IT’S BEEN OVER 35 years since Cary Elwes waved his sword as hero Wesley in the endlessly quotable fairy tale The Princess Bride. The role catapulted him into the Hollywood mainstream and remains a firm fan-favourite to this day. “It’s given me the career and the life that I have today,” he tells Empire fondly. That career now sees him play Nathan Jasmine, the straight-laced colleague to Jason Statham’s Orson Fortune, in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming crime caper Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre, and has reunited him with his Days Of Thunder co-star Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.
What excited you about working with Guy Ritchie? I’ve been a big fan of Guy’s for a long time; I’ve seen every single one of his movies. And he has a very specific style of directing: he’s very creative and able to come up with ideas on the spot that you can’t help but get carried away with. There’s a scene in the film where I’m torturing a guy called Mike, where Guy wrote some dialogue for me on the spot that really made me laugh. I’m always driven to a project that helps me to explore a new part of my personality and he really pushed me to do this as a director.