Think Jamie Bell and ballet shoes immediately spring to mind. A trained dancer, Bell put his skills to good use playing the eponymous "Billy Elliot", a role that saw him beat out Russell Crowe to win the 2001 BAFTA for Best Actor. From there on, it seems Bell's mission has been to shake off his prima ballerina image, tackling grittier characters like that of a young soldier in WWI horror "Deathwatch", and now the abused houseboy of Mr and Mrs Wackford Squeers in an adaptation of the Dickens classic "Nicholas Nickleby".
Smike couldn't be more different to Billy Elliot. Was it a conscious decision to separate yourself from that character?
Yeah, that was definitely intentional. I just wanted to lose the tagline that I created for myself with "Billy Elliot". And in this film, there's no way he [Smike] is going to have ballet shoes and be dancing down a street - well, maybe in his dream sequence! But it was also just about getting to work with Doug [McGrath, director] and Charlie [Hunnam, Nickleby] and the rest of the cast, who are all so amazing. It was a difficult decision, though, just because it came along at the same time as my GCSE exams. I was filming a death scene one day and the next day going into my English exam.
And we're guessing "Nicholas Nickleby" wasn't the set book?
It wasn't, no! It was "To Kill a Mockingbird", actually.
As well as assuming Smike's hunch, you're standing and walking on the sides of your feet. Didn't all this take a toll on you, physically?
Yeah, actually. I mean, when we were framing up a shot, we'd lose three foot when I got into position, so I'd have to stand hunched over like that all day. By the end of the first week, it was pretty bad - my ankles and back were pretty distressed. But being a dancer, you build up a tolerance. Your body takes a lot of beating.
Didn't you work with a choreographer to perfect Smike's hobble?
I actually did quite a bit of rehearsal with a choreographer for a couple of weeks, which was to get the limp as natural and as fluid as possible. I also watched "The Elephant Man" just because it's interesting to see how someone like that just does the normal day-to-day things like kneeling down or climbing the stairs. I was interested in that aspect of it.
You're 17 now. Do you feel like you've got more control over your career these days?
Well, there are a lot of people who influence me, and give me advice me about what to do, so it's still quite difficult to make decisions for myself. But just two weeks ago, I was on a plane going over to the States on my own for the first time in my whole life. So things like that mean my life is changing; changing in the sense that I'm going places on my own, meeting people on my own, and I don't need chaperones anymore.
