Interview

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It's hard to believe when looking at him, but Ben Barnes's first stab at fame came in front of a microphone, and not a movie camera. Barnes was 17 and living with his folks in Wimbledon,

England, when Pop Idol talent-spotter Simon Fuller signed the young man up to his label, 19 Management. Barnes was dubbed the next teen heartthrob, but all too soon his singing career sank into a sorry sequence of dead notes that ended in 2003, when the band he teamed up with failed to qualify for the Eurovision Song Contest. He retreated to Kingston University, in London, where he studied English and drama. He didn't know it at the time, but the loss of his crooner ambition would set him on course for a spot among cinematic royalty.

Barnes's turn as the hero Prince Caspian in the second Chronicles of Narnia film, released this past spring, has turned the 27-year-old actor into a global poster boy. Hollywood usually casts young male Brits as villains or rebels, but Barnes comes equipped with way too much of that other clichéd English trait-charm-to be convincing in those dark roles. Nope, the kid was cursed to be a valiant hero in a multi-million-dollar fantasy-adventure movie. Just look at his first big break, in Matthew Vaughn's fairy-tale epic Stardust, where he was given the small but pivotal role of Young Dunstan, which in retrospect seems like an elaborate audition for Caspian. Not to say Barnes is a walking, talking typecast: He played a broke Russian immigrant in Suzie Halewood's independent movie Bigga Than Ben and the cocky straight-A student Dakin onstage in Alan Bennett's The History Boys.

Today, living in central London, Barnes has signed on for the third chapter of Narnia and recently took on the role as the son of Colin Firth's and Kristin Scott Thomas's characters in the film version of Noël Coward's tragicomedy Easy Virtue. He's also currently filling the shoes of a very different male fantasy character, Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's handsome protagonist who sells his soul to the devil to stay looking very much like Ben Barnes does today. In real life, Barnes sees himself as more of an accidental sex symbol

KALEEM AFTAB: The last time that we saw each other was a year ago. You were still acting onstage in The History Boys and were excited that Bigga Than Ben was nearly completed. What a
difference a year makes.

BEN BARNES: It's so funny, last time I saw you this change in fortune was just happening.

KA: Yeah. You'd just been to-or were about to go to-the audition for Prince Caspian.

BB: And then it all went a bit mental.