Benediction takes us into the life and work of poet Siegfried Sassoon. The film is described as follows: “The story of Siegfried Sassoon, the famed British poet who was sent to a psychiatric facility for his anti-war stance during WWI, had affairs with several men while being closeted, and developed a crisis in faith when he converted to Catholicism.”
We see Siegfried Sassoon in two parts in the film: When he’s a young soldier and poet, fighting against World War I, played there by Jack Lowden, and then again as he’s having a crisis of faith and turning to the Catholic church later in life, where he’s played by past Doctor Who star Peter Capaldi. And part of Sassoon’s journey is his relationship with actor Ivor Novello, played by Jeremy Irvine.
In talking to Irvine about his role as Ivor, we had a lot of fun back and forth about his career, singing on camera, and his inspiration for this actor who used his fame and good looks to get what he wanted from the men in his life (even if he wouldn’t tell us which actor he used as inspiration for Ivor). Novello is not a good man in the fictionalized telling of Benediction, an important distinction that Irvine and I made in our interview, since we don’t know the real story between Ivor and Sassoon. But he is a man who uses his fame and his good looks to essentially prey on men, and Sassoon is one of those men.
It all starts with Ivor starting the film off by singing a song and charming a room full of guests with his song, something that Irvine should be used to given his role in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, but he described filming that first scene and how weird it must have been for the others there.
“It was sung live on set. To do that means that I had an earpiece in which plays the music but it means that no one else can hear the music,” Irvine said. “So no one else knows. I’m pretending to play the piano, no one else can hear that. They just see me going and the camera tracking forward, tracking forward, and me going do do do. And suddenly I’m singing with no backing track, these people haven’t heard this song before and yeah, it must have been weird.”
But the best part of the interview was when Jeremy Irvine described his portrayal of Ivor, which is, as he says “Jeremy being a bitch in eyeliner” because he wanted to be authentic to how Ivor Novello looked in his movies and real life, from what Irvine researched.
You can see the rest of our interview here:
Benediction is in select theaters now!
(featured image: Roadside Attractions)
