“Fuck, I can’t do this”: the acting legends that triggered Helena Bonham Carter’s existential crisis
Eminently comfortable in her skin more than 40 years into her career, for a long time, Helena Bonham Carter has projected an ironclad sense of self-belief and confidence. However, those qualities were in dangerously short supply when she was taking her first steps in the world of stage and screen.
That’s fair enough, really, because she was only a teenager. Bonham Carter was 16 years old when the made-for-TV movie A Pattern of Roses aired in 1983, but stardom was lurking just around the corner. By the time she turned 20, A Room with a View and Lady Jane combined to make her the most in-demand ingenue of the period drama.
The former won three Academy Awards and earned a further five nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, while the latter was her first time playing a leading role. Although Bonham Carter was running the risk of being typecast very early on, she quickly settled on the historical drama as her genre of choice.
A Hazard of Hearts, Francesco, and Hamlet followed by the end of 1990, and all of those aforementioned productions placed her shoulder to shoulder with some of the biggest names in the business: past, present, and future.
Her illustrious co-stars during that formative period included Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Daniel Day-Lewis, Simon Callow, Patrick Stewart, Diana Rigg, Christopher Plummer, Mickey Rourke, Ian Holm, Glenn Close, Pete Postlethwaite, and Mel Gibson. Needless to say, it was a lot to take in for a performer with no formal training who felt like they’d been thrown in at the deep end.
“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” she admitted to The Guardian. “I thought, ‘Fuck, I can’t do this’. I felt I was totally bluffing it.” Of course, Bonham Carter wouldn’t have gotten into acting in the first place if she didn’t think she was cut out for it, but experiencing such a rapid rise when she’d barely gotten her feet wet was in danger of causing severe professional whiplash.
Having cut her teeth on sets populated by some of the very best around, not to mention several international superstars, she was beginning to feel out of her depth. By her own admission, it’s something she navigated her way through a long time ago, confessing that “I’m much easier with it because I’m fundamentally happy,” but it was a baptism of fire throughout the 1980s.
As a two-time Oscar nominee, nine-time Golden Globe nominee, five-time Primetime Emmy nominee, three-time Screen Actors Guild Award winner, and Bafta victor, Bonham Carter has the accolades to back up the confidence she continued gathering after a testing introduction to cinema that plunged her into the midst of an existential crisis in her early 20s.
