The first thing I notice when I meet Aaron Taylor-Johnson is his beard. Glossy, thick and caviar-coloured, it seems to precede him by several seconds. The term “face-furniture” would be underselling this bad boy; it’s more like a three-piece suite. I compliment him on it – the lustre, the density. He looks pleased to have it acknowledged. His blue eyes sparkle. Then he says something strange: “It’s real.” I hadn’t thought that it wasn’t. I mumble something about believing him. But now he has made me suspicious.
We chew the fat, or rather the fur. He has noticed a lot of face fuzz in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, the artist and director Sam Taylor-Johnson, and their children (two daughters, aged four and three; another two, aged 16 and eight, from her previous marriage to the art dealer Jay Jopling). “I’ve seen some pretty impressive beards from some young lads. Guys saying to one another: ‘Dude, I saw you two weeks ago, what the fuck? That’s some serious growth you’ve got going on there. Fuckin’ hell!’” He chuckles. He wants to make it clear, though, that this is no hipster hangover – as if his black leather jacket and stiff dark-blue jeans didn’t convey that message already. “I got into beards right in the middle of the hipster boom. But that’s not why I’m doing this.” He liked it recently when someone said he resembled a fashionable Hasidic Jew. “That was nice because I have really curly hair and also I’m Jewish,” he explains.
At 24, he is a handsome man, though on screen he has been nerdy (as a DIY crimefighter in the Kick-Ass movies), dapper (Count Vronsky in Anna Karenina), baby-faced (the young John Lennon in Nowhere Boy) and blissed-out (a dreadlocked drug-dealer in Savages). Photographed when his wife was collecting her OBE, he sported a waxed moustache and a kind of blond triangular wimple made of hair. “I looked like Gene Wilder gone wrong,” he says. But his stern good looks shine through every disguise. “I try to chop and change. Play around, go a bit wild. On Godzilla I was military: cropped hair, clean-shaven. For this I had white hair.” By “this” he means Avengers: Age of Ultron, the Marvel extravaganza he is obediently promoting.
Taylor-Johnson plays Quicksilver, who, as his name suggests, zips everywhere at lightning speed. He could clean your entire flat in the time it takes you to scribble “Clean flat” on your to-do list. Despite being in the company of the extravagantly costumed Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, the character spends most of the film in a crummy tracksuit that suggests Avengers: Age of Primark. I tell him I thought that was a nice touch. “Yeah, well, he’s a civilian, isn’t he?” He gives an unimpressed sniff.
His work in the film is smouldering, witty, blase. But now that the Taylor-Johnsons each choose only one project a year, the better to spend time together as a family, it would not be impertinent to ask whether his energies might be more fruitfully channelled toward material as strong as Nowhere Boy, the film on which the couple met.
He was 19; she was 42. The film, her feature debut, gave him his meatiest role. His life and career until then had been standard rising-star stuff. Growing up in a Hertfordshire village, he had acted professionally since the age of six. His breakthrough came as a neighbourhood heartthrob in the teen comedy Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. He also starred in British independent drama Dummy, as a budding DJ caring for his kid brother after their mother’s death. Its director, Matthew Thompson, recalls an actor of uncommon intensity.
“There was a seriousness in the way he approached the role right from the audition,” he tells me. “Especially for someone so young – he was 17 at the time. The way he wound himself, getting into character, was very impressive. Before a take, he would go off into a corner and you could see his face change as he got darker and deeper. He was having a lot of auditions around the time we were filming but he didn’t come across as over-ambitious or arrogant. There was a real modesty and sweetness about him. You can see that in something like Kick-Ass, where his naivety is exactly what’s required.”
In Nowhere Boy, his performance matures and sharpens before our eyes. His John Lennon is playful in unnerving ways – the involuntary laugh, for instance, that bursts out of him when he learns his beloved uncle has died. Sam Taylor-Johnson has said that she fell in love with her star almost immediately, but that they weren’t a couple until the end of the shoot. I wonder whether falling for the director changes an actor’s work. Did what was happening behind the camera affect what he was doing in front of it? He gazes around the room, mulling over the question. “I don’t know if it was coincidence or if we just both had focus and time and passion.” He sounds thoroughly bored.
His displeasure with my suggestion that he might look for another project of the calibre of Nowhere Boy reveals itself only gradually. “Those scripts, those sorts of films, they’re gems that come around every so often and when they do, yeah, of course, I’d love to do them. People look at stuff like Godzilla and Avengers and think I only do blockbusters, or however you wanna put it, but in reality I can make double or triple what I got paid for Avengers by doing other stuff – there are other options but I don’t want to work with this person or that person and so I don’t do it. There are other ways to make more money.” He needs a lot of persuasion, he says, to be away from home. “I know when I’ve missed too many school runs. We’re lucky that we have the financial luxury not to have to be working all the time.”
That brings us directly to the subject of money. I ask how much he got paid for the Avengers film. He lets out an incredulous splutter. “You’re, like: ‘Oh yeah, how much did they pay you?’” he says, mimicking my voice. His smile is so wide that I’m sure he’s going to answer, but then he says: “I can’t really discuss that.”
I tell him we can make a deal: I’ll reveal how much I’m earning for doing this interview and he can say how much he got paid for Avengers.
“That’s funny,” he laughs. “You don’t have to tell me, man. Really.”
Go on, I say. We can share.
“Let’s just say I got paid very nicely. The money didn’t have a major effect on me. It was really down to spending time speaking to Joss [Whedon, the writer-director] and talking it over. It’s much more important to me to consider what I could do in the film and who I’m working with.”
His wife also plays a part in his career choices, as he does in hers. What did she have to say about Avengers? “Good question. Something like: ‘You gotta do it. It’ll be great. It’ll be so much fun.’ And it was.”
Earlier this year, she told this newspaper that he had encouraged her to direct Fifty Shades of Grey (“Just do it,” he said). Following reports of arguments between her and the author EL James, she announced that she wouldn’t be directing the second instalment. Was he also instrumental in that decision? “Um … decisions just naturally happen. It isn’t about forcing anything. Sam certainly isn’t one to shy away from a challenge. But, you know, it’s probably for the best.” Whenever she crops up in conversation, he seems to perk up. Initial sneers at the age difference between them have largely abated these days. They were married in 2012 and, while most people who take their partner’s surname experience a thrill upon receiving a new credit card or driving licence, I wonder what it was like for Taylor-Johnson. When he first saw his new name in a professional context, it was in the credits for Anna Karenina on screens 30ft high.
“It was so important to me. Actually I wanted it on Savages as well but they told me the posters had already gone out. Then they said: ‘Look, we hired Aaron Johnson.’” He shrugs. When the same thing almost happened on Anna Karenina, he dug his heels in. “I said: ‘I want it changed! This is important.’” But how did it actually feel? “It felt beautiful,” he sighs. “It felt right.”
Avengers: Age of Ultron is out now in the UK and Australia and on 1 May in the US
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