"It [Superman II] was fun, albeit painful," he laughs heartily, remembering. "The wires, you know. Anytime you see anybody flying, you have to know they're in agony because however much they pad you, your weight has to come to rest somewhere. Our chests would bleed. The girl [co-villain Sarah Douglas] would often pass out on the wires, hanging upside down."
In person, handsome and silver-haired, Stamp carries himself with the dignity you'd expect based on his screen persona, but with none of the threat. He knows what it is to be Terence Stamp -- a man from a poor English background who won a stage scholarship and broke into the movies ("I never wanted to play Hamlet. I wanted to be like Gary Cooper or James Dean.") -- but doesn't seem overly concerned with his persona. It's this same affectless self-assurance that has enriched films for over 30 years, from his graceful debut as a Christ-like Billy Budd in 1962 to his celebrated turn in the '90s as the regal transsexual Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (which he describes as "a growth move").
Stamp's singular, paradoxically quiet force is what propels Steven Soderbergh's marvelously quirky new thriller, The Limey, which casts him as the titular ex-con, bulldozing his way through an oblivious, demoralized Los Angeles on a relentless quest to avenge his daughter's mysterious death. The film has dry touches reminiscent of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, but instead of Elliot Gould's mumbling patsy, there is Stamp roaring calmly at its core, destroying every unlucky bastard stupid enough to step into his path. Soderbergh uses Stamp with some of the unadulterated glee that characterized Tarantino's revitalization of Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Stamp, for his part, puts Soderbergh on a par with William Wyler, the Golden Age of Hollywood director who cast him as the sorrowful psychopath in The Collector, a performance so convincing it kept him in villain roles for most of the rest of his career.
"They know their value," he says of the two directors, with great admiration. "They know their value and they're not worried that the film may manifest itself through the prop man or the electrician or even the actor. The film may reveal itself to them through anyone. That's the mark of a great director in my book."
George Lucas, presumably, is not in that book. Wasting Stamp as Chancellor Valorum in the artistic debacle that was The Phantom Menace, Lucas is perhaps the only director who can proudly say that he made some great actors almost completely unmemorable.
"When you're working with a director who doesn't have enough faith in you to let you read the script...," Stamp explains, trailing off, then tries it another way. "I was gasping to work with Natalie Portman [cast as Queen Amidala]. I'd seen her in The Professional, like, six times. On the day I walk up there [to the set], Lucas says, 'Oh, we've given her a holiday, so this post -- see where that big post is? -- that's Natalie.' Thanks, thanks a bunch. So it was like that."
The Limey, understandably, is foremost in his thoughts. It should bring him a lot of attention again, especially as it features him in that canny combination of the two things he plays best -- the outsider and the dark force of nature. Stamp understands the appeal.
"What I believe is that everybody is doing the best they can -- they don't believe themselves to be bad," he says. "You can't say the Limey's a good guy, but he's dancing to his own drum. And that makes him attractive because there are a lot of us out there who would really like to dance to our own drum and haven't got the balls. So he's not a good guy, but he has a redeeming feature, and that is he's lived his life on his own terms, which is basically enviable."
Even after experiencing the personal charm of Terence Stamp, the man who is not Zod, I may now be stuck remembering him in The Limey, in which he turns to his companion and suggests, "Bring the motor round front -- point it downhill," before strolling inside a mansion to head-butt a bodyguard and toss him off a balcony.
