Douglas Booth on The Riot Club:

When we meet Douglas Booth he’s lounging on a sofa, fresh from a Yahoo-organised game of beer pong with his Riot Club co-stars, in which he “wasn’t as bad as he thought he was going to be.”

This humble assertion over beer pong might not be what we’d expect from one of Britain’s most sought after young actors, who has seen a steady stream of critical plaudits over the last few years, since 2010’s Worried About the Boy — the role that established his prominence.

In press shots for The Riot Club and on screen as Harry Villiers, the former Burberry model stares out at us icily, a poster boy for entitlement and unbridled arrogance. It could be easy to feel intimidated before meeting him, especially after watching his disturbing turn in Lone Sherfig’s drama, but even when The Riot Club is set aside — his face is high cheek-boned and aristocratic, and could easily appear cold.

But of course, Douglas Booth is an actor, and a good one — this image is hardly reflective of reality. When we meet him at a London hotel on a breezy Wednesday afternoon he’s softer than we might expect and immediately friendly, asking how we are, and appearing genuinely concerned about how long we’ve been waiting in our journalistic holding pen. This is despite having spent the last week travelling to “LA, New York, then to London, then to Toronto, then back to London” — understandably, he admits to being “kind of tired.”

Whilst this disproportionate amount of time on the red-eye, flitting between endless press junkets, would cause a lot of actors to be more than a bit crabby, Douglas Booth is well-trained in the art of British gentlemanly politeness — unlike his Riot Club character, the aristocratic Harry Villiers, who may appear sleazy or desirable, sinister or charming (or indeed all four) depending on your own particular point of view.

As Villiers in The Riot Club, based on Laura Wade’s hit West End play Posh, Booth is knowingly charismatic, mind-bogglingly privileged — and a central member of the elite group of Oxford students, selected via initiation and breeding, who know that their social status gives them a green light for any hedonistic or misogynistic behaviour that they might indulge in. Without giving away essential aspects of the plot, this unrestrained power leads to a disturbing confluence of events.

Discussing Villiers, his fellow Riot Club members, and their disturbing conflux of charm, destruction and the power that they are likely to wield in the not so distant future, in the halls of Westminster or the towers of Canary Wharf, post-Oxford, Booth is clear of his character’s motivations, and why he behaves in the way that he does.

“It’s how they operate,” he says, “they kill with charm. They wouldn’t get to these positions of power without being ridiculously charming. That’s what’s so scary. It’s the pack mentality; when they’re together in that group, that’s when they turn into something not very pretty.

“We always said that the eleventh member of the group was the group as a collective.”

He adds: “If Harry Villiers was a real person and walked into this room right now you’d probably find him quite charming… you’d find him quite intimidating… you create this character and you don’t realise how scary, how intimidating his character is.”

It is Villiers that appears to wield the most authority over his fellow club members, with his good looks, penchant for women and titled family. He stands out alongside the film’s other two central characters (Sam Claflin as unhappy and bitter Alistair and Max Irons as wholly more sympathetic Miles) within the group, and this prominence has been noted — Booth says, with a slight amount of surprise, “I didn’t expect people to come up to me and say, “you were one of the worst.”

I suggest that it’s Villiers’s deliberate behaviour, and confidence, that sets him apart from his bumbling and far less suave fellow club members, rather than that his behaviour is in fact any worse than theirs. In this exclusive club, although not the president, he is undoubtedly a strong leader.

The conversation moves on to gang culture and the public and media-led perception of it, and Booth references an article that he read in the Oxford Student that he found “really interesting.”

“Gang culture is often portrayed as the bottom rung of society,” he says, “as people struggling to get up. You don’t really see many films about the gangs at the top of society, and that’s what this is. And they are a gang. 100%. Just because they’re not wearing tracksuit bottoms-” he breaks off, tentatively: “…actually, I do wear tracksuit bottoms.”

How did Douglas get into the mindset of this upper class, country-bred man, with a penchant for women and a destructive streak that cares for nothing other than protecting himself and his reputation?

“I went to some polo matches, and I went to Eton and did some research,” he says. This might seem stereotypical — surely there aren’t psychopathic Harry Villiers types floating around at every polo match? — but Booth says that this aspect of culture was important.

“You have to go to the polo,” he says, “you see these characters; you see them wafting around. Then I went to Eton; I had to really figure out where this person came from, I had to figure out what that school was like.”

He tells us a story about “an 18-year-old Lord, who was actually a really charming young guy” and being told about “this thing called Pop — which is basically where popular kids nominate other popular kids to be in a club and they get special privileges, they have their own clubhouse, they have their own tie and a special waistcoat… it’s sort of breeding entitlement at kids from a really young age.

“And for a very small minority that’s enough of a seed to turn these people into the characters that you see in this film.”

He’s quick to disassociate the film from Eton itself, or Oxford’s Bullingdon Club (former members: David Cameron, George Osborne, Boris Johnson) — “our club is a fictional club,” he says: “we’re not saying that this is the Bullingdon Club.”

The similarities, though, are apparent — and some might say deliberate. Did he do much research into these exclusive societies — the groups that permit, as we see at the end of The Riot Club, their members to the very top rungs of British society?

“Yeah, we met up with people who are in such clubs,” he says, “and it was eye-opening. When I first read the script I thought, “people aren’t really like this; people don’t act like this. People can’t just go to a restaurant and smash it up.”

But evidently, he was in for a surprise — because “when we spoke to them… they actually do. We actually had to make some of the scenes worse.”

After watching The Riot Club, it’s a scary thought that some commentators have called the film out for not being extreme enough in its excess, class warfare or misogyny.

At the end of everything, Booth says, leaving our interview on a reflective note: “This is a gang,” he says of the Riot Club’s central characters. “And these are the gangs that are running our country.”

A worrying conclusion indeed — and one that the audience, as well as the actors, cannot fail to reach.

The Riot Club is released in UK cinemas on 19th September 2014.

Originally published at https://www.thenationalstudent.com.