Out of Control

During casting for Control, the new biopic about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, Jude Law was reportedly considered for the role, which, in retrospect, seems patently ridiculous. Curtis, a depressed epileptic who hanged himself in his kitchen at age twenty-three, was always conflicted about fame — Law is likely incapable of embodying that problem. Luckily, a little known twenty-seven-year-old British TV actor named Sam Riley was cast in the role instead. “I can understand this feeling of getting to where you wanted to be and then thinking, fucking hell, this is shit, where the fuck am I now?” he says of relating to Curtis.

Directed by Anton Corbijn, who’s made films about Depeche Mode, Metallica and U2, Control follows Curtis’ life from adolescence to death. He and his wife, Deborah, married when they were teenagers and had a daughter, Natalie. Then Joy Division blew up after being featured on a British music mogul’s TV show, and soon they were touring the country, surrounded by groupies at every stop. Curtis found himself engaged in an affair with a Belgian journalist named Annik. Depressed by the side effects of his epilepsy meds, and by his failure to be faithful to his wife, his already limited ability to cope quickly dissolved. He killed himself in 1980.

“I’m not interested in making a rock-and-roll film,” Corbijn said in a recent interview, and Control is very much not a rock-and-roll film. It’s a sad, quiet love story, played with unobtrusive intensity by Riley. He spoke to Hooksexup about his breakout role. — Will Doig

Before taking this role, you were in a rock band called 10,000 Things. How did you go from being a musician to being an actor?

I’d always been a musician, but I’d had a go at being at actor when I was nineteen. I did a couple of TV parts, but I hated the work I was doing. They were hoping I’d join a soap opera or something, which I thought would ruin my chances of a credible music career. So I told my agent I didn’t want to be an actor anymore. Then 10,000 Things, we were signed to Domino Records, did an EP with them, then signed to Polydor and did an album. The major-label problem was our biggest achievement, but also the kiss of death.

What were the problems with the major label?

They didn’t have a fucking clue, actually. They didn’t know whether to sign the great live rock band that we were, or try to produce us into something radio-friendly, and it sort of ended up neither.

Were you a Joy Division fan before you were cast in this film?

Not massively, no. I really only used to listen to “Digital” and “Transmission.” The rest of the album wasn’t very cool for driving, so I didn’t give it much of a chance.

That brings up a good point. A lot of today’s younger audience was born after Ian had died, and I was struck by how dated Joy Division seems in the film — not just their sound, but their low-key lives, their bare-bones concerts. It’s so unlike most popular music today. Do you think this film will translate for those born after 1980?

Those of us that have grown up interested in music know music as far back as the Beatles, Elvis — you can love any band from any era, and I was a big fan of other bands of that era, and a lot of the bands that Ian liked. But your average pop-culture teenager, maybe the only time they’ve heard “Rock the Casbah” is in Will Smith’s version — it’s sad that I even know about that. I wanted to make a film that transcends Joy Division fandom. We’re all obsessed with becoming rock stars or pop idols, and here’s a story about how it’s not exactly what you hoped for.

If anything, people are even more obsessed with becoming famous today, because it seems more possible.

It’s epidemic, isn’t it really? You can be famous for fuck-all these days. When I was researching [the band], I found there was very little footage of them in existence. Only about an hour and a bit.

That’s amazing. We’re such a documentary culture now. Everything is filmed and archived.

These days, you can see Jimmy and the Bollocks playing on YouTube. It’s crazy. But that adds to the enigma of Ian Curtis. There’s no footage of him being interviewed. There’s only a little poor-quality footage of him, and the TV show of him performing.

Did the fact that your portrayal will be the first time many people see “Ian” perform add to the pressure to depict him accurately?

Yeah. The most pressure came with the performance scenes. Although they’re not a huge part of the movie, they’re the one thing people can look at on YouTube to see how Ian does his thing. So that instantly can be compared to what I do.

Your portrayal of him is very internal. When he’s singing, and when he’s depressed, it’s all this miserable conflict going on in his head. Was that difficult to act? Were you just mimicking what you’d seen in the footage?

