Interview: Jamie Bell for ‘The Uprising’

Jamie Bell on playing real-life rebel priest John Ball in The Uprising, and the through-line of rebellion running through his career.

Six hundred years before anyone stormed a palace with a phone camera, a farmer, a priest, and a soldier did it with pitchforks. The Uprising opens on the quiet cruelty of 14th-century England — a poll tax bleeding a population still reeling from plague — and doesn’t so much build to rebellion as detonate into it. Paul Greengrass, never a director interested in watching history from a safe distance, throws his camera into the mud alongside the mob, and the result plays less like a costume drama than a countdown to an explosion nobody in power saw coming.

Andrew Garfield anchors the film as its unnamed everyman, but it’s Jamie Bell as the real-life preacher John Ball who gives the rebellion its conscience. Ball was a man remembered mostly through the accounts of people who despised him, and Bell had to build a performance out of the gaps: a handful of surviving rhyming couplets, secondhand hostility, and whatever conviction he could locate in a 14th-century voice history tried to bury. It’s the kind of role that asks an actor to be a symbol and a person at once, and Bell, no stranger to underdogs and agitators, leans hard into the person.

We sat down with Bell to talk about finding Ball’s voice, the miners’ strikes that shaped his own upbringing, and why a 643-year-old uprising still feels like it could break out tomorrow.

I want to take it back to your debut role, as a kid in Billy Elliot, which is, of course, a story set against a miners’ strike about a working class kid up against rigid expectations, and now 26 years later, you’re playing a priest leading a revolt of the working class. Did that earlier experience with class and rebellion as subject matter come back to you at all while making this?

Well, I’m so grateful that you’ve dived so deep into that. Because you’re absolutely… you’ve hit the nail right on the head squarely, because in terms of preparation for a role like this. You know, it’s so distant, it’s so removed from our present, that I was, you know, trying to find something from recent times that I could just look at, just something that I could kind of be inspired by, or something to just kind of carry with me. And the… if you can find something that is…personal, you know, it always, I think, helps. So, obviously, and inevitably, I found myself looking at a lot of miner strike documentaries, looking at speeches on YouTube by the great, Arthur Scargill, the union leader at the time. And I, obviously, I wasn’t a child of the miner strike. I was, you know, raised in that geographic kind of location. None of my family were miners. But certainly I grew up in the communities and the surrounding communities of the result of the miner strike, right? So, like, I kind of had…some attachment to it personally, but… So, I did feel… I felt so inspired by what those guys, and obviously the women of the wives of the miners and the families had to endure, and what they were willing to sacrifice to get what they felt was owed to them. And it was like a rebellion. It did feel like a war on the streets of Britain at that time, in 1984.

So, yeah, that was something that was very close to me. It was very, like, on the sleeve of the character, certainly for me as an actor. I watched a lot of that stuff, and it was very much in my heart when we made the movie. So yeah, you’re totally right.

And then kind of looking at your career as a whole, I found instances where it’s a bit of a similar kind of way of thinking with Billy Elliot, it’s like you keep coming back to stories about, you know, ordinary people pushed to extraordinary action against power structures. I wanted to know, of course, outside of Billy Elliot, there’s Snowpiercer, there’s Turn, and now with The Uprising you’re in medieval England. Is that a conscious thread for you, or does it feel more like a coincidence that you kind of choose these roles?

I think it is… I mean, it is clearly coincidental, but I do feel like, I’m drawn to that spirit, I think. I’m drawn to whatever energy that is, which is not the energy of just, like…”let’s blow stuff up.” I think it is, “let’s just cause a ruckus.” I think it comes from this place of desperately needing to be heard. You know what I mean? Desperately needing to be seen, not to be taken advantage of. Like, Titanic, right, is a movie that’s such a monumental movie, I can’t believe I’m talking about Titanic, but it’s such a monumental movie for me. I saw it 8 times in the theater. I was young when it came out. And so much of it, and what I love about the James Cameron interpretation of this, is that it is the rigid structures of society just on a ship. So, I was really kind of moved by all those people in third class, right, who just weren’t even given a chance to live. It was like, that wasn’t an option for them at all. I’m drawn to those kinds of stories of oppression. Of structures holding people down and trying to break free of those structures, and trying to stand up, and trying to have your voice heard. I think they’re incredibly moving stories, they’re urgent stories, and stories that we desperately need now more than ever, so, it’s not a conscious decision, but whenever there is a story that has those thematic elements in it, I’m very interested in it. So, yeah.

