Jamie Bell is still dancing.
Twenty-five years ago, an 11-year-old boy from northeast England filmed a small movie about a coal miner’s son who wanted to dance ballet. Three years later, that boy, a 14-year-old Jamie Bell, stood on a BAFTA stage holding the prize for best leading actor, the youngest person ever to win it in the category. Stephen Daldry’s “Billy Elliot” remains the kind of debut most actors spend a career trying to recover from. Bell, now 40, has been working steadily ever since to make sure it isn’t the only thing anyone remembers.
“Nothing is a given,” Bell tells Variety, sitting in a Los Angeles airport terminal, getting ready to get on board back to London. “When you come out of the gate with something that is so loved in that way, it’s a great gift, but it can also be a bit of a curse, because you have to carry that around with you and you almost have to live up to it. It’s a responsibility to go and have a great career, but it’s easier said than done.”
The career that has followed has been the rare one that survived a child-star debut without ever congealing into the obvious next thing. Ones like the action film “Jumper,” the period drama “Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool,” the fantasy-musical biopic “Rocketman” and the emotional ghostly drama “All of Us Strangers.” And now, most recently, the HBO limited series “Half Man,” in which Bell plays a man nose-diving through his own life. It’s a towering performance that has reset the conversation around what he is capable of as a dramatic actor in this Emmy cycle.
Written and directed by Richard Gadd, the same singular voice that defined the Emmy-winning “Baby Reindeer” found its way to Bell’s orbit in pieces. He says he read the sixth episode first, before he had any sense of what the show would be. When he read his character, Niall, doing what he calls “nose-diving his life,” that was enough to get him on board.
“He’s just choosing the wrong decision at every possible turn,” Bell says of the role. “It’s this dark downward spiral of self-hatred, self-loathing and self-destruction. And clearly, a man who has been given every opportunity to succeed. He’s experiencing success almost for the first time in his life, and he doesn’t know what to do with it, and doesn’t acknowledge it.”
Courtesy of Canneseries
This is the kind of role that does not exist for actors who haven’t been paying attention. By his own account, Bell has been paying very close attention. He credits a manager he worked with for 20 years for teaching him to stay aware, curious and honest about his craft. It’s become somewhat of a life mantra for him.
“You have to love it to live the life,” Bell shares. “There will be a lot of rejection and hardship, and you have to learn more about yourself as you go. You can only grow as an actor as you grow as a person. If you’re not growing as a person, you can’t really grow as an actor.”
The list of filmmakers Bell has spent his life learning from reads like a wish-list for any aspiring actor, and yet, he’s lived it. Steven Spielberg (“The Adventures of Tintin”), Clint Eastwood (“Flags of our Fathers”), Peter Jackson (“King Kong”), Edward Zwick (“Defiance”) and Bong Joon Ho (“Snowpiercer”). “You’re just watching them and learning from them,” he recalls. “So much of it is risk-taking. I think you have to have fearlessness about it, because you have to dive in and be brave and make choices.”
The film he is most excited for people to see is Paul Greengrass’ “The Uprising,” in which he plays radical preacher John Ball, opposite Andrew Garfield, for Focus Features. The film dramatizes the 1381 English Peasants’ Revolt — what Bell calls “England’s first revolution” — when ordinary people organized against a punitive poll tax imposed to fund what they understood to be an endless war.
“The English monarchy tried to raise a poll tax on the people, and they thought that was unjust,” Bell explains. “They thought that the people would be exploited and used and abused to fund a never-ending war. And the people said, ‘We’ve had enough,’ and they organized and rallied together and descended upon London.”
Working with Greengrass has been a long-held ambition. Bell saw the 2002 docudrama “Bloody Sunday” when he was 14 and has been seeking that experience ever since. The reality of being on a Greengrass set, he says, lived up to the expectation.
“The way that he shoots is unbelievable. There’s no real coverage, the cameras are just floating around somewhere, and you’re just always on. Sometimes he’s like, ‘Yeah, do the script, don’t do the script, but this is the scenario that I need you to interact with, and I’ll give you a couple of pointers, but if you feel like you want to add things here and there, please do.’”
Outside the Greengrass film, Bell is currently shooting the “Peaky Blinders” sequel series, which continues the universe. The schedule has been demanding in ways that conflict with his stated priorities: his family.
“You only get to raise your kids once. So, being away, shooting a whole show for so long, it takes its toll on me. It takes its toll on my family, as it would on anyone. In the immediate, it’s just like getting the show done, going home and being a dad.”
That same work-life math is also the obstacle between him and the role he has wanted longer than almost any other. Bell, who came up through dance before he ever stood in front of a camera, was once close to playing Fred Astaire in a long-developed feature project that ultimately did not happen. The disappointment has not faded.
“It is certainly a dream role. It’s one of those things,” he says. “It’s very difficult to crack. What’s the angle here? What’s the story we really want to tell? It’s obviously still very much on the table. I know there are a couple of Fred Astaire projects in the ether as well.”
He has stopped treating the Astaire project as his singular ambition. What he really wants to make, in its absence, is a dance movie of his own design.
“More than anything, I just want to do something with dance again. I’d love to do something that lets me be physical and use my dance experience. Certainly tap. Tap is just my favorite thing to do.”
What he is sketching in private is quieter and more specific.
“I’d really love to do a contemporary tap-dancing movie that was mostly focused on process. I find movies about rehearsal spaces fascinating: how things come together, what it takes to pull it off, and the thought behind it all. The meticulousness that goes into crafting something like that, I have a real fascination with.”
In the immediate, though, the work is focused on “Peaky,” the Greengrass film hitting theaters in 2026, and his family. He is, as he points out, no longer the boy from the BAFTA stage.
“Turning 40 is a big thing for me as well,” Bell reflects. “I tell people I’m 40 years old and a father of three. I think it freaks them out more than it freaks me out.”
He laughs.
“I’m everyone’s reminder of how old they are.”
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