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Helena Bonham Carter was enjoying a remarkable career by any standard. She started out as a talented and gorgeous British teen, and has grown up on screen, veering from period dramas, including A Room with a View (1985), Howards End (1992) and The Wings of the Dove (1997), to contemporary pieces such as Fight Club (1999), several of the Harry Potter adventures, and Terminator Salvation (2009). Then somewhere along the way -- actually, we can pinpoint it; it was while making Planet of the Apes (2001) -- Carter also became a seemingly permanent presence in the life and films of Tim Burton. She co-starred in Apes, then also his Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Bonham Carter and Burton are still together as a couple, are the parents of two young children, and their latest film collaboration is the March 5 release Alice in Wonderland (2010), with Bonham Carter's evil Red Queen ruling Underland with an iron first, leading its population to hope that the latest visit from Alice (Mia Wasikowska) will help bring about the Red Queen's fall from power.
ScreenStar recently got a few minutes of telephone time with Bonham Carter and what follows is our exclusive interview with the actress.
How would you describe this version of Alice in Wonderland?
It's not the story as we know it. It's an invented story because as Tim quite rightly said, "There ain't much story in Alice in Wonderland. It's just an episodic meeting of crazy-crazy people." So they've got a story and an emotional context. So you see Alice as an older girl, and she's revisiting Wonderland, basically. It honors the tone of the piece and it's got all your favorite characters. And because it's foreign to a lot of people, hopefully it will make them feel like Alice themselves by entering a world that they sort of recognize, but then equally totally confuses them.
What intrigued you about the character of the Red Queen?
She's really funny. I just loved deforming myself. So the idea that I'd have this huge head was immediately attractive to me. I had this special camera that followed me around, that made my head bigger. There's only two of them in the world. Johnny (Depp) had one that made his eyes bigger. Well, it wasn't a camera, but it was a special effect. My head was going to get very, very much bigger than my normal head. And then she's a mixture of things. She obviously has emotional problems. She has something like Tourette's. "Off with their head!" That's her answer to everything or any problem. She's very much given to anger. I thought she was, mentally and emotionally, about age two. She was really good fun to play.
Mia is a real newcomer. How did you enjoy working with her?
I loved Mia. She's a really special person. She is one of those people who can be anything because she's both old and young at the same time. She's got such an old, wise head, and is so un-needy, so un-neurotic. She's totally -- what's the word? -- centered and a really good actress. Tim so relied on Mia because he had to have an Alice who was completely naturalist and real. And yet, Mia was always thinking, "Oh God, how is this interesting?" because, of course, everybody she meets suffers from one kind of madness or the other, between the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Queen. She felt dull in response, but she's brilliant. She had some stiff competition, and he chose brilliantly, Tim.
So much of Alice in Wonderland was shot with the actors working in green rooms and against green screens. What's that like for an actor?
When we came to act it, of course, we were in Greenland. We weren't at all in Wonderland. It was all green screens. I'd been such a big fan of Alice my whole life, and Lewis Carroll, and his whole world and his imagination. I thought, "Oh, how amazing to be a part of it." I had visions of being on a great set, with fantastic props and us getting to keep most of them because I'm married to the director. And then, of course, I walked on the set the first day and it was just a green room. It was all green screen for eight weeks. Every acting job you have to imagine, but this was like you had to imagine everything except for the actor opposite you, if he was human, like Johnny was human, and Anne Hathaway and Matt Lucas. They were there. But if you were acting opposite something else, which I did with the pig, they were not there. They were just wooden. And you always had an actor dressed in green around. If you were an actor dressed in green, you'd vanish in green-screen land. So we had these actors who were really, really sweet, but they'd never be seen and they'll never be heard, either. But they were dressed in green jumpsuits and they'd give us lines off screen if you were talking to a pig or a frog or some other animal.
This is one of those films where you don't know how it's come together until you see the finished piece. So, what did you make of it?
To be honest, it's probably one of the few films I can watch myself in because I don't really look that much like me, because my head is about ten times bigger than it actually is. That's where he's amazing, Tim, because he's got such a visual imagination, and the impact of some simple ideas I can't fully realize. Then I'll watch the film and go, "Oh, that's what he was going on about." That's partially why, and I didn't quite appreciate this initially, you have to be really quite minimal, because my head was going to be so much bigger than anyone else's. Your acting has to be that much better.
While we've got you on the phone we wanted to ask about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. You've wrapped your work as Bellatrix Lestrange. How tough was it to say goodbye to that role, to the franchise?
I was really sad because I've been part of it, off and on, for about three years. So I really knew those people. It was a real luxury. It was perfect for a mommy-actress, especially for me, because it was at Leavesden, about 40 minutes from where I live. It was a supporting role, so the hours aren't bad. But it was a real luxury and a treat to have the chance to get to know those people over such a period of time. Usually, your acquaintanceship or knowledge of people only lasts three months at the most. It can be even less. So that continuity was really lovely and that security was nice, always knowing that there'd be a Potter to do. Emotionally, financially, it was a real luxury. I also loved the kids and the other actors and the crew. I really miss them already. I was really genuinely sad when it finished.
