Mark Brown at the Guardian scores a few minutes with Thomas Sangster, soon to be better known as Tintin. A seventeen-year-old native of London, Sangster will star in the projected Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson "photo-realistic" movie based on the canonical comic-strip adventure series created by Georges Prosper Remi, the great Belgian cartoonist popularly known as "Herge'". (Stop-motion god Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson's one-man repertory company, is penciled in to co-star as Tintin's bearded, apoplectic sidekick, Captain Haddock.) To prepare for his role, Sangster reports that he recently sucked it up and started actually reading some of the Tintin comics. He was familiar with the character from watching TV cartoons based on the real stuff, but "I never saw the books because I was never that big on reading." Well, it's not as if he's likely to be called upon to perform brain surgery during the shoot.
Luckily, he does seem to have a firm grasp on the character's enduring appeal. "I love cars and aeroplanes and stuff, any car or any aeroplane or any gun that was ever used in Tintin would always be real, an exact copy of it so if it was a car it would be a Citroen and if it was a gun it would be a Luger. Tintin is like a super boy scout. He knows how to fly these things. He knows how to drive these things. It's just like common sense: he jumps in and goes, he doesn't need to think about any safety, he just goes where he pleases. For such a small kid he's very good at beating people up and, being a cartoon, nowadays you know, there's all that 'we can't be violent'. Tintin would hit people over the head with bottles and shoot people. He probably wouldn't kill them but he'd shoot them in the shoulder." Note the "probably"--young Sangster is already a seasoned industry veteran who understands that things need to be remain open in case Spielberg and Jackson are called away on urgent business and the project winds up in the hands of Eli Roth or Robert Rodriguez. (Sangster had good-sized roles in Love, Actually and Nanny McPhee, and also appeared in an especially creepy two-part episode of the rebooted Doctor Who. However, his creepiest role was almost certainly in the 2003 TV miniseries Hitler--The Rise of Evil, though it's debatable which is more unnerving--that he played the ten-year-old Adolf Hitler, or that the Hitler he played grew up to be impersonated by Robert Carlyle.) The first TIntin movie is expected to be released sometime in 2010.
