Interview: Jeremy Irvine

On the set of his new film, holiday-season horror flick The Woman in Black 2, Jeremy Irvine was employed both as actor and unofficial nanny.

There were eight small children in the cast, playing the orphans who’d be terrorised by the film’s titular ghoul. Irvine was playing an RAF pilot, trying to protect them, and whenever the cameras stopped rolling the kids kept following him around. “I had one half-decent magic trick involving 5p pieces,” says the 24-year-old, meeting the Observer in the festively decorated bar of a London hotel, a couple of years on from his name-making role in Stephen Spielberg’s film version of War Horse. “To them that meant I was basically Gandalf.”

Coiffed, beardless, dimple-chinned, there is still much of the child about the Cambridgeshire-born actor.

“Oh yeah, I am still a kid,” says Irvine, adding that on the set of The Woman in Black the only difference between him and the minors was that “I was the kid who couldn’t be told off”.

He’s tended to opt for hard-work movies since War Horse. To make The Railway Man, last year’s drama about a British prisoner of war in a Japanese camp, Irvine allowed himself to be waterboarded for a torture scene. Last summer he made The Reach, co-starring Michael Douglas, about getting lost in the Mojave desert. “One hundred degree-heat during the day, snow and sleet at night. And then I came back for this [The Woman in Black 2] ... I had the life of bloody Riley. Because the kids, of course, can’t work that long. So a lot of the time I’d get to go home early as well.”

Four years ago Irvine was in a rut. He was doing shifts in a Co-op and freelance website design, “at the very bottom”. He got so desperate for acting jobs that he faked a showreel with scenes purporting to be from features that didn’t exist. “I don’t think any of the agents I showed it to believed me — but one humoured me. I signed for them on a Friday night and on the Monday morning I went in to audition for War Horse ...”

It’s taken him a while, since Spielberg’s blockbuster, to come around to making a flashy movie again. “I had this feeling after War Horse: everyone’s going to think it was a fluke. I got offered some big studio movies, afterwards, and I said no to them. I felt like I needed to go back and do some character acting.” His agents, apparently, were a little concerned. And they were delighted, this year, when he finally caved and agreed to make a big, unsubtle horror film. (he first Woman in Black movie, starring Daniel Radcliffe, made £80 million (Dh450 million).

“I really went against a lot of people’s advice, in terms of the things I said no to after War Horse,” says Irvine. “You sometimes get a conference call when all your agents call you up. Which is either great news ... Or it means they’re all about to have a big shout at you.”

So you still get told off sometimes? “Oh good lord, by the agents? Yes!”