I try to break the pattern of being self-destructive every day,” says Callum Turner. The 29-year-old star of War & Peace, Fantastic Beastsand the new big-screen adaptation of Emma is sitting opposite me, dressed all in black, musing on addiction. We’ve been talking about the character he played last year in BBC1’s surveillance thriller, The Capture – a former Special Forces soldier apparently caught on CCTV attacking a young woman – which has set in motion a surprising train of thoughts.
“Shaun Emery is definitely someone I know and could have grown up with,” he says. Turner was brought up on a council estate in Chelsea, cheek by jowl with wealthy Sloane Rangers and close to the Royal Court theatre. To get to his primary school each morning, he had to walk through The Boltons, the third-most expensive street in the country and former home to Madonna. It was Emery’s “sense of being super self-destructive”, though, that struck a particular chord, because it’s a trait he’s seen in himself. “I was compassionate towards him as someone who can’t stop making the same mistakes,” Turner says.
He stops, weighing up whether he should elaborate further. “I was a big stoner,” he says, eventually. “I used to smoke so much weed. I was dealing with a depression or a frustration, and not having the understanding or the tools to deal with how I felt, so I self-medicated for too long.”
Turner smoked marijuana between the ages of 18 and 26, and thinks the habit “definitely stunted something”. “The stuff in England is really… you get what you’re given,” he says. “It’s not like in LA when you go to the weed version of the Apple Store and they’re like, ‘What do you wanna do tonight?’ I was acting, doing films, and smoking weed every day. I never smoked on set but as soon as I got home, I was like a real addict. I definitely missed four years of my life.”
It was “compassion and love” for himself and a “determination to change and not miss my life” that enabled Turner to kick the habit.
It’s a startling shift of subject from where we began, which was on the etiquette lessons he took so that he could play Frank Churchill in Emma, another apparent bounder to add to his gallery of rogues, which already includes the incestuous, intemperate Anatole Kuragin in Andrew Davies’ adaptation of War & Peace, and Newt Scamander’s morally bankrupt brother, Theseus, in Fantastic Beasts.
The heedless, charming Frank is the masculine mirror to Emma herself in Jane Austen’s novel about a spoilt, class-obsessed young woman who meddles in the lives of her neighbours. It’s the directorial debut from photographer Autumn de Wilde, and Turner stars alongside what he describes as his fellow “left-field weirdos”, Anya Taylor-Joy, Bill Nighy and Johnny Flynn. “We had a week of etiquette lessons,” he says. “It was very important – how to walk, how to hold a teacup. You definitely don’t use the pinkie, that’s a big no-no.”
It’s hard to imagine the man sitting before me, with his rumbling London lilt, lifting his pinkie for anyone.There is a smile dancing at the corners of his lips that never fully goes away.
He laughs as he admits that most of his friends “ain’t gonna watch Emma, but they love The Capture”.
Turner’s childhood memories are happy ones: getting up to no good with the 20 kids in his block, football practice at the weekends, and running about with his best friend – who, incidentally, is here today raiding the hotel minibar.
He has a keen sense of the way working-class people are portrayed on screen. “I don’t want to play the downbeat thief or the generic version of a working-class person in England,” he says, pointing to Shane Meadows’ works as examples of portrayals that are not caricatures. “He actually comes from that place and understands it.”
Turner was raised by his mother, a “brilliant woman” who worked as a nightclub promoter during the New Romantic movement in the Eighties. Her job meant an eclectic mix of characters from across the London club scene were constantly passing through Turner’s front door, with some even living with them when he was a child – “The father figures were a lot of different gay guys, basically.”
“My mum allowed a community of people around me and wasn’t protective of her love for me,” says Turner. “It was almost like a tribe.” He says his mother was “the strictest mum on the estate” and recalls looking longingly out of his fourth-floor bedroom window at all the kids playing below, but not being able to join them after 10 o’clock “because rules are rules”.
Turner loved school, but only for the people. “I was naughty, but within reason. I wasn’t mean, but I was a bit of a class clown. I was in all the lowest sets, but not because I couldn’t do it – because I didn’t want to do it.”
He left school at 16 because he didn’t see the point of university if he didn’t want to be a lawyer or a doctor, and went to play for a semi-professional football team. “They gave us a tiny bit of money to play,” says Turner. “At the time I thought I was like a multi-millionaire – ‘Only done a week, killing it!’”
The dream of playing for his beloved team, Chelsea, didn’t last long, though. Not for lack of commitment, but because, Turner admits, “I’m not a professional athlete. Very simple. I was incredibly dedicated, I just wasn’t a footballer.”
Was that difficult to accept? Turner leans back, exhaling mournfully. “Yeah,” he shakes his head, “it took me about nine years.” He composes himself, lets the smile break free. “Look, I’ve got a season ticket for Chelsea. I still go and I’m like, ‘Man, got two years to make it,’” he quips. “By 32 I’m never going to be able to play football again, so there’s still hope for me.”
Turner’s football days and the time he spent with the nightclubbing crowd gave him a tolerance and understanding that, years later, has helped him to identify with the characters he plays. “It made me very accepting,” he says. “I grew up around such a blend of different people who I learned from, meaning there’s less of a gap between people, less of a barrier for me to cross.”
Having starred alongside Eddie Redmayne in Fantastic Beasts, does Turner ever feel excluded from the Etonite acting crew? “I’ve got friends who’ve got loads of money and come from money and they don’t care, I don’t care,” he says. “Generally, people are nice… if someone comes with a [negative] energy, I’m not going to reciprocate. I’ll just be like, ‘That’s cool, you need to chill out, you need to get a therapist man.’”
Turner says he tries “not to play with fame that much, so it doesn’t then play with me”. “I don’t go to events and I don’t have Instagram,” he explains. “I have a pretty low-key life and I enjoy that, but also I love acting. There are people like Viggo Mortensen and Javier Bardem who are really low key but who have amazing careers. Daniel Day Lewis! You know nothing about that guy.”
After Emma, Turner will appear opposite Shailene Woodley in Last Letter from Your Lover, a romantic drama about a star-crossed affair in the Sixties, he’s returning as Theseus Scamander in the third Fantastic Beasts film, and he’s been mooted as the next 007 – would he ever consider playing James Bond?
The smile enters full-on flash mob mode. “I’d love to play James Bond,” Turner nods vigorously. “It’s iconic. I think everyone would, of course. Would you like to play James Bond?”
Emma is released in cinemas on 14 February
