If you have a Radio Times magazine subscription, you’ll no doubt have already read Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West’s interview about their new BBC Four drama, Burton and Taylor in which they play Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton during their final reunion.
Helena jokes that her chemistry with West was so good she’d even tried to get him to go home with her.
“I think we have great chemistry,” she says. “I try to lure him back into my bed but he won’t have me. Dominic's very funny. I didn't want it to end.”
Both actors obviously wanted to get the characters perfect – particularly as they are two such iconic roles.
Of Burton, West said: “It's the voice. You have to get it right. The film opens with Burton quoting from King Lear, a role he always wanted to play but never managed and the stage direction on the script is ‘Burton has the most beautiful mellifluous voice you’ve ever heard’, which put the fear of God into me.”
“When I drank and smoked all night, it worked pretty well but I didn’t have the stamina to keep it up,” he says.
Of Taylor, Helena says she went to see an astrologer to get a better feel for her. “She was really insightful,” she says. “She told me Elizabeth was a water person. Water is sexual and sensual and that’s the place she operated from. She had a big appetite for life. She was a good eater. Unlike actresses these days, she liked her food.”
Read the full interview in this week’s issue of Radio Times and catch the film on Monday 22nd July at 9pm.
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Posted by Amy Power.
