BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ When he was a very young actor, George Blagden did everything people warned him not to do. At 18, after 11 years in boarding school, he auditioned for drama school. "Everyone said, 'don't bother applying when you're 18 because you won't get in. They're looking for candidates who've got a bit of life experience,'" he recalls in a meeting room of a hotel here.
"Luckily I got in and was with 25 other students who were five, six years my senior. And that was great because I spent three years, eight hours a day, every day working with people who were pushing me constantly."
Actually he applied to six drama schools and was accepted by all six.
Before he even graduated, the British-born actor was offered a role in an American independent movie to be shot in Indonesia. Everybody cautioned him not to go. He went anyway.
"It was kind of a diversion from this other plan that other people had for me, to go do this film. And it was the most incredible seven weeks ever," he says, seated at a round linen-clad table.
"We shot in these deserted temples in Prambanan and an island that has literally not any kind of feature on it that's made by man, totally deserted. Active volcanoes _ we filmed a whole sequence in the crater of an erupting volcano � the most incredible seven weeks."
When he tried out for his latest role as King Louis XIV in "Versailles," premiering on Ovation Oct. 1, nobody discouraged him. No one except himself. While he may sound like a banner-waving rebel, he's not. "Anyone who knows me for five minutes would tell you I'm the least rebellious person," he shakes his head.
In fact, acting was one way he could overcome his shyness, he confesses. "It's really odd to talk about that in our industry particularly, when you have to stand on stage in front of hundreds of people or on set in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in front of a 300-piece crew, to say that you're shy, people probably raise their eyebrows and go, 'Yeah, whatever,'" he says.
"But I think it was shyness and being able to channel confidence through someone else, I guess is a way of being able to come out of your shell. It's amazing this role has started changing that in me. It's the first role I've ever done where I am being directly influenced by living with this man," he says.
"I have spent a lot of my formative years not being very comfortable in my own skin" he chuckles. "And I suppose acting is that way of being able to be lots of different people. And being those different people, you get to express things that maybe sometimes you're too scared to. And you get to vent certain things and channel certain things through the character you play that maybe you don't have the confidence to do in your real life."
He remembers feeling an aching homesickness when, at 7, he was first sent to boarding school. "You get to go home (on holidays) but it means that you start being able to be very chameleon-like in your outlook to the world.
"I guess with a school like that if there's a problem in the playground you don't get to go home at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and forget about it and go back in the comfort of your home. You have to go into a room where you sleep with that problem and eat breakfast with that problem and you get very, very good at a very young age dealing with other people. Very adaptable. I'm sure it influenced me and also my choice to be an actor."
Blagden, 27, had spent three years playing an Anglo-Saxon monk on "Vikings," when he auditioned for "Versailles."(
"I showed up with this huge ponytail, with undercut shaved sides of my head and a beard out to here," he stretches out his hands. "I walked into the casting director's office. I walked in and did two scenes. Suzanne Smith, our lovely casting director, is quite a tough cookie. At the end of the audition she even said, 'I've seen you do better.'"
At first he was surprised he landed the role. "I understood more why they'd chosen me when I got on set and started talking about this vulnerability that they wanted to kick this season off with, because it's something that I am able to do quite naturally and it was really important to not have this very sort of bravado, scented character to start season one."
Performing in foreign places like France and Indonesia, often takes him away from his sweetheart, actress Ellie Crawley. "We've never really had a conversation about what it is to be an actor and the fact that you have to try to make a relationship like this work in these circumstances where you are apart a lot of the time," he says. "But I think we both did that subconsciously in our own heads when we decided to be together. At the moment, we're very happy and it's working."
