The movie may be called "Tamara Drewe" -- the name of an ugly duckling turned beauty -- but rock star and drummer Ben Sergeant thinks the world revolves around him. And so do some adoring teenage girls.
"Drummers are the weird ones in bands," suggests Dominic Cooper, who portrays Ben in the movie opening today in Pittsburgh.
"I bet if your favorite band walked past, you wouldn't recognize the drummer. No one recognizes the drummer. They never get any respect although they're fundamentally the most important thing in the band, I came to realize as I learned to drum. They hold the whole thing together.
"The drummer is always the bloke who looks awkward in photographs; he's put in a leather jacket but doesn't wear a leather jacket normally."
Mr. Cooper wanted his drummer to be more of a frontman and worked with director Stephen Frears and the costumer to nail the look -- all-black outfits, asymmetrical haircut and guyliner, not to mention a yellow Porsche and pet boxer dog, which terrorizes the neighbors' cows.
A friend gave him drumming lessons, and while he doesn't think he could do a full gig, he could hold a tune.
"I loved it. It was such good fun and to be on stage and to write the songs with my brother and then perform them on stage with him just was absolutely magical," he said. It didn't hurt that they rocked out at a festival "in front of an audience obligated to love the music."
His younger brother, Nathan Cooper, plays keyboard on stage and unconsciously inspired a bit of Ben thanks to long-ago family vacations to the French countryside.
"My brother, we'd go on holiday, and for eight weeks, would wear tight leather trousers -- sometimes two pairs -- gel his hair for an hour or two in the morning, wear a kind of done-up collar and be a pop star in the countryside, singing songs about how dull the country is as he walked through a field of hay, looking like Edward Scissorhands or a fantastic '80s pop star."
On this day, the dark-haired Brit whose stage and movie credits include "The History Boys," "Mamma Mia!" and "An Education" was chatting over tea in a Toronto restaurant. He talked in rapid fashion for 20 minutes while co-star Gemma Arterton, who plays Tamara Drewe, was a few tables over doing interviews, too.
They were at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote the comedy of manners set largely in the English countryside. It's based on Posy Simmonds' graphic novel, itself inspired by Thomas Hardy's "Far From the Madding Crowd."
The movie, written by Moira Buffini, provides a none-too-flattering portrait of a slice of British society.
"On the outside, those families in those worlds seem very idyllic and perfect, and I loved that it was rotting from within, and that the deceit and the lies and the self-obsession with, in fact, all of the people in the film ... [make them] quite dislikable." But Mr. Cooper also enjoyed how the story spanned generations.
"Two young girls are desperate for some excitement to happen in their lives so they become obsessed with the celebrity culture, which is fundamentally flawed and completely pointless and ludicrous ... what they wish to be, it's so pathetic," he said.
Add to that adolescents who are "lost idiots, bonking around, not knowing who they are or what direction they're heading in. And then you have these adults who should be sorted, who should know who they are, and they're just as bad as the rest, if not worse."
"Tamara Drewe," as you might suspect given its roots as a comic strip in the Guardian newspaper, is not pretending to be a grand examination of humankind.
"It's not going to alter your ideas of life. It just is what it is, and it's a huge amount of fun and I think that's why I was inspired to do it and was attracted to it."
Ben is likable for his stupidity, although his admirers who devour celebrity magazines don't see it that way.
"It's hilarious, you know. Girls drooling over make-believe stories about these people who are no more important than anyone else. Why? Because their pictures are taken.
"And they're not interesting. I couldn't sit in the room with my character for more than 10 minutes before he'd dulled me to the point of wanting to eat a spoon."
The movie, however, did allow him to spend time with a couple whose house doubled as a key location; they were holed up in another room while shooting progressed.
"There was a fantastic couple who would just sit on the sofa in front of the fire all day. They were lovely. I had really long conversations with them," often about music because they had an extensive collection of cassettes.
That home was a sharp counterpoint to the rocker's on-screen apartment, which Mr. Cooper calls "a swanky, horrible, gray, minimalist nightmare, with pictures of the dog and myself."
Celebrity has been mainly a blessing for Mr. Cooper, who played a business associate of Peter Sarsgaard's in "An Education," the teacher's darling in stage and screen versions of "The History Boys" and the fiance in "Mamma Mia!"
"It's all very nice, isn't it?" he said, because he typically doesn't get hounded. "It's changed things in terms of work," he said, but hasn't made his life miserable.
He jokes, though, that if he keeps doing "weird, strange, obscure, unusual, unrecognizable parts" he might keep some of that coveted privacy. That could change, however, with "My Week With Marilyn" in which he will play photographer Milton Greene opposite Michelle Williams' Marilyn Monroe.
Then he will vault over to the doubly dark side for Lee Tamahori's action drama, "The Devil's Double." He will portray Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Uday Hussein, and Latif Yahia, his body double.
And for good measure, he will play the younger version of Howard Stark (Iron Man's father) in "Captain America: The First Avenger." That movie will be released in July and just might make him a household name.
First Published: December 3, 2010, 10:00 a.m.
