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Colin Firth is no overnight sensation. Rather his career has been built through hard work, putting in the hours. His Mr. Darcy added a sensuality and animal appeal to what might have turned out to be just another stuffy BBC costume drama, making it one of the television events of the year. Colin Firth: "It was a pretty good series, but not my cup of tea. I felt like a drug dealer who doesn't get high on his own supply. I'll peddle the stuff, but wont use it. All I did was to put on a costume and act as well as I could." From The Times while still filming P&P: "There'll be people who will object strongly simply because it's my face instead of the one they have in their mind. Everyone believes he is dark, though I don't believe Jane Austen ever described him as such. So they've dyed me dark. You have to be very careful not to make him either too idiosyncratic or too bland, and the danger is that you don't dare to do anything at all. So you have to take over and say, 'To hell with it, he's mine now. I own this character and he has to be me'.
The success of Darcy makes no sense to Mr. Firth, even frightens him. At one point he suggested it was all Jane Austen, at another the makeup and hair dye. Perhaps it was the actor's stillness, the years of hiding and of condensing everything, that burns through Darcy's passionate journey into life. "I thought to myself: 'This is where he wants to go across the room and punch someone. This is where he wants to kiss her. This is where he wants sex with her right now.' I'd imagine a man doing it all, and then not doing any of it. That's all I did." [New York Times, Jan. 14, 1996] Colin Firth had never read Jane Austen's work before Andrew Davies' script landed on his desk. "Nineteenth-century literature didn't seem very sexy to me. I had this prejudice that it would probably be girl's stuff. I had never realised that Darcy was such a famous figure in literature." But then, he continues, he would mention the script, and "everyone would tell me how they were devoted to this book, how at school they had been in love with Mr. Darcy, and my brother said, 'Darcy, isn't he supposed to be sexy?'" There's no denying Firth's own appeal. Aged 34, he stand six foot one in his stockinged feet, with tousled brown hair and deep-set eyes. Still the role failed to appeal. "I looked in the mirror and I didn't see Darcy," he says. And he doubted that he was up to the part. "I started to think, 'Oh God, Olivier was fantastic and no one else could ever play the part'". He struggled with a character who still remains an enigma until the end of the book. "I reasoned: To make myself different enough to play Darcy, I will have to do an awful lot. But doing anything is the last thing that is right for playing Darcy. The only way for it to work is to be Darcy already." The conviction of producer Sue Birtwistle changed his mind. "I realised that I had begun to appropriate the character and I now owned it. The thought of anyone else doing it made me feel rather jealous," he says. His Darcy is all his own. He is neither too idiosyncratic nor too bland. Colin Firth has achieved his aim. [The London Times 25 Oct. 1995] The amiable Firth feels detached from the fuss of Darcymania, mainly because he was in Colombia and Tunisia filming Nostromo and The English Patient when the dam broke. "I was away all the time. I thought my mum was having me on. She would ring me up every so often and say, 'This is popular. People like it.' Then she'd ring again and say, 'Actually, they're going a bit mad about it.' Then, 'This seems to be getting out of control.' My initial reaction was, 'Yeah, right, Mum.' " As it turned out, Mrs. Firth was being a little understated with her lad Colin. More than ten million viewers tuned in every week, and the BBC video leapt off the shelves, its initial run an instant sell-out.
The success of Darcy makes no sense to Mr. Firth, even frightens him. At one point he suggested it was all Jane Austen, at another the makeup and hair dye. Perhaps it was the actor's stillness, the years of hiding and of condensing everything, that burns through Darcy's passionate journey into life. "I thought to myself: 'This is where he wants to go across the room and punch someone. This is where he wants to kiss her. This is where he wants sex with her right now.' I'd imagine a man doing it all, and then not doing any of it. That's all I did." [NY Times, 14 Jan. 1996] It seems obvious that what happened with the Darcy character was very special, not just to me but to a lot of other people, and I feel that I must look at it all again, absorb it, understand this bewildering golden moment. [Time Out, 19 March 1997]
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I probably overdid it a few weeks ago when I said that it was the most mundane, run-of-the-mill adaptation. But it is an utterly conventional rendering of Pride and Prejudice. There is nothing exceptionally sexual about it all. Nudity? So far no one has even removed a shirt. In fact I go for a swim after a long ride in one scene and remain fully clothed. What happened, I think, is that someone said they wanted it to be sexy. What they meant was the kind of sexuality that's in the book the sexuality of repression. When you read the book, you know that everybody's horny all that flirtation and dancing and conversation, but nobody's going to get laid." [The London Times, 27 Aug. 1994]
"Being Mr. Darcy was nice, but it's over - it was three years ago, and I'm not doing him any more. I'm not Mr. Darcy, though I sometimes wished I were. Certain tabloid newspapers have suggested I'm sick of the image and loathed all the publicity. Nonsense, I never said that. The great thing about Darcymania was that it had no down side; it was great even though it all seemed so unreal, as if it was happening to someone else. But it wasn't really me that everyone went crazy about - it was the character, who'd been around for a couple of centuries and who I played a few years ago, before I went on to do a load of other things. And that's just a simple fact of life." [Radio Times, 12 July 1997]