be his most nuanced and emotional performance yet.
There is already talk of an Oscar nomination. The role even seems to have enhanced his heart-throb status: the screams prompted by Owen's red carpet appearance at the British premiere of The Boys are Back are deafening.
"There's nothing hotter than a gorgeous guy who is also a great dad," says a woman waving an autograph book.
It's the London Film Festival; Owen has already spent much of today giving interviews to international press at a trendy Soho hotel. It's the same hotel where, more than four years earlier, he sat in a windowless meeting room with Hicks and scriptwriter Allan Cubitt and pored over a screenplay adapted from The Boys are Back in Town, a 2001 memoir by British political sketch writer Simon Carr. ("Clive Owen is what I look like on the inside," Carr has quipped.)
But after putting his hand up to play Warr, the in-demand actor couldn't find time in his schedule - between the likes of sci-fi thriller Children of Men, action flick Shoot 'Em Up and spy caper Duplicity - to make the film. Then, when he did have a window, Hicks was busy making his feature-length documentary on American composer Philip Glass and the Catherine Zeta-Jones drama No Reservations.
Neither man, however, would let it go. They kept meeting, chatting, honing the script. Owen signed on as the film's executive producer, confirming his awareness of his A-list cachet. "Scott and I were both trying to make the same film," he says in his velvety baritone, having settled his besuited, surprisingly slight 185cm frame into a designer armchair.
"So, because I was a key ingredient, I wanted to protect that vision, give it an extra standing when the script's being discussed with people that are putting the money in or whatever. I would never do a producing credit simply as a vanity exercise," he adds, his green-eyed gaze unwavering. "There has got to be a reason."
Without Hicks and Owen The Boys are Back might easily have moved into two-hanky territory, but the film's black humour and tears feel as if they're drawn from real life than from anything manufactured.
Not a natural family man, Warr moves from playful to grief-stricken and back as he tries to do the right thing. It's the sort of acting everyone suspected Owen was capable of, and that Owen was keen to explore.
"This script embraced a big part of my life, parenting, in a very beautiful way," he says. "It's something that I've always felt to be separate from my work, but it's what I am. I'm a dad.
"I didn't want Joe to be too likable. I wanted him to be tough, difficult. He's trying to do as best he can and, like all of us, he gets things wrong. The boys are too young to formulate the impact of their mother's death and the film is all the more moving for that."
While it is hard to feel too sorry for a single dad with a full-time sports-writing job (for The Australian, no less), a dream home in a valley with a view of the sea and neighbours who look as good as Australian actress and model Emma Booth, the film works by concentrating on characters and relationships rather than plot. Hicks used the same tactics on his 1996 Academy Award-nominated film, Shine.
And just as he insisted on a theatre actor named Geoffrey Rush for the lead role (as piano virtuoso David Helfgott, for which Rush won an Oscar), he was adamant that Owen and only Owen could play Warr.
Owen first came to Hicks's attention with his Golden Globe and BAFTA-winning portrayal of an unreconstructed dermatologist in 2004's Closer, a cinematic adaptation of the hit West End play by Patrick Marber (in which Owen had starred as the other leading male character).
"I remember watching Clive back then and thinking, 'That's him! That's my guy!' " says Hicks. "Clive has this tremendous strength on screen. There's a great stillness about him that speaks of under-the-surface emotions. Then I was on tenterhooks in case he turned me down. So it was wonderful that he wanted, like really wanted, to do it."
Before the cameras started rolling on South Australian locations including the Fleurieu Peninsula and Adelaide Hills - where Hicks and his wife, Jill Heysen, maintain their Yacca Paddock Vineyard - Owen devoted himself to bonding with young McAnulty, with whom he spends most of his screen time. His work paid off: whether riding dangerously, joyously on the bonnet of his father's Land Rover as it speeds along the beach, wondering if his mother is going to "die before teatime" or throwing an angry tantrum on a father-son road trip, McAnulty delivers a dazzling, almost scene-stealing performance.
"Our connection was vital to the film so we scheduled in plenty of Nick and Clive time first," says Owen.
"I took him to safari parks and fun fairs and away from his parents and the film crew. It was important that he felt safe and trusted me." He shakes his head in wonderment. "You watch that film and that boy and you go, 'Wow, what a natural.' Scott showed enormous sensitivity, skill and patience in bringing that out."
He agrees the film might have been very different if Warr had been rearing two girls instead of two boys. "I think boys are more volatile and energetic than girls. My friends have boys the same age as our daughters" - Eve, 10, and Hannah, 12 - "and I think very often girls are generally ahead in the maturity stakes." Nonetheless, he and Sarah-Jane Fenton, his wife of 15 years, still forbid their kids from watching the news. And their father's steamy, shoot 'em up back catalogue: The Boys are Back is the only one of his films they have seen.
