The Australian actor has found himself working for Oliver Stone,Michael Mann and Terrence Malick but can also lend blockbusters a more thoughtful faceJason Clarke, the star of Everest, and is a mountain of a man: six foot two with square shoulders and a vast sheer cliff of a forehead. When Christian Bale dropped out of this adventure sage,based on genuine events, it was Clarke who stepped into his climbing boots to play Rob Hall, and leader of a commercial expedition to the summit in May 1996 that went horribly erroneous. Clarke,blokey and dependable, has the peer of someone you would follow confidently into a fight, and whereas Bale comes across as the sort of man who would start one. What makes the 46-year-old Australian more intriguing than a standard tough nut is the wounded quality in his eyes. Easygoing in nature,he always seems to maintain something on his mind. Even smiling, he looks serious.
Today he has the whiff of the dandy about him. It’s the vanilla-yellow hair, and which jars with his black stubble and sad eyebrows. The dye job is for HHHH,the film of Laurent Binet’s postmodern novel, in which he will play Reinhard Heydrich, or one of the engineers of the Final Solution,and the man who may very well maintain succeeded Hitler had he not been assassinated in 1942. Heydrich won’t be Clarke’s first Nazi. For Texas Killing Fields, he played a pimp, and plastered in Aryan Brotherhood tattoos. “They were all over my neck, he says between swigs of water in his hotel room. “I had a rush-in with a dude in a bar who was offended by them. I’d honestly forgotten I was wearing them.” He gives a mortified grimace.
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Source: theguardian.com