"PAYNE speaking"
by Susan Irvine

This article originally appeared in the March 1987 issue of Vogue UK Magazine

Bruce Payne is not a predictable hero. His acting career has its weighting of un-savoury characters: Flikker, leader of the bad boys in Absolute Beginners, Lawrence MacNeice in BBC 1's Smart Money. Even the good guys he plays are no golden boys: Malcolm Pollard, the undercover policeman in Operation Julie had stringy hair and filthy clothes and the "alternative folk music critic" he plays in next month's ITV series, Lost Belongings, is a "bohemian off-the-road character who never gets his copy in."

But his best villains are yet to be seen. He hopes to start work soon on The Rise and Rise of Jonathan Wild, playing the eighteenth-century cut-purse as "a sort of gutter Macbeth", and next month he plays the dreadlocked Dogger to Alexei Sayle's Malice in Mel Brooks's futuristic comedy, Solar Babies. "What's interesting is that we turn the old image of an English arch-villain - Boris Karloff, that sort of thing - upside down. We're just a couple of soaks."

Bruce looks like a Bruce. He arrives with a deep Moroccan tan, black polo-neck, fringed suede Ralph Lauren jacket ("a present") and ancient jeans exhumed from the back of a cupboard. Also stout brown Oxfords - he has a penchant for old-fashioned shoes. He pulls various other items from his sports bag: black Levis, a bright print shirt, cotton drill trousers ("my dad's") and an even more venerable pair of jeans with a great rip skirting one buttock. "I wore these for the Operation Julie audition, with a nondescript jacket and lank, greasy hair. The director took me aside and asked, 'Do you always dress like this?'" He pulls on the older pair of jeans to wear with the pearl dripping Gaultier jacket. Would he ever wear this of his own volition? For several minutes he is laughing too hard to talk. "For its cheeky element - yeah. But you'd have to be brave  to wear it on the street". He admires the plainness of Romeo Gigli and is very fond of Ralph Lauren: "I hear he's a bit of a pioneer."

His own wardrobe, however, consists mostly of "casual, untidy, sports-related clothes, jeans, T-shirts, trainers..."spiced with a preference for Mexican pieces: "Nah, not sombreros but those traditionally-embroidered shirts - so perfect you only ever need one," as well as for Japanese looks: "They look so smart and yet easy to wear: they have a clean edge."

So why doesn't he go mad in South Molton Street? "They cost an awful lot of money, and I need all I've got right now for air fares - my clothes are just to stop me getting wet." A week later, true to his word, he is on a plane to Los Angeles for more auditions, and then on to Mexico, perhaps to pick up that perfect, hand-sewn shirt.

copyright 1987 by Vogue UK Magazine