Да, казалось бы минимум внешних усилий, а столько чувств передает...

Blueberry, как ты о ней У меня вот ее репродукция все детство на стене провисела и нисколько не надоела

Ой и он тоже тебе чем-то насолил?

Blueberry, ну ты повеселила!

Я тогда чумадан пошла собирать

тортика уже нет, я его вессь уже стрескала

Во, я красавица буду: с посохом, чемоданом и портретом Тоби, вместо плаката, на шее.

The Mail on Sunday
3 Nov 2002
by Jo Wiltshire

When your mother is revered actress Dame Maggie Smith, and your own foray into acting has consisted mainly of classical stage roles or aristocratic leads in costume dramas, it makes sense that you would give your eye teeth to behave badly on screen.

Toby Stephens, son of Dame Maggie and the late Sir Robert Stephens, has relished every minute of his role as Gustav Graves, principal baddie in Die Another Day. His face, beautifully bevelled with fine, elongated proportions, seems to have taken on a rakish air; even his floppy locks seem devilishly piratical.

'If someone had told me a year ago that I'd be playing this part, I wouldn't have believed them. It wouldn't have figured in my wildest dreams,' he says, his voice all masterly Merchant-Ivory with an unexpected undertone of sexy transatlantic drawl. 'Many people said, "How are you going to play a villain? You seem like such a sweet bloke?" But once I started doing it, I began to trust that I could be bad. It's fun, because if you are quite a nice person, you can get rid of all your angst in parts like this. It's actually quite liberating, to be really horrible to people.' The role of Graves will certainly give the 33-year-old actor full scope to explore his dark side.

The villain's kingdom of crime is based in Iceland, where he presides over a diamond-mining enterprise in a series of forest-filled bio-domes, and lives in a glittering palace sculpted from ice. When Bond finally tracks him down, Graves shows his true power by unleashing an amazing new weapon, and reveals the true extent of his evil intentions.

'Graves has a rather shady background,' says Stephens. 'Apparently he's an Argentinian orphan who once worked in a diamond mine in Argentina and now owns his own mine. He is immensely wealthy, but also one of these eco-friendly industrialists who wants to give something back to the Earth.

The question of whether this is done from a genuine sense of conscience or whether it's just PR is at the core of his character, and of Bond's interest in him.' Stephens waited many months to hear that he had won the role of Graves. 'I'd been to an initial reading, and never expected to hear from them again,' he says. 'About two months later I was called in for a screen test - but I'd never experienced the kind of screen tests that the Bond team arranges. Normally, they're on high-definition video tape in normal clothes.

This one was on proper film at Pinewood, with a crew of 40 people, sets, costumes, makeup. Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson and director Lee Tamahori wanted me, but MGM wanted a big name. It was a rough two-month ride waiting for MGM to come around.' Before then, Stephens had chiselled out a successful career for himself on stage and screen. A member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, he was awarded the Sir John Gielgud Award for Best Actor for his performance in the title role of David Thacker's Coriolanus. He also starred in BBC productions of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and The Great Gatsby, as well as Channel 4's The Camomile Lawn.

He spent several years 'trying to avoid being typecast as the next Hugh Grant', and fighting for roles in British films. 'But they needed big names, so there was only a list of about five actors they could use, your Jude Laws and Ewan McGregors. There were a lot of good actors left out of the mix.'

Eventually, Die Another Day came along. 'And one of the great benefits of having to wait is that you really appreciate it,' he says. 'They often get people who already have successful film careers to be the Bond baddie, and they just say, "Oh well, Bond's fun, I'll just chop out a performance." But for me, it matters a bit more. I'm much more appreciative of being given the chance, and I have a lot more to prove.' His first step was to do lots of homework. 'I thought I had better go and watch some of the old Bond movies,' he says. 'I was trying to work out what makes a villain work. I came to the conclusion that if you can fool an audience for just a fraction of a second that Bond is going to croak, you're winning. They know there's going to be another film coming along, but if you can make them believe "My God, this guy's got him!", you're OK.' He drew inspiration from, among others, Robert Shaw in From Russia With Love. 'He's not the main villain - in those days, that was just a camera shot of a bald head and you never really saw him - but he was a henchman who became the personification of villainy in the piece.

There's a scene where he's got Bond on a train in a carriage, and Bond is really on the ropes. It's fantastically intense between them, and Shaw has this great sense of menace. He's in control. That's what works for me.

'I also really like Donald Pleasence's weird sense of disembodiment and distance - he was a person almost intrigued by Bond, as though he were a bug that he was toying with. Menace and a sinister detachment were, I felt, the two ingredients that worked well, and it was a question of hitting on a mixture of the two.' Stephens is excited by the freedom of playing the Bond baddie. 'It's very difficult for Pierce Brosnan in a way, because he's nailed his character. People trust what he's doing with the role and there's very little scope for changing that. But when a new villain comes into each film, it's a blank canvas.

'It's very intimidating, though, coming into something like the Bond franchise. You think, "God, I had better pull this off - because if I don't, it's going to be a short career."' He is quietly confident, though, that he is on the brink of making a name for himself - and one that stands apart from his lineage. 'When I first became an actor, I went into it with this naive sense that who my mother was would make no difference to my career,' he says. 'I quickly realised that of course it does, and everyone initially judged me on that. But I'm immensely proud of my mother, I really admire her as an actress and have an objective sense of how amazing she is. I went through a period of really resenting the comparisons, but the truth is, one can't get away from it, and I've come to terms with that. If you fight it you end up becoming messed up, and I have nothing to be messed up about. It's a great thing.' Anyway, Stephens had enough on his mind with the Bond film. 'I found myself, at various points, dangling from wires or pretending I was being hurled out of windows, thinking, "This is surreal." If I was some sort of jaded movie star who had done 20 action movies, I might have thought, "There must be an easier way", but because it's my first, it's just been such a kick. I found it hard to be disgruntled or feel tired or fed up.

'My mother has probably never watched a Bond film, but she realised it was a great break for me and would be a lot of fun.' Stephens rather endearingly combines a suave, confident manner with frequent lapses into excited disbelief. 'I kept on having to pinch myself,' he confides. 'You're looking down at yourself in a Bond movie, and still can't quite get to grips with it.

Talking to Pierce between shots and expecting him to pull a Walther PPK pistol out at you all the time. Those memories will always stay with me.' His only regret? No hi-tech gadgets he can take home as souvenirs and no fast cars to play boy racer in. 'The big villain never really gets any of those funky things - he gets one grand thing, some sort of weapon of mass destruction, but that's not the same deal as a cool car or something. And he never really gets any of the girls, because the Bond baddies are strangely asexual people who get their rocks off taking over the world. I have got my ice palace, I suppose - but you can't take that out for a spin.'