"Oh fuck off!" The words are out of my mouth before I have a chance to think about the ramifications of saying them to a Hollywood actor, especially one whose star is about to turn supernova. As soon as I do, I think I might throw up. And then, after the briefest of pauses, Taylor Kitsch's perfect eyes wrinkle up and his perfect mouth emits a perfect laugh, all manly and throaty and sounding of a thousand cigarettes.
The incident occurs just after Kitsch has finished telling me about the house he's building by a lake in Austin, Texas, and the boat, which he sails upon said lake. It comes after he's said how much he loves England ("I love the dry, wry humour"), and doesn't like LA ("It's too one-sided"); all punctuated with swearing, jokes and the confidence of a man who can wear cowboy boots, bootcut jeans (well, he does live in Texas) and still look absurdly attractive.
I don't mean to curse at him, but it is almost too much to take, all of this, and the vision of him building a house just doesn't seem fair to the rest of the population, neither male nor female. If there was a real-life, modern-day Adam, or if Gosling in The Notebook really did exist, it would be in the form of the man sitting in front of me. Which is probably why he's saving the planet in two films this spring. First up is John Carter, a Disney action behemoth based on the 1964 book by Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs; then comes the guns-blazing Battleship, in which he stars alongside Liam Neeson and Rihanna. As if that isn't enough, Kitsch will follow with Oliver Stone's Savages, in which he plays a pot grower taking on a Mexican drug cartel to rescue his girlfriend (Blake Lively).
It might seem a brazen burst on to the scene but Kitsch, 30, has done his time in the waiting room. There was the almost career as a hockey player in his native Canada, until injury got the better of him, then a move to New York and a brief stint as a model. During that time he studied acting on the side and won small roles in forgettable films such as Snakes On A Plane and John Tucker Must Die. There was a stint in LA, living – literally – out of his $1,100 car, in between auditioning for parts. But it was not until getting cast as Tim Riggins in American football TV drama, Friday Night Lights – a spin off from the 2004 film – that his career kick-started his career in earnest.
"I played a high school kid at 26, 27; I still never use a razor, maybe to spite him," grins Kitsch, reclining back into his sofa. "But I love that role, man. I was told it was to be supporting at the beginning: you're going to be used incrementally, you could be gone by the first season. But it turned out to be quite the opposite. They gave me the empowerment to be really free. No rehearsals and the most important thing to me was to be able to improv. I love to throw curveballs; all those quotes people come up to me and say about Riggins, I'd say 90% are from the improv. I'd be like, 'Hey, this paragraph here? Literally not going to do it. Just going to do a look right here.' And they'd be like, 'Let's try it!'"
The confidence the role gave him obviously worked. It led to meatier parts, playing war photographer Kevin Carter in 2010's The Bang Bang Club and Gambit in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. And FNL also saw Kitsch forge a friendship with the show's director, Peter Berg, who hand-picked him for the lead role of Alex Hopper in Battleship.
"Pete and I go way back," says Kitsch, grinning, and extolling his pal in language you might expect from a veteran of a US sports drama. "He came to pitch Battleship to me and that alone is incredible; we're friends first and foremost and we've gone through a lot together personally, so it's a big risk to ask a close friend to get in the trenches with you on a different level. Because making movies is fucking tough and you're going to bat heads and you're going to challenge each other. But I think that was why I signed on, to go to battle with Pete."
'For 11 months, I was on a regimen of training and dieting. I was working six-day weeks. I would get my wake-up call at 4.33am'
Photograph: Frank Connor Before Battleship, however, is John Carter – or "JC" as Kitsch likes to call him – an American civil war veteran transported from Earth to Mars. Not the easiest of premises to sell, but with the help of giant billboards featuring a long-haired Kitsch half-naked save for a loin cloth, one that has the potential to sell itself. It's his first lead role, and the pressure is on.
