When you’re acting, you have the way you move your body, and your facility with your voice and how you make that sound, and your interpretation of the words. This is just a purer, more raw way of just expressing myself. What are the biggest differences for you with music, when it comes to creative and artistic fulfillment? Is it as simple as when you’re acting, you’re playing a character, and when you’re doing music, it’s coming from you personally, or is it not that clearly defined?īARNES: I think I’m always trying to find ways to syringe in and find foundation in the characters that I play with pieces of myself. It’s definitely proven to myself what it is that I sound like and what it is that I have to say for myself. I feel like it’s helped people understand me more readily already.
I have no regrets about it because it’s actually made it easier. Having spent 20 years being edited and directed and written for, it became important for me to do something completely from me, completely raw and authentically me. To be honest, it’s just a different way of storytelling. But for me, I love to try new things and try a different way. They see you as a certain character that they love from a story, or whatever it might be. They want to own that little piece of you and they see you in a certain way. How do you deal with that, as an actor, and does feeling like people see you as an actor then get in your head when you’re trying to work on music?īARNES: I think there’s probably always that slight initial judgment from people. It’s up to the actor or the filmmaker to get people to see them in some different way or convince them that they can do something they haven’t seen them do before. Especially when you’re good at a particular kind of character or people see you a particular way, they want to keep casting you as that because it’s reliably successful. It’s easy to find yourself put into a box in Hollywood. Honestly, it just got to a point where I was talking to the 80-year-old version of myself thinking, “If I don’t do this now, I’ll forever regret not having done it.” That should far outweigh any other argument there is for not doing it. Sometimes it takes some of us a bit longer than others to get to that place, especially when I’m so used to people seeing me in a certain light. It just took this amount of time to find the confidence that my own songs can stand up in the canon of all music ever released and that I knew what I wanted it to sound like. Even at school, I would do these Sinatra tribute concerts and Stevie Wonder soul nights, and all of these things that weren’t really me, but just things that I loved. Through the course of my career, you can see that I was navigating back, whenever I could, to projects that had something to do with music, but it was always impersonations of people. Meanwhile, the acting side of things was brewing and peaking my curiosity and I got excited about some of the storytelling. I got quite quickly disillusioned with it. We were doing a jazz/big band project together, which never came to fruition, and I did a few pop band projects and did some recording with some other producers, but it just never really got any wind under its wings. Twenty-two years ago, I had my first foray into music and music recording, and I signed to Simon Fuller, who was the managed who came up with Spice Girls.
He also talked about where things are at with Season 2 of Shadow and Bone and what he’s most excited about in that regard, as well as his experience doing an episode of Guillermo del Toro’s horror anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities.Ĭollider: How long had you been thinking about this music, these songs and this album, before finally deciding to actually take this journey and see it through?īEN BARNES: I think the answer to that is somewhere between two years and 22 years. Now, as a singer/songwriter, he’s also carrying that same vibe over to his music, most specifically the collection of songs that make up the EP Songs for You.ĭuring this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, which you can both watch and read, Barnes talked about his more than 20-year journey to releasing such a personal collection of songs, the creative and artistic fulfillment he gets from music, his musical inspirations, how he knew when he had the right collection of songs put together, why he wanted to do music videos, and his hope of doing some live shows.
From Shadow and Bone and Westworld to The Punisher and The Chronicles of Narnia, along with a variety of independents and TV shows woven throughout, Ben Barnes is an actor whose characters are always layered on multiple levels and never fully just one thing.