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Ten years ago Ben Barnes never would have participated in Glamour's new column Tell Me Something I Don't Know. Now he's throwing caution to the wind.
A lot has changed for the 41-year-old actor over the course of nearly two decades in Hollywood. Starring as Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia franchise in 2008, Barnes was quickly poised to be the next great British heartthrob along the lines of Twilight-era Robert Pattinson—or, as Barnes would describe it, “the young protagonist in the fantasy thing.” From there came Dorian Grey, Killing Bono, Westworld, Marvel's The Punisher, and the list goes on.
However, as any “young protagonist in the fantasy thing” would probably tell you, that level of exposure leaves you feeling, well, exposed. “I used to care so hard about every single little piece of criticism,” Barnes tells me over Zoom from his airy kitchen in Los Angeles. “I didn't like doing interviews and I was quite cautious, even with my acting choices.”
Cautious is not the word I'd use to describe the man speaking with me with an easy smile and a refreshing mix of playful banter and genuine openness. And though Barnes is clearly grateful to his legion of die-hard fans and millions of Instagram followers, this hard-earned confidence did not come from fandom popularity alone.
“For 20 years I've been playing these characters that everyone else has kind of written and it's their agenda,” Barnes says. Then, around 2017, his mother was battling cancer while he was supposed to be filming the second season of HBO's Westworld. Despite playing the hit sci-fi series' resident “tilted-hat douchebag with big dick energy,” he was able to take time off to be with his family and take stock of his goals. “I became a bit braver with my work and began to chase my old-school dream that I had as a teenager,” he says. Like many teenage boys, the London-born actor always wanted to be in a band. In October 2021 he finally released his first album at 40 years old, an EP titled Songs for You.
That same year Barnes became the face of yet another “fantasy thing” but not as the roguish young hero. As General Kirigan (a.k.a. The Darkling) in Shadow and Bone—the Netflix series based on Leigh Bardugo's popular Grishaverse novels—he gaslighted his way into viewers' hearts with a toxic combination of manipulation and charm. By season two the surprise villain is openly embracing what Barnes calls his “vengeance era.”
When I ask Barnes to title this latest chapter in his life, he tosses the ball back to me. “You'll know more snappy Taylor Swift references than I will,” he jokes. He may be right about that, but as he opens up about making bolder choices and creating his own album from scratch, the answer comes to him more naturally than he expected. “I feel free,” Barnes says with a weighted breath of relief. “It took me a while to get here, but the really nice upshot of doing it at 40 is that people sort of say, ‘Oh, I love watching you [try something new] because it made me feel like I can too.’”
He adds, “It's sort of like a freedom era.”
Just by agreeing to this interview, Ben Barnes proved his own point. While he's spent plenty of interviews discussing his famous characters and his deeply personal album, he opened up to Glamour about someone he rarely talks about: himself. From his love language and best date ever to his fantasy series pet peeve and the role that got away, here's a bunch of stuff you don't know about Ben Barnes.
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Glamour: Tell me something I don’t know about working on Shadow and Bone.
Ben Barnes: The thing that nobody knows is that I'm the professor. I'm like the headmaster of this school because it frustrates me so much when the names of places and character names and things that are using made-up languages or new languages or borrowed elements from Slavic languages, like ours does—it has all of those things in it—and I can't bear it when I watch TV shows and it's inconsistent how people are saying things. It drives me absolutely insane when I see that, so I have this text thread with Eric Heisserer, who's our showrunner and writer, and Leigh Bardugo, who's the author of the novels. Before each season we go through each word that is a weird word or a strange kind of pronunciation or something, and Leigh tells us how it's said in her world. Then I do this obnoxiously long 15-minute voice note, which has me repeating the word like a Calm app, which then gets sent to every cast member.
[Ben does an impression of his very calming professor voice.] “Nichevo’ya [nee-sheh-voya]. Nichevo'ya.” I do it almost funny like that, and we had some messages going round in our cast group chat that were commenting on—I’m like the dad on set, so they send me messages like, “I was having trouble sleeping, but then I was listening to Ben's voice note and I nodded right off.” That's the kind of stuff that Freddy Carter will say.
Do you ever correct people while on set?
Once you’re on set there’s a script supervisor and all that stuff. But if somebody comes in who’s like a day player or somebody who comes in for one scene, they’ll say something—instead of Inferni [in-fer-nee], they’ll say [in-fer-nai]—and I’ll kind of be behind them just twitching silently to myself and hoping somebody else comes in to direct it. [Laughs.]
Tell me about a role you wanted but didn’t get.
