Kingsman star Taron Egerton: ‘I don’t think I’m the right choice for James Bond’
Taron Egerton has history with billion-dollar phenomena. As Elton John in Rocketman (2019), the Welsh actor stepped into the platform boots of the third-biggest-selling solo artist of all time; as a street delinquent turned secret agent in the Kingsman movies, he helped to establish a gloriously tongue-in-cheek British rival to Bond; and in his latest film, for Apple TV+, he takes on a viral video-game sensation that emerged from Soviet Russia and spread throughout the world, Tetris. Egerton remembers playing the addictive puzzle game as a child – “My mum bought me a Game Boy when I was 10,” he says – yet he never got so hooked that he saw blocks falling in his dreams, as so many others did. His obsession lay elsewhere. “I was the Pokémon generation. It was my life for 18 months or so.” He’s 33 now. On his birthday in November 2022, Egerton posted on Instagram that “the past year has been one of the most challenging of my life”. “My mother had cancer,” he tells me from his kitchen in Aberystwyth. “She’s fine now. But it felt like the end of my youth. You confront something that means you have to dispel any of the illusions and stories you tell yourself about anything fairy tale to do with life – you lose a lot of the lightness. It was just a tough experience.” The year threw up other disasters. Last March, he took on the revival of Mike Bartlett’s play Cock, in the West End, opposite Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey and His Dark Materials actress Jade Anouka, but withdrew from the production after passing out on stage on the opening night – “Slightly sore neck and a bruised ego,” he said afterwards – then testing positive for Covid-19. “It was a difficult episode,” he says now, and one he’s not keen to revisit. His decision to quit the play “for personal reasons” was informed by his mother’s cancer diagnosis. Yet he recalls now that one tabloid tried to suggest his departure was down to his split from his girlfriend. “That was actually two years ago, but I just kept it private,” he says. “[They] made it sound as if those two [events] were connected, when, in fact, they were a year apart.”
Via: Telegraph
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