Helena Bonham Carter is Tim Burton’s Red Queen
by Hugh Hart, wired.com (March 5, 2010)
HOLLYWOOD — Helena Bonham Carter rummages through a hotel refrigerator in search of nuts and candy bars for herself and a famished visitor. The night before, she’d appeared on screen in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland’s U.S. press premiere as a big-headed tyrant with goo-goo eyes, swelled forehead, bee-stung lips and tiny waist.
But even without the bulgy brow, Carter in person is every bit as striking as her digitally manipulated Red Queen doppleganger.
Dressed in combat boots and a silk sliplike frock, the actress, wild tangle of auburn hair framing her pale face, studies an early Carter-as-Red Queen sketch from the Museum of Modern Art’s catalog of Burton’s artwork and laughs:
“Oh wow, that’s it, the early sketch. Tim said, ‘You’ve got to play the Red Queen because I drew you.’ It’s like, ‘Really, is that me?’ He goes ‘Of course that’s you, and you’ve got to play her.’ I said, ‘Then of course I’ve got to play the Red Queen, for Tim.’”
Carter has played a lot of roles for Burton over the past decade.
Previously, she’d stunned audiences as a thinking man’s sex symbol in period pieces A Room With a View, Howard’s End and her Oscar-nominated star turn in The Wings of the Dove. And 1999’s dark Fight Club featured Carter as Ed Norton’s twisted girlfriend. Then, in 2000, she met Burton on the set of Planet of the Apes. A couple ever since, Carter and Burton moved into adjoining Victorian townhouses in London and now have two children, Billy Ray and Nell.
Describing day-to-day life with a man known for his outlandish imagination, Carter says: “Tim’s actually a quite sane person who doesn’t like combs, and me too. We have quite a normal existence. People would be surprised at how banal we are. We watch [English soap opera] EastEnders on the telly and most of the time he’s very tired because he’s always working.”
Usually he’s been working with Carter. Burton hired her to voice his stop-motion title character in 2005’s The Corpse Bride, then shunned experienced singing talent to cast Carter opposite Johnny Depp in his movie version of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
For Alice in Wonderland, which opens Friday, Carter materialized on one of Burton’s sketch pads in the form of the Red Queen and there was no turning back.
“I’m not really interested in sci-fi, but as far as the fantastical, I’m sure Tim has indelibly affected me,” says Carter, who also played the villain Bellatrix Lestrange in the last couple of Harry Potter movies. “I can’t really see the seam between him and me but I’m sure he’s influenced my sense of humor and viewpoint on things. Hopefully I’ve done the same for him.”
At home with Tim Burton
In Alice, Carter’s Queen rules her court with absolute authority. Does art reflect reality regarding life in the Burton-Carter household?
“Yeah yeah, I am the boss. The Red Queen is Tim’s revenge,” she jokes. “‘I’m the boss at home, he’s the boss at work. I do the cooking, and he does the fetching. I make decisions, and he goes, ‘Yes dear.’”
On the movie set, of course, it’s a different story.
“Tim does most of the talking and telling and Johnny and I go ‘yep, yep, yep,’” Carter says. “Tim does not like intellectualizing and I think he’s right. It’s one of the things he’s taught me because I overanalyze and start to make things more difficult than they need to be. Then again, I take pleasure out of analyzing things. He’s much more intuitive. Tim knows how to trust his unconscious and let things marinate. He’s very good at trusting his unconscious.”
Unlike most of Burton’s previous guy-centric movies, Alice in Wonderland puts its young heroine and the dueling diva queens front and center.
“It’s funny that Tim even wanted to do it because usually he leaves ‘girly’ up to me,” Carter says. “When he said he wanted to do Alice in Wonderland, I’m like, ‘Yes! This is one for me. It’s for Nell. This is definitely one for the girls.’”
Carter says she can relate, in retrospect, to the coming-of-age crisis depicted by Mia Wasikowska’s Alice. “I remember what it was like when I was 19 and just starting out — I was just terrified of being defined all the time, of being judged. I was very limited by caring about what people thought of me.”
That was then, this is now.
“There comes a point where you just go, ‘Ultimately, I don’t really give a fuck any more,” she says. Restating the sentiment with a PG-rated term borrowed from the Mad Hatter’s “happy dance,” Carter, mother of two, concludes: “What happens when you have a baby, for me anyway, is I didn’t give a funderwhack any more.”