The one that still sticks with me is an old one, but it was my first, like, it was the old-school system where they used to just audition, audition, audition, audition you and just test you and test you and test you. I auditioned, I think, 8 or 10 times for this movie. I hadn't really done anything, but I just wanted it so badly. And they flew me to New York for the final chemistry reads and stuff. It was for Across the Universe, the Beatles movie by director Julie Taymor.
But it kind of came full circle because then I got to meet Evan Rachel Wood when we did Westworld and then she starred in my music video. We talked a few times about how badly I wanted to do that movie because it was this trippy, wonderful magical realism thing, and I was such a big Beatles fan growing up. I know I wasn't cool and band-y enough and grungy enough. I think Jim Sturgess, who played that part, was actually in a band. He was just cool, and I was not, really. I was so thirsty for it, and he was just like, “Whatever.” Obviously, that's what they were after, but I still would have loved to have done that movie.
I remember my first LA trip was when that movie was coming out and the posters were everywhere, and it was like little stabs every time.
If it makes you feel any better, Andrew Garfield said he lost the role of Prince Caspian in The Chronicles of Narnia to you and was eventually told he wasn’t “handsome enough.”
I remember him saying that…. How much is he really regretting it? How many times has he been nominated for an Oscar now? I think he’s fine.
He’s a really sweet man and we have the same birthday, he and I. I’ve seen him in plays, and I’ve always been a big fan of his. But it was very sweet of him to say it the way he did.
Yes, he called you “handsome” and “brilliant” and said you did a “beautiful job.”
He was very gracious about it, and he’s a very gracious human being. I think we're quite similar in quite a lot of ways, actually. Sometimes I see him giving interviews and I'm like, Wow, I could have said this exact same thing. I'd like to play brothers with him or something. That would be cool.
I’d like to see it.
Yeah, I mean, I remember doing the final round of auditions for that in LA, and I don't remember him being there. But he probably had like a private, proper actor audition. [Laughs.] We were these guys trying to wangle their way into Hollywood.
Tell me about your best date ever.
It was very late in life because we don’t really have them in England, so I’d never been to a drive-in movie. I always thought from watching movies like Grease that it would be great. You get food in the car and watch a movie, but you're private. Somebody organized curated this date for me; we went to a drive-in to see When Harry Met Sally…, which is my absolute favorite movie, and we had pizza in the car and it was just magical. I loved the thoughtfulness because often the man is expected to curate the date. Obviously, those times have been entirely tornadoes in the best possible way recently.
Tell me something you need in a relationship.
I need a lot of affection. I need to be, like, holding socks on the sofa. I need skin-to-skin at bedtime. I need physical connection, physical touch.
What’s your sign?
I’m a Leo. All those Instagram videos when the lion will come and nuzzle the lioness and then plump down next to them…that’s me.
Tell me something I don’t know about your guilty pleasure.
I live my life on a variable rewards-based system. Like, if I go to the gym or finish reading that script or take that meeting I don't really want to take—whatever my obligations are for the day—I'll allow myself to watch some switch-off-brain trashy TV and won't feel guilty about watching, like, five episodes.
Like what?
My current one is this British series called The Traitors, which is a reality show that's basically a game of mafia, but it's played over a number of weeks. These people will go and stay in a house and every night secret traitors will come and “murder” people. They'll come to breakfast the next morning and someone won't be there and the rest of them are trying to figure out who the traitors are. I found myself watching a really disgusting amount of episodes in one evening the other night.
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Tell me something I don’t know about writing your album Songs for You.
My dad does this thing at Christmas where he always writes a poem and reads it at Christmas dinner. It's like a review of the year, and it's usually really funny and sometimes sad and it's always really touching. I sort of adopted that from him in that I sometimes, for people's birthdays or if they're going through something rough, I'll write them a little six-line poem or something.
More than one of the songs on that EP, particularly the song “Rise Up,” started that way. A friend of mine was having a depressed, sort of swirly time during the pandemic, and I wrote this little six-line poem, and then I was like, Oh, this is a little bit hymn-like, and then, Oh, this could have choruses, and then suddenly I've got baseball caps and sweatshirts that say “Rise Up” on them. Life is very weird.
I like those songs about the gray areas of life where your emotional reactions don't necessarily have to be what the textbook reactions to those things are. You can choose to be hopeful or loving even if this situation doesn't dictate it. I think most of my things are about that. But I think the “unknown thing” is that a lot of them started off as little poems for specific people.
That’s so nice. I want someone to write me a poem—
I’ll write you a poem!
Now I fully expect one.
Season two of Shadow & Bone hits Netflix on March 16. Emily Tannenbaum is an entertainment editor, critic, and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @ectannenbaum.
