NYLON - February 2008 - (Page 108) MEANS TO AN END After receiving rave reviews for his role as Ian Curtis in Anton Corbijn’s brilliant Control, Sam Riley’s acting career is off to one hell of a start. By Nick Duerden. Photographed by Edith Held “My limited experience in this business,” Sam Riley is saying, the smoke from his cigarette clouding in front of his haunted eyes, “is that you shouldn’t get your hopes up too much because things are likely to go wrong. That said, in my moments of fantasy I was actually expecting things to go exactly as they have done with [the movie] Control: great film, glowing praise.” He laughs like an old man. You can practically hear his lungs rattle. “And I can’t say I’m not enjoying it because that would make me sound ungrateful, wouldn’t it? It’s all good, but let’s just say I feel a little exposed right now ” It is a cold winter day in Berlin, and 27-year-old Riley, the British actor who brought Joy Division’s Ian Curtis so vividly back to life in Anton Corbijn’s biopic, is sitting in his flat. Like Curtis, Riley is louche and strikingly cheekboned, his eternally dishevelled appearance suggestive that he has only recently gotten up out of bed and wants keenly to return to it. He is cool, collapsed, and likeable. He is also cynical to his very marrow, at long last the recipient of some hard-won limelight and yet deeply mistrustful of it. “That’ll be because I’m from Yorkshire,” he deadpans. “And also because I’ve already been burned by [showbiz] once before.”
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.