NEW YORK
A few tidbits about British actor Martin Freeman, star of the new film "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy":
He is a habitual and expert nail-biter whose fingernails are gnawed perfectly straight across.
He and his girlfriend own a miniature longhaired dachshund named Archie.
He occasionally suffers from eczema.
This information might have been more interesting to some readers if Freeman resembled Brad Pitt or Jude Law or any other hunky Hollywood leading man. But Freeman isn't that kind of hottie.
 |
| "If you look like me ... you're not gonna get cast as James Bond," says Martin Freeman, 33.(Helayne Seidman - Helayne Seidman) |
He first came to prominence in the British television comedy series "The Office," playing Tim Canterbury, a rumpled and slightly doughy underachiever stuck in the soul-crushing tedium of a paper-goods office. In "Hitchhiker," which opens Friday, Freeman portrays another unglamorous guy: ordinary earthling Arthur Dent, who finds himself yanked into an extraordinary intergalactic adventure.
Freeman, 33, has played plenty of other roles, but Everyman characters seem to be his forte. "I'm a 30-odd-year-old white man from England, and I think everyone's got only so much range," he says. "And if you look like me -- i.e., fairly average, if you're a fairly normal-looking person -- you're not gonna get cast as James Bond."
Midway through a day of "Hitchhiker" interviews in a Ritz-Carlton Hotel here, Freeman is holed up in an upper-floor suite. He sits on an oversize couch and sips a Stella Artois.
He doesn't dress like a movie star. He's wearing jeans, a Levi's jacket over a Penguin polo shirt, and an exhausted-looking pair of Converse sneakers that were once white. His socks are dark brown.
In the first minutes of "Hitchhiker," Arthur Dent wakes up with a massive yawn and bumps his head on the way to his kitchen, where he promptly burns his toast. He then looks out the window to see bulldozers converged around his house, which has been slated for demolition to make way for a new highway. A few minutes later, he finds himself in an alien spacecraft, and for the remainder of the film, Freeman's wardrobe consists of a fuzzy green bathrobe, two T-shirts, striped pajama pants, and bedroom slippers.
Even for an actor in a movie, embarking on outer-space adventures in a pair of bedroom slippers might be tricky, but the film's costume department was up to the challenge: "They put some sort of stunt traction on the bottom . . . so they weren't so slippy as they would be normally," says Freeman. But the actor found that even his fortified slippers were easily destroyed. "Your slippers last a lot longer in your bedroom. On a film set they do get very scuffed up."
