Fantastic Freddie
Last updated 14:17, Tuesday, 25 March 2008
At just 16, Freddie Highmore is one of Britain’s best-known child actors, thanks to a string of lead roles in hits like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland.
But while he may still look like the little boy who played the humble Charlie, he sounds so much wiser than his years.
Take the following on the challenge of playing twins in his new film The Spiderwick Chronicles: “I think it’s important to do new things for every film you do. You don’t want to always play the same character. So obviously this was something I had never done before and that was really enticing.”
The Spiderwick Chronicles, based on illustrated books by American children’s authors Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black, follows the adventures of nine-year-old twins Jared and Simon and their 13-year-old sister Mallory, who have moved to the rundown Spiderwick Estate with their mum.
When Jared starts hearing strange noises in the house, the children investigate and are soon drawn into a world of good and bad fairies.
Freddie, real name Alfred, was approached to take on the double part and flown out to America for a screen test, despite being seven years older than the characters in question.
“Originally they were trying to get real twins to do it. I think it would have been a lot easier, you know, logistically, because I could not be in two places at one time,” he laughs. “But we went to see if that would work out and if playing two people together could work technically, as well as using the CGI creatures, and try and put them all together.”
Shooting took place over a period of four months in Montreal (“It was pretty cold but I got to practise my French”) with Freddie’s main challenge being the costume changes between twins.
“We got it down to sort of Ferrari pit-stop time in the end,” he says. “I would go and quickly change in a tent and come out as the other character and shoot the reverse.”
But it didn’t always go so smoothly.
“Sometimes it went wrong and it would look like I was walking into myself when we played the two images back next to each other. But it was great fun to do and it worked out in the end.”
Another obstacle for Freddie was acting with the non-existent fairies, like Hogsqueal and Mulgarath.
“Often you are just acting to a blue ping pong ball or a long pole in the sky and pretending that they are the CGI creatures,” he reveals.
“They tried to make it a bit easier for us and showed us animations of how they would look and often they had the voiceover that the artist had recorded, so they could play it over the loud speaker. They also had cardboard cut outs of the creatures so we knew their size.
“But it got kind of confusing when, you know, I am looking over there and the pink cross is meant to be my other self and the Hogsqueal is over there and he is the blue ping pong ball.
“When Simon gets tripped up and is taken off into the forest by the goblins, they attached various poles to different parts of my body and there were lots of men dressed in black who obviously got edited out. We tried to do it a bit realistically, so it wasn’t just me lying there wriggling.”
One of the best scenes in the film comes when the children work out they can only kill the evil fairies by splatting them with tomato sauce. Cue lots of mess, as they devise various tomato sauce bombs, culminating in an oven-full of the stuff which explodes all over the kitchen.
“They could only do the tomato scene once, otherwise it would have taken them a few days to clean up!” admits Freddie.
“You really do have fun on set with lots of other kids around and seven other doubles of me. So it’s not like I am missing out on being a kid in any way by doing the film I don’t think.”
Neither is the young actor missing out on any schoolwork: “Whenever I am not filming I go to a normal school in London near where I live so there are no problems there.
“When I go away we have a tutor who always comes out with us who knows the syllabus and we still communicate with the school and they send out the work that needs to be done and I send it back and they can mark it.
“I still keep in contact with my friends on email and phone and stuff. They are interested in what we’re doing but I definitely talk more about other things with them – how Arsenal are getting on! So I think I am still a normal guy.”
Freddie now counts Johnny Depp among his A-list pals, after appearing alongside him twice. And the young actor has signed up for two animated films – Eddie Dickens And The Awful End and Astro Boy.