"I don't think anyone is going to put more on it than me," he says, ruffling that hair underneath his oversized beanie hat. "Of course it's the grandeur of it all, and the effects. I don't have any power over that but the character is something you just dive into. For 11 months, I was on a regimen of training and dieting. I stayed four months at the Metropolitan hotel in Mayfair, right by Hyde Park, but I was working six-day weeks, so I literally went out once. I would get my wake-up call at 4.33am to train. But it's worth it; the aesthetic of John Carter … you can't fuck around with that."
Was there a pie or two at the end of filming, then? "Oh my god, if I even fucking told you how hard I partied after that …" he starts, going almost misty eyed. "I rented an over-the-top house on the lake where I live in Austin, that I would never live in, like ridiculous; it was a joke. I flew in 11 of my friends, and my brother; friends that I grew up with and a few that I met through work. Eleven guys for five days, on the lake and going into the town. I fucking was a different person."
He is a confident fellow, Taylor Kitsch. We are used to a more falsely humble Hollywood these days – "Oh I'm so lucky, oh it just happened, oh I'm so blessed" and so forth – but perhaps because he doesn't live there, Kitsch doesn't seem to suffer from that syndrome. He will happily tell you how hard he worked to get a role. He will sing praises of those he has learned from – Willem Defoe, Dominic West, or Benicio Del Toro – and cast shadows upon those he hasn't, dismissing their methods without naming names. It may sound over-bearing but with Kitsch, such self-belief seems to come from a genuine place of simply wanting to make things happen. You sense he's used to being the best. But it's not every ex-model pretty boy who manages to land two lead roles in a year, convincing studios to take a risk on a relative unknown. How did he manage to pull it off?
"Oh I threatened them quite often," he says, grinning. "I would love to ask them that, too. I had a call from my manager saying the director, Andrew Stanton (Wall-E), wanted to meet me. The screen test was quite heavy; John Carter has quite a burden. I think getting that part of it was a big thing [for Stanton]. But he was so emphatic and his energy was so infectious, that I left the audition thinking, 'If he gives me a good kick at it, I'm going to fight for it, I'm going to throw my hat in the ring for sure.'"
'John Carter tested me quite intensely. I literally suffered from exhaustion, passed out a couple of times. It took everything I had'
Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Sportsphoto For all his fighting talk, Kitsch is the first to admit that it was not an easy ride, and not only for the training that left him physically battered and bruised.
"John Carter tested me quite intensely," he says in a southern drawl that belies the fact he's actually from a tiny Canadian town called Kelowna. "I literally suffered from exhaustion on John Carter, passed out a couple of times from it, so it took everything I had on that level. But also, emotionally. We shot the scene where his family are taken away from him, and that's 14 hours of Carter in mourning; that's intense. If it's Friday Night Lights, you can do it because you need two takes of raw emotion. You do it for literally about 30 minutes, if that, and then you're done. This was rough, but rewarding because when you see it cut in at certain spots, fuck it can hit ya, and I love that."
He may be owning the action hero this year, but Kitsch is determined to be taken seriously as an actor. "I love the story part of acting," he says. "I love bringing people into the emotional part of it. My favourite scenes in John Carter are the emotional ones, especially when you can collaborate with Stanton, who can rip your heart out and make you cry laughing in the same breath."
It's quite rare for an action picture to have a heart, I suggest; mostly it's just brawn and battles. "It is, but if it was one of those movies, I wouldn't have done it." He pauses, then with the confidence dipping a notch, says, "I was scared shitless with Bang Bang Club. Kevin Carter was a South African, drug-addicted, suicidal war photographer, and it was a true story that his family and best friend would see. Doing that justice is way more pressure … Then shooting Savages with Oliver Stone. I think that role will turn some heads in the sense of how unapologetic the character is. ThHe just doesn't give a fuck. But that's fun."
It is an exciting time for Taylor Kitsch and if he plays things right, he could have just what he wants. Is he happy with where he is going? "You work for years on end," he says, "and it's not theatre where you can have that validation right away. You hope people love it, and you're proud of the work. I remember driving around Sunset Boulevard in the car that I was living in. Now you drive down Sunset and there is a huge John Carter billboard. I had probably about 25 people texting me about it, and that is a pretty cool feeling. But what I really love is how different these guys are. And that's the beauty of it, hopefully."
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