Sam Riley: On Control, Cornwall And Keeping His Privacy

Simon Button talks to the Yorkshire actor about playing Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, filming She Is Love on the south coast, and living a family life in Berlin

- Simon Button

SAM RILEY IS happy that the public doesn't know much about his personal life beyond the fact that he lives in Berlin, is married to Romanian-German actress Alexandra Maria Lara and that they have a young son named Ben.

"My wife is a very well-known actor in Germany but they don't have the same culture of scrutiny," says the West Yorkshire-born actor, who met Alexandra when she played a journalist in his screen debut Control in 2007. "Fame is not something either of us has courted because it's a double-edged sword. There are a lot of good actors who are successful but who you don't know very much about at all."

Sam smiles, seemingly forgetting the blockbuster success of the two Maleficent films he has appeared in. "Plus I've never really been in anything that millions of people have seen."

The small, independent drama She Is Love is more typical of his CV, although it pushed him far beyond his comfort zone. It was largely improvised. "It gave me the fear," he admits. "I'd never done anything like it and just before filming started, I started panicking because I realised I'd have to use an awful lot of myself. You're always using something of yourself as an actor, but you're usually hiding behind the dialogue."

In the film, which was directed by Jamie Adams, Sam plays a musician and hotelier in Cornwall whose relationship with his girlfriend Louise (Marisa Abela) is disrupted by the arrival of his ex-wife Patricia (Haley Bennett).

A sometime musician himself, Riley notes: "I realised Jamie had based it on a version of me. There wasn't really a character there, just the fact Idris was a musician. The first thing I had to do was dance like an idiot behind mixing desks in front of complete strangers and I thought, I'm just going to have to completely give in to this and try not to be vain!"