Helena Bonham Carter fancies a drink. So she orders a double espresso. And a glass of fizzy water. And an apple smoothie. She looks rather worried when I order just a coffee. “Is that all you want?” she asks gently. Multiple drinking, she explains, is the way to a balanced diet. She admits her theory is not based on pure science.
We are in the cafe just down the road from her north London home. She says she’s got something to show me, and produces a freaky cardboard cutout of a little woman with a huge, hydroencephalized head. “I’ve brought myself. It’s me ... in Alice.” Alice in Wonderland is the latest movie she has made with her partner, director Tim Burton. This is their sixth collaboration, and possibly the grandest (it’s certainly the most expensive, at an estimated US$250 million). It’s classic Burton territory — a fairy-tale world where adulthood is never quite attained, and innocence trails a ghoulish stench. Bonham Carter is playing nasty — a cross between the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts. She holds up her cardboard self and addresses it. “She’s got Tourette’s. She just says, ‘Off with their heads!’ all the time.”
Bonham Carter has not yet seen the film. No one has. It’s a closely guarded secret. But then, you won’t get far asking her about any film she’s been in. In recent years, she has boycotted them. She can’t stand watching herself. Nor can Johnny Depp, Burton’s prettier alter ego, who plays the Mad Hatter in Alice. “Johnny doesn’t watch anything he’s in. That’s slightly comforting. You think if Johnny Depp can’t watch himself ...”
You don’t look your best in Alice, I say. “No, I can never rely on Tim to make me pretty.”
Bonham Carter’s career divides neatly into two ages — pre-Burton and Burton. She seems so different from the 19-year-old who emerged in A Room With a View, and went on to be a poster girl for E. M. Forster, English roses and the corset industry. The past decade has been Burton time — increasingly wacky characters in increasingly wacky movies, from Big Fish to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In Sweeney Todd, she is wonderful as Mrs Lovett, the most adorable serial-killer sidekick in movie history. The white petticoats have long gone, replaced by black lace, black hats and black frocks; black everything. The luxuriant, pre-Raphaelite hair has become a bird’s nest and the pallid complexion ghostly white.
“Ageing has helped hugely,” she says. “There’s no question I’m a better actor, and you leave behind a certain typecasting. I was like the corset bimbo.” She stops, has a slurp of smoothie, and starts again. “Well, not quite bimbo, but you know what I mean. The corset sex symbol, I suppose. Now I’m not going to be the sex symbol, I’m going to be the granny.” She changes her mind by the mouthful. “Well, not quite granny.”
In those early films she came across incredibly posh. The irony is that she is the ultimate hybrid — as well as the Englishness, she is also part Spanish, French, Austrian, Czech and Russian. Her perplexed mother would ask where everybody got this notion of the highly bred British family. The answer was simple: Bonham Carter’s great-grandfather was the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith. But even then, she says, people got it wrong — Asquith wasn’t posh, just a clothes manufacturer with a bit of wedge. As for the Bonham Carters, they were old-fashioned liberals. Yes, there was once a country house, but that went decades ago when they fell on hard times.
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