Playing Will's unwashed slacker flatmate Spike was a breakthrough turn for Rhys Ifans, most notably when the Welsh actor happily flexes and shows off his "nice, firm buttocks" to the paparazzi waiting outside the front door for Anna.
But though Spike can't help but charm as well as amuse, Ifans apparently went quite method with the role.
Asked if it was true he didn't bathe or brush his teeth during filming, he told Interview in 2011, "We were filming in Shepardston Studios, and I couldn't bear the journey all the way from London every day, so I got a tent and I camped in a campsite nearby. Every morning this big limo would come and pick me up at the campsite, to the utter bafflement of the campsite owner. He thought I was some kind of eccentric millionaire."
And, "I would bathe occasionally, when I remembered to."
Not helping was the fact that the sneakers the costume department found for him had a "smell that emanated from the dark depths" that "brought a tear to one's eye," he told E! News in 1999. "By the end of the day, the rest of the cast insisted that these trainers were taken away and cleansed—exorcised!"
But while he's got the air of the rogue about him, director Roger Michell (who before Notting Hill directed Ifans onstage in Under Milk Wood) described him to the Telegraph in 2006 as full of pleasant contradictions: "He's gawky, yet graceful. He's smelly and Welsh and yet he's handsome and winning." Certainly winning enough to work with Ifans again on the 2004 film Enduring Love and direct him in a 2017 West End production of Mood Music.
Ifans told the BBC in 2018 that he'd "rather throw a brick than sign a petition," but he found a happy medium: after being turned on to the cause after playing a homeless man in the one-man play Protest Song in 2013, he volunteered to be an ambassador for the Welsh charity Shelter Cymru, which aids the homeless.
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