"Now they get what it is I actually do!" Owen's laugh bellows around the room. "There isn't a film I've done where they haven't visited me on set at some point, but usually once the film is made it's 'Uh-uh-uh'," he says, wagging a finger. "Maybe I'll give them a library of my films when they're 18. Or, er, maybe I won't. There's a few I wouldn't want them to see at any age."
His wife and daughters joined him in Australia: "I've never been before and I will always have a strong memory of a great family time. I managed to get a few days off and we all hung out on Kangaroo Island. Everything was great: the wildlife, the weather, the beaches. The girls just adored it."
Family is vital to Owen, who can spend months at a time away from his homes in Highgate, a posh northeast London suburb, and Wrabness in England's north Essex.
The fourth of five brothers, he was born in working-class Coventry in the West Midlands to Pamela and Jesse Owen, a country-and-western singer who walked out when his son was a toddler. He was reared by his mother and his stepfather, a railway ticket clerk. Aged 19, he met his father again briefly and hasn't seen him since. ("It was very bizarre," he told Details magazine, "looking at someone you've never known and going: 'Oh my God, that's my father.'")
He has previously described his childhood as rough but doesn't really want to talk about it now. "Childhood is difficult and I think The Boys are Back illustrates that beautifully," he says, deflecting the question with practised ease. Acting offered him an escape, a way out. After shining as the Artful Dodger in the school production of Oliver Twist he announced, aged 13, that he wanted to be an actor. Initially he thought he'd try to bypass drama school, but after a couple of years on the dole he applied for a place at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and, much to his surprise, got in.
He met his wife when he was playing Romeo at London's Young Vic in 1988. She, rather neatly, was playing Juliet.
"It was very schmaltzy," he gushed, uncharacteristically, to Ellen DeGeneres on her US television show a few weeks back. "She was late for the first read-through; she'd been on a cycling tour buying second-hand books and came in with glasses on and books falling everywhere. I fell in love with her straight away."
Though his early success playing the yuppie lead in a 1990 British TV series called Chancer taught him how to deal with fame and its perils ("I realised at a young age that there are huge distractions; that ultimately you have to keep your eye on the ball"), you get the sense that Fenton is his anchor. She was there by his side when he won international acclaim with the 1999 film Croupier, a small-scale British flick about a writer who gets caught up in a robbery, and Hollywood came knocking.
"I was lucky that it became a bit of a cult hit and opened up a new world of film for me," he says. "I wasn't actively hunting."
Next up he plays another father in the David Schwimmer-directed Trust: "About a family ripped apart when a 14-year-old girl is groomed on the internet. Maybe it's 'cause my girls are that age but it's a problem that needs to be dealt with."
Oh, and James Bond? He maintains he was never asked. "I wasn't in the running," he says of the role nabbed by Daniel Craig.
All those appearances on best dressed lists, all those thinking man's action hero roles and 2008 BMW ads (he was a nameless driver-gun for hire in a series of short films directed by filmmakers from Ang Lee to Guy Ritchie) have kept stoking the rumours, regardless. Owen doesn't see himself as cool or sexy; he's a little too working-class Midlands for that. And though aware of his A-list status, he isn't afraid of sending it up: "F. . k off, I'm Clive Owen," he swore, hilariously, on an episode of Ricky Gervais's comedy TV series Extras.
"I don't really spend that much time thinking about the sex symbol stuff," says Owen. "I'd have serious problems if I sat there going: 'Hmmm, yes, well . . .' " He leans forward and strikes The Thinker's pose, resting his cleft chin on his left hand. "I think it's important to try and have as normal a life as possible," he adds, sitting back. "A lot of it is to do with how you carry yourself. I try not to draw any heat. I'm always wandering about London having a coffee here, doing grocery shopping there."
Although he has been answering questions with grace and good humour, one of Owen's legs has started jiggling impatiently. After a day of interviews he would probably rather be down at the pub or getting ready to watch his beloved Liverpool football team take on Lyon in the Champions League. Ordinary bloke, ordinary passions: "I've worked with a lot of big-name actors and I'm never fazed," he says. "The only time I've ever been tongue-tied was when I met (Liverpool captain) Steven Gerrard. Well, him and David Bowie."
But with all this talk of family and fatherhood it's highly likely that Owen will simply make a beeline for home. He may do the laundry. Help his wife make the dinner. Get stuck into the washing up.
"It's true," he says, eyes twinkling. "I go off and make movies and then I go home and be a father."
So does Owen make the rules? "Er, no."
Another smile. "I have no power in my household whatsoever. I am the geek. The dad they roll their eyes at. I am definitely not treated like a movie star."
