Jean-Baptiste Grenouille has got to be the weirdest super-villain ever. His special power? The ability to smell really, really well. His power wins him fame as a wicked Parisian perfumer, but ironically, Grenouille finds that he emits no odors of any kind. Such is the strange world of Perfume, the new romantic horror film directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run).
Based on the 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by German author Patrick Suskind, the film spent many years struggling through the pre-production process. This was largely due to a string of high profile directors-namely Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Tim Burton and Ridley Scott-all ducking out of the project, calling the story fundamentally unadaptable to film. This might be due to the fact that scent can’t be goth-stylized or exploded, as Burton and Scott might have liked.
In the dark and twisted plotline, Grenouille’s most sought-after desire is the scent of a beautiful young woman. In search of a particular version of this odour he stalks his female prey like Toucan Sam on PCP-a caricature of hatred, lust and ruthless determination.
With all its neurotic grisliness, it’s not hard to understand why Kurt Cobain listed Suskind’s book amongst his all-time favourites, even writing a song-“Scentless Apprentice” off 1993’s In Utero-about Grenouille.
The job of bringing such the strange character to life finally fell to 26-year-old British stage actor Ben Whishaw.
I sat down with Whishaw last month and was surprised to discover that he didn’t exhibit any of the diabolical creepiness of his onscreen counterpart. Instead, what I encountered was a rather awkward and timid man tucked away in a corner, covering his mouth with his hand while he spoke, the fingers of his other hand drawing distracted circles on the tabletop. “I don’t feel especially comfortable in these kind of situations,” he confessed.
Before long, however, the coy actor started reminiscing about how he got into the head of a serial killer. “We didn’t want to start off by condemning Grenouille as some evil person. We really talked about him more as somebody who has some kind of mental disorder. Somebody who has been cast out of society … He’s just completely insular, and withdrawn, and isolated, disconnected from people.”
Playing a sociopath who does unfathomable things and giving him a sense of humanity proved a daunting task for a young actor with minimal screen experience. “We tried to understand what he was going through, what was missing inside of him, and what he needed,” he recalled. There was another challenge to the role: it required Whishaw to perform disturbing abuse on a number of naked bodies. Could he ever watch the film with his mother?
“No,” he laughs, “no. I don’t think I’m ever going to put myself in a position where I have to watch it with my mother. I don’t like watching myself at the best of times. But I think that would be a little bit too weird.”
However, mom can’t have too many complaints. While her boy may be playing a perverted homicidal smell-o-phile, he’s in the company of such stars as Alan Rickman and Dustin Hoffman, and was hand-picked by Tykwer to play the role after the director caught him on stage as Hamlet.
“I met Tom after I’d been playing Hamlet in [London’s] West end. And Tom came to see the show. And we met afterwards for a drink and kind of had a really good rapport, a good connection. We went to a studio and I did a kind of screen test, which took about four hours to work on one of the scenes.” Whishaw’s lightning-fast casting left him a bit disoriented. “It was a really, really quick decision on Tom’s part. I think what took a lot of time was trying to convince everybody else that it was a good idea to cast somebody who was not well known in a movie that was going to be pretty expensive to make.”
And his success won’t end with Perfume. Whishaw is already slated to appear in I’m Not There, a biopic about Bob Dylan by acclaimed director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven), that features a star-studded cast including Christian Bale, Julianne Moore, and Heath Ledger. Despite Whishaw’s non-existent resemblance to a young (or any other) Dylan, I enquired whether he would be taking on the coveted title role. His response: “Yeah … one of them.” Huh?
“It’s a strange kind of thing because, I don’t think you know this, but six people play Bob Dylan, and one of them is Cate Blanchett, and another one of them is a twelve-year-old black kid. So we’re not in the realm of kitchen-sink drama reality. It’s slightly skewed.”
Well, skewed or not, he’s still playing Dylan, and that certainly cements the success of this versatile young actor who can move from playing an 18th-century German murderer to the great American folk legend. So how does a rookie actor celebrate this newfound achievement?
“I haven’t celebrated yet. I think when all of this publicity is done I’ll do something bonkers.”
Let’s just hope he keeps his nose clean while doing so.
