Billy Elliot finds his feet in Manhattan

The first time I met Jamie Bell he’d been brought to London by his mum. He was sitting in the lobby of the Dorchester, looking as if he’d sooner be on the first train back to his home in Billingham, Stockton-on-Tees.

The poor lad had danced his way across the screen in what he was assured would be a small-time film called Billy Elliot. Suddenly he was the hottest act in town, at the age of just 13. I didn’t know whether to interview him or buy him a can of fizzy pop.

But never talk down to a talented child. Bell is now 22, has become a regular in Hollywood and is a confident young Englishman in New York. From not knowing a head porter from a maître d’, Bell has become a smooth operator who is welcome in the smartest bars and clubs in Manhattan and has laid his head on the fluffiest pillows of five-star hotels around the world.

“Changed?” he questions. “I hope I have changed, otherwise I’d be in trouble.

“But I don’t want to change too much. If anyone ever said I’d become too big for my boots, I would take that as the worst insult.”

Bell has grown and blossomed, just like his character in Billy Elliot – the young boy who, to the shock of his miner father, becomes the star pupil at the Royal Ballet School.

He now lives in a smart apartment in Manhattan, viewing the movers and shakers of America’s most competitive city with an assured eye. He’s even dated Evan Rachel Wood, the sassy 20-year-old American actress and singer, although she’s now moved on to a more grizzled model in the form of Marilyn Manson, the glassy-eyed goth rocker.

Their two-year relationship ended a year ago, and since then Bell has remained single. “It is hard to start a relationship, and even more difficult to keep it,” he observes. “Acting is all that everyone says it is when it comes to a personal life. There is hardly any time to establish something which will last. You’re always on to the next project, far away.”

For now, however, he’s more than happy to be in the Big Apple. “I like it here,” he says. “I like the size of the place – the tall buildings, the bustle, the nonstop, 24-hour-a-day activity. I won’t be here for ever, but it suits me at the moment. I can fly across to Los Angeles for meetings, if I need to be there. And it’s only a seven-hour flight back home to England.”

It would fit the pattern of his new lifestyle if I could report that he has a sleek set of wheels parked outside his apartment. Alas, no. Having spent his teens finishing his education and then fighting to build a career as an adult actor, he’s only recently got round to passing his driving test. And, after all that belated effort, he now sees no point in driving in New York.

“I walk everywhere,” he says. “Or I take the subway.

“Driving will be useful, though, when I’m in Los Angeles. There’s no public transport and the city is spread out over miles. I am looking forward to driving – in something open-topped – along the coast highway near Malibu.” It is all a long haul from his home in the northeast of England, where Eileen, his mother – a single parent after his father walked out when he was a baby – could not afford a car to take him to dance lessons. But it’s clear he’s not letting either his success or his bank balance go to his head.

“My biggest fear was that I would not be able to take the step from a child actor to an adult,” he reflects. “I think it happened when I was able to play a soldier in Deathwatch, set in the trenches of the first world war. The film didn’t quite work out – it was a very good movie, almost – but I think that got me up and running as a grown-up actor.”

Roles followed in big-budget Hollywood movies such as King Kong and Flags of Our Fathers, directed by Clint Eastwood. Most recently, he appeared in Jumper, a sci-fi fantasy film that reached No 1 at the American and British box office earlier this year.

“I have grown in confidence,” he reports. “And I do like to think I know the difference between confidence and arrogance.

“At the very start, after Billy Elliot, I did wonder, ‘Is this what I really want to do?’ But I could not think of anything else I would rather do. So I began, taking one acting job at a time. There’s no other way to play it, really. There is no career structure in this business.”

Bell has taken a long, hard look at the circumstances surrounding the sudden death of Heath Ledger, the Australian star of Brokeback Mountain, who was just 28 when he was found slumped in his SoHo apartment, after an accidental overdose of prescription medication.

Like Ledger’s, his career has gone into overdrive in his twenties. And, like him, he lives alone, far from home, with temptation on the doorstep.

“I never even met Heath but I can appreciate the pressure he was under,” Bell says. “There is a feeling that, however supportive your family is, you are very much on your own. Was there anyone there to help him in his hour of need? They also hand out prescription drugs in America like packs of Smarties.”

Bell is quick to add that he’s no pill-popper. He doesn’t even like strong drink. And he’s still far too focused on his career – his next film will be Defiance, a second world war tale of Jewish resistance fighters that also stars Daniel Craig.

“I’m just saying I can see where it can all go wrong,” he says. “For the moment, though, I am just enjoying being a 22-year-old in New York. I don’t want to grow up too quickly.”

My stuff...

On my CD player
Arctic Monkeys and In Rainbows, the Radiohead album. I went online and bought it before it came out on CD

On my DVD player
Documentary films like Sicko, Michael Moore’s one about the American healthcare system; The 11th Hour, about the environment and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; and No End in Sight, about Iraq. Those are the ones that do it for me, rather than fictional films

In my parking space
A bicycle

I would never throw away
An original Warner Bros poster I bought for Rebel Without a Cause