No, you can’t just mimic. I studied it enough that I understood what things he did do and what he wouldn’t do. Once we started playing the songs live, we just told ourselves we were Joy Division, full-stop. And I just went for it. I thought about the things he was going through, some of which I was going through at the same time, and just put myself there. I’ve never been to drama college so I don’t really have a method, but I was working with really credible actors, and when we were playing with the band, we were actually playing live — that’s as real as you can get it. It also helps to have the haircut and the costume. That might seem not such an important thing, but it is quite important. The second you don’t look like Sam Riley anymore, the easier it is to convince yourself you’re Ian Curtis.

In a movie about someone who’s remembered as being fairly insane, it’s a surprisingly understated performance.

Yeah, it wasn’t sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. The sex was mainly with his wife. If you believe Annik’s story, [he and Annik] never even made love with one another.

Is that true?

Well that’s what she says. I don’t believe that for a second. She’s just being decent. And the drugs were medicinal, for epilepsy.

Did Ian not do recreational drugs at all?

Not really. When he was a child he did do some of those daft things, like sniffing bleach or stealing pills off old people. But no, he was never a heroin addict or a junkie. He liked to drink. He was from the north of England. We all do.

You’re in the midst of a rise to fame yourself, at around the same age Ian was when he became famous. Can you relate to the demons he struggled with?

I wouldn’t want to compare myself to Ian Curtis, but yeah, there were times when we were shooting where I was drawing on my own experiences. I was a schoolboy daydreaming of being a movie star or a rock star, and then I was almost on the verge of actually becoming a rock star, which the British press led me to believe for a certain amount of time. Then I had that whipped away, and now I’m the lead part in a movie that’s doing pretty well. But I’m wary of it. It isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. I mean, it’s wonderful and incredible, but at the same time it’s a world that wants to push and pull you around, and use you, and I’m just trying to keep my eye on things.

To what extent was Deborah involved with the film?

It’s based on her book, Touching from a Distance. I met her the first week of filming, in Macclesfield, because we were shooting at their old house that they shared together.

What was it like meeting the widow of the man you were portraying?

I was embarrassed, to be honest. I think we both thought it was fairly surreal. I was in their house, I had to sleep upstairs, I was wearing his clothes, and I’d be walking around their house and I’d bump into Debbie, and I almost wanted to say sorry.

Sorry for portraying Ian?

Yeah. For being an imposter or something. [Playing Ian in front of her] was like saying something about someone when they’re standing right behind you – it was that kind of feeling. I could see she was nervous, but she was lovely. Ian wasn’t your classic rock star, and she’s by no means the groupie persona. Just normal. A regular-type lady. Lovely. Charming. And she made me feel that it was okay, what I was doing. That it was okay that I was doing it, and that I was pretty good at it. She called me Ian as a joke at one point.

As a joke?

Well, I think it was sort of a little — I don’t know. It was a signal, like giving her blessing or something. And I met Natalie Curtis as well, who’s my age. That was another surreal moment. We were filming a scene that didn’t end up in the movie in the end. It’s at Ian and Debbie’s engagement party. Ian is in a fit of jealousy and throws a Bloody Mary all over Deborah. We filmed it, and then I went outside to have a cigarette, and there’s Natalie Curtis. She hung out with us quite a lot then. She came to the gig scenes and quite enjoyed watching those. She hung out with us and drank.

Ian was tortured by guilt about his inability to be monogamous to his wife, Debbie, and just generally by what he saw as his inability to be a good person. These aren’t complexes you normally associate with rock stars. Why do you think he was like that?

He was from a family where the mother and father were still together, a close-knit family. I’m from that kind of family as well, and it does put on a certain amount of pressure. They say it’s hard growing up with divorced parents, and I’m sure it is, but it’s a different pressure. Ian felt that once he’d fallen in love, he should marry like his parents had.

But his infidelity seemed to go beyond just cheating and into outright manipulation. You see him as a sympathetic character?

Yeah, I do. I have to, because I’ve been there and I don’t want to think of myself as a complete cunt. He was twenty-three years old when he died. I’m twenty-seven now. Most young men can be thoughtless, manipulative and selfish, and most young men don’t find themselves married and a father before they’re twenty. In those days, it wasn’t the done thing to divorce. If Ian had been living in the modern world, I think he’d have gone off with someone and maybe fallen out of love with her and he’d be in love with his seventh person by now. In those times there were pressures that we can’t fully understand.