Here’s what happens if you are 26 years old, have boyish good looks and get cast as a rapier-wielding, horse-riding, dashing prince in a romantic fantasy adventure such as Prince Caspian: within days of hitting the big screen, most of the comments about you on film websites such as The Internet Movie Database read: “Jenny8327: He is incredibly hot. I would love to have his babies.

“The-rebel-angel: Yeah, so would everyone else here . . .

“Missy 915: It kills me to say, but he has to have someone, so here are the ladies in Hollywood I thought he could go with: Hayden Panettiere, Rihanna, although I think she has a boyfriend, and maybe Christina Milian.”

At face value, therefore, Ben Barnes is just this year’s British dream boy – the next Jim Sturgess or James McAvoy, with tousled hair and a bit of swash and buckle. And yet you would be hard-pressed to find a man less keen on being a sex symbol. When the producers showed him the posters for Prince Caspian, featuring Barnes smouldering down the blade of his sword in a way that would cause even asexual protozoa to spontaneously divide, he was aghast. “Is that sensible?” he asked them. “Because, you know, nobody knows who I am.”

They do now. Since Prince Caspian wrapped, he has been named in lists of talent to watch on both sides of the Atlantic, hailed as the “second coming of Orlando Bloom” by Entertainment Weekly and described by the International Herald Tribune as being “in a rare position in Hollywood: an unknown actor on the brink of certain global fame”.

And yet he doesn’t seem aware of what’s about to happen to him. He crashed at a friend’s apartment during a recent visit to Los Angeles. He has no publicist. His first junket in New York – an interviewing sausage-machine in which actors face round tables of six or seven journalists for 20 minutes at a time, repeated in seemingly endless succession, day after day – almost killed him. Most actors prepare 10 funny stories and trot them out to the assembled pack while working out where to have dinner. Barnes, on the other hand, threw himself into the machine determined to give all he had.

“I was trying to be interesting, and my defences were high because I didn’t want to say anything stupid, and I wanted to be funny and entertaining and promote the movie . . . and to do that for 90 interviews in a row is nigh on impossible.” He still seems faintly baffled. “And then if you’re trying to be original with every answer . . . I had people saying things like, ‘Who is Ben Barnes?’, and a French journalist said, ‘Tell me, what is life?’ I don’t know. And if I did, who cares? I got so sick after three days, I couldn’t get out of bed, and they brought a doctor to my hotel room because I had to get up and keep doing the interviews.”

When we meet in his agent’s office in London, my immediate response is to slot him into the round hole of dim but cute. He’s wearing a leather jacket and loose-fitting shirt, his eyes are open and trusting and he grabs at a movie magazine to check its coverage of The Incredible Hulk. As we talk, however, a square peg emerges. For a start, he’s bright for a pretty boy. As we chat, he is far happier investigating the writing intentions of CS Lewis across the whole Narnia series than gazing at his perfectly formed navel.

“The difference between Lewis and all other fantasy writers is that he writes different genres with each book, while the others just stay in the milieu,” he argues, with knowledge of the text that you’re unlikely to find in Jude Law, bless him. “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a Christmas fairy tale of discovery, with snow and Santa and Christian imagery. With Caspian, it’s an action story, although the motives are darker because the villain is human. We can identify with his greed and lust for power. His fascist mentality – going to war to promote his race above all others – is more terrifying to us because it’s part of our history. I think that was the second world war seeping into Lewis’s writing. But what stood out for me as incredibly modern was the fear-based politics that Miraz [Caspian’s evil uncle] was using – trying to get his generals to fake casualties to justify his desire to attack.”

He pauses, a little downcast. “None of the reviews really picked up on that, which is surprising to me, given the Bush syndrome.”

Perhaps it’s growing up the son of a psychiatrist father and psychotherapist mother that gives him this analytical approach. “They taught me that you are made up of your childhood memories, so even if I say I’m not a method actor, I have something to draw on when placing myself in intense human situations,” he begins, before delivering a sly change of tack. “But when you’re playing a fantasy prince, there’s not a huge amount to relate to. Obviously, I’ve never held a sword at a family member’s throat.”

What he did have to draw on, however, were two real-life princes – possibly the first time Harry and Wills have been credited with any sort of cultural inspiration.

“Caspian is not a swash-buckling heroic Prince Charming, but Americans expect somebody like that,” he explains. “Their concept of a prince is Disney – that’s all they know. But I’ve grown up with two princes, one my age, one my younger brother’s age. Caspian makes mistakes; Harry goes to a party dressed as a Nazi. Caspian does something heroic; Harry goes and fights for his country without telling anyone. I think it’s interesting that they are real people, making real decisions about their lives, but they have this responsibility that they may or may not want.”

He does become irritable when his meteoric rise is compared with the spotlight shone on the Windsors. “People say, this must be like winning the lottery. Well, it isn’t. I started off singing in choirs. That’s how I got into acting. When I was 15, my voice broke and I was like, now what? It’s not really cool to be in a choir any more – I’m not sure it ever actually was cool. Then I got a job playing drums on stage in Bugsy Malone, and I felt great, because I was so shy and awkward at school. I spent every summer doing plays with the National Youth Music Theatre. At university, I spent every summer taking plays up to the Edin-burgh Fringe. I’ve tried my hand at television presenting and music projects, I’ve played Russian thugs in indie movies, Yorkshire schoolboys at the National Theatre, and I’ve done American television pilots. I have worked to get here.”

That work includes a boyband called Hyrise, an unsuccessful Eurovision act that the press have been throwing at him for the past couple of weeks. He sighs when I bring it up. “I was in my second year at university when somebody rang me up and said, ‘Do you want to sing on this thing?’ I thought, carpe diem, I’m still at uni, nobody will notice. How wrong can you be? Anyway, we rehearsed for a week, and then they said it was Eurovision, and I thought, oh nonononono. I tried to pull out, but it was too late, and I felt a bit selfish. So, hey, how bad can it be? Pretty bad, as it turns out. We had one song, performed one time, and next morning I left. That was it: never heard hide nor hair of it until Caspian. I don’t feel it’s a skeleton because it really wasn’t anything – although my mum did make a banner.”

Next he has the third Narnia movie, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “I think it’s the best book, very episodic, but that makes it hard to adapt. It’s interesting that Michael Apted is directing it, because he did the Seven Up! series, so if there’s one person who knows about ageing someone and keeping their essence, it’s him.”

He will also be the lead in Dorian Gray from Ealing Studios. “How could I turn down Dorian Gray?” He spreads out his hands in appeal. “In two years’ time, I’ll be too old – well, I’m too old now. Just don’t tell anyone. But there hasn’t been a decent version made, and there needs to be in this celebrity-obsessed, youth-crazed culture. I think the best films and the best plays always seem current. There’s something in them that makes you think, that’s good, there’s a point in doing this now.”

And he explains how he staged Frank McGuinness’s Someone Who’ll Watch over Me at college, just after the invasion of Iraq. The play deals with hostages in Lebanon in the late 1980s; Barnes performed it as the same thing started happening in Iraq. “Playing Dorian feels right in just that way,” he says, leaning forward earnestly to make this point. “It says something about a darker side of Britain.”

I look at this handsome young actor explaining to me that obsession with handsome young actors is wrong and I think: Ben, I really take your point, but on the IMDB chatroom discussing Dorian Gray, the girls are just going to say you’re hot.

Source: Times Online