And then, of course, John Ball was a real priest whose sermons actually survived in the historical record. Did you read or draw on any of his actual words, or how did you find the voice of someone real versus a purely invented character?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, obviously, the record for so long was made by people who disagreed with him. Which is always, like, an interesting thing that you kind of have to hold in your head, is that most of the record of this man has been made by people who oppose him. You know, and he was, kind of, really made an example of, like, do not do this, this is the result, this is where this will lead, you know? You will be hung, drawn, quartered. But he obviously, clearly had a way with words. He spoke a lot of couplets, rhyming couplets. A lot of his writings kind of still exist, and that was kind of interesting. It feels quaint now, obviously, because we’re so far removed. At the time, it was so dangerous, and so rebellious, the kind of ideals that he was, like, putting into people’s minds, and putting on paper, and sending around, and messaging people. The fact that all of this was organized at this time is kind of unprecedented, it’s unbelievable. How messages, messengers sending stuff off, and messages here and there, and people having to, you know, ride a horse thousands of miles or hundreds of miles to the next town over to spread the word and try and get them to rise with them and move. It’s an unbelievable piece of organization.

In which, you know, his writings and his sermons and his words and the way that he could distill messages into, like, brief little couplets was, you know, extraordinary. He was certainly a man of words, so, Paul, as a filmmaker, is very giving. He gives you the space, he gives you the character in a way. You are the pilot of this character. He gives you that sense of freedom. So I just kind of say whatever. People were just gonna come at it with all sorts of things, which some he embraced and some he wouldn’t. But just having that sense of freedom, and with the spirit of John Ball and what he was trying to get across, and the fire that was in his belly. I really feel like he was a man where he felt like it’s either now or never. Either we do this now and we succeed, or it’ll never happen. And in some ways, he was right. I think. I mean, I do think, like, once the rebellion is put down. It still feels like we haven’t quite shifted out of that way of thinking, in a way. So, people like him, we should never kind of lose sight of. Should always hold them as, like, these kind of idealistic people who can… you can change something, if you put your mind to it.

You did touch on Paul a little bit, so I did want to bring up… he’s drawn, you know, a direct line from this story to now. Anger at institutions, collapse of trust in leadership. Did that contemporary parallel come up on set, and how did you approach that in the role?

It did occasionally in some instances, mostly the kind of physical stuff, or like the raising of the stakes, or just, you know, I think in some instances, like, the descent into barbarism. The descent into brutality. I think that was, obviously, the 14th century was a very brutal time, in a way that we couldn’t understand, like, it’s incredibly alien to us now, it just seems so… distant. Even things like The Troubles, right, in Northern Ireland — obviously a subject that Paul has touched on before, there’s a lot of video of that, there’s a lot of documentation of that time. A lot of the marches, and a lot of, like, aggression. A lot of people going up against one another, and some of it is really quite horrific and really quite brutal. So, obviously, the January 6th insurrection is just a time when people kind of lose themselves in a haze of rage. It’s almost like they’re infected by something, and something else overtakes their body. Like, some of that we talked about, but that was mostly in terms of physicality, or this heightened sense of state that we needed to get ourselves to, you know? Politics weren’t particularly discussed, you know, in terms of the doing of it.

But certainly, we didn’t have to look far from today’s headlines to kind of understand where this sat in the culture. I do think there is this sense of injustice that people have. There is a sense of, “this is not fair” that I think a lot of us have. How is this possible? What do we need to do? How can we fix it? I do feel like there’s this kind of desperation to change things, but, like, how do we go about doing it, you know? And obviously, like, organization and community is the way to do it. I mean, I really do think that is how things change. So, yeah, very topical movie. And Paul’s movies often are. Paul’s movies often reflect the society and the culture, for sure.

Yeah, and I definitely think we see that sense of community as kind of the answer in the film as well.

Yeah. And unity, you know, coming together, I mean, you know, it’s certainly in Bloody Sunday, certainly in 1993. It’s that feeling of we need to pull together to go against this system and trying to. His movies are always about the struggle for control of something. Whether it’s an airplane, or whether it’s a civil rights movement, or whether it’s the control of a ship, you know what I mean? Like, all of these rigid systems that are, at the end of the day, so vulnerable. And democracy as a whole is, kind of, constantly teetering, right? And it always feels so fragile. And the humanity amidst that is the thing that Paul is interested in, you know, and that’s why I adore him as a filmmaker.

I appreciate that so much. If I could just get you to tell me one thing you hope audiences will take away from the film.

Yeah, that we have to hold people accountable. And never stop holding people accountable, you know? I think that’s really important. Now more so than ever, and, you know, we have to unite and come together, otherwise nothing will change.

The Uprising is now playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the trailer below and read our review for it here.