The Next Big Thing: Dominic Cooper

Dominic Cooper is the kind of naturally lucky person you'd want to throttle if it weren't for his unrelenting sweetness. Or maybe he's not sweet at all-maybe it's just the combination of his smart Londoner accent and lilting upper-register voice, higher than you'd think, coming out of the cherub face with the Bogartian eyebags. It's a charming sound, a charming face and even if the guy behind them were some kind of flaming asshole, you'd probably still want to buy him a beer.

But I'm pretty sure he's not a flaming asshole. He's just a good boy for whom everything seems to be going wondrously, rapturously right. If you're a typical film-loving Yank, you'll probably know his face from brief appearances in From Hell or Breakfast On Pluto, or one of a handful of other flicks. If you're a theatre person, your relationship with Cooper will likely run deeper. He's spent the last three years inhabiting the role of Dakin in Alan Bennett's The History Boys-a world-historic schoolboy drama that won a record-smashing six out of seven Tony Awards after a long, much-lauded run in London with detours to Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.

Last summer, the cast took the time to turn The History Boys into a movie. It appears I'm catching Cooper at the close of the ensuing publicity blitz. "Yeah," he says, "that's just coming to an end. It seems like I'm spending my life going from hotel to hotel, talking about the same things I've been talking about for years."

He doesn't say that grudgingly-indeed, he sounds delighted that he's spent the last three years pretending to be a teenager. If there's any hint of grudginess in his voice, it's when he affirms, for sure, that his days as a history boy are done.

Cooper grew up in Greenwich, a pretty piece of London's sprawling urbania that lends itself to the sort of community-mindedness that's very hard to come by this side of the pond. Some of his best friends are the ones he made on his first day of elementary school, at age 5. He later found himself at the Thomas Tallis School, where his dramatic savoir-faire saved him from academic mediocrity. "I remember being told, 'Your results, they're fine, but they're not good enough for you to stay on in this school.' So I talked to the drama department, and they really wanted me to stay and play the emcee in Cabaret, the big school production. They couldn't think of anybody else they wanted to do it, which is damned lucky-they persuaded the deputy head to let me stay on."

Boyish Dominic Cooper, roguish whelp of the Bogartian eyebags, portraying Cabaret's Arch Androgyne? Doesn't seem to fit.

"Really? No! It's fantastic! I should be employed in that part again! I love that musical!"

Well, whatever. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it, but Cooper's career was, in fact, built on odd sexual types. With an ease so unlikely that is smacks of grace more than luck, Cooper went straight from doing Cabaret in school to playing a male prostitute in Mother Clap's Molly House, the deliciously dirty affair that first matched Cooper with famed director Nicholas Hytner and established Cooper's position in the dramatic major leagues. "Then I went off and did some other things-I played Puck for the ROC company, did some theatre and TV and stuff, and then (Hytner) took over the National Theatre. I guess he'd enjoyed working with me-I'd certainly enjoyed working with him, I think he's wonderful-and he asked me to come play this part. He said there was a fantastic trilogy of books, which I had never read. I read them, and absolutely fell in love."

Those books were Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, and thanks to their wildly successful theatrical adaptation, Cooper went from 19th century Catamite to Hero of Children, All The World 'Ore, playing the tale's 12-year-old protagonist with a fidelity that convinced critics and tykes alike.

That was right before The History Boys took off, and ever since, Cooper has been in motion. "We were here (in L.A.) last week for the opening of History Boys. I did that, went back home, and now I'm back out here, looking for work." Tomorrow he'll fly home and then he'll come back to the States to film Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, based on the inscrutably weird book by David Foster Wallace.

In the meantime, we should begin to feel Cooper's presence in the multiplexes of the world in ways we've never felt it before. Starter For Ten, a coming-of-age flick in which Cooper co-stars, hits theatres nationwide next month. And as we speak, the three-year saga of The History Boys-the show that served as Cooper's bridge from working-actorhood to rising star-is drawing to a close, trickling into theatres across the country.

"You normally do a play, and you have your memories, and a handful of other people have their memories, but there's nothing else left of it. Now, we have it in the can, and that's such a great gift. We'll always have that. After three years-those are your friends up there."