As a leading man, Clive Owen has always found fitness important. But the actor knew he needed to up his game for some naked swimming scenes when he was offered the part of Sam Spade, a hard-boiled Californian private eye who ends up in southern France, where he becomes the eponymous hero of the new six-part TV drama Monsieur Spade.
"The first time I spoke to [series co-creator] Scott Frank, he told me this was going to be a recurring theme – that Sam Spade liked to go for dips without any clothes on, so I had plenty of time to go to the gym," Clive explained.
"He also told me that he was going to look after me and nothing would be too blatant," added the 59-year-old actor, who has been married to actress Sarah-Jane Fenton, with whom he has two daughters – Hannah, 26, and Eve, 24 – for almost 30 years.
As well as bracing himself for the skinny-dipping scenes, Clive faced another challenge: learning to speak French. "Luckily for me, it was important that I wasn't that good at French, because of who he was," noted Clive, referring to Sam Spade, the protagonist in Dashiell Hammett's classic 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon.
"I didn't do very well at French at school," recalled Clive, who left his comprehensive in Coventry after passing just one of his nine O-levels. "So I panicked because I was working with a teacher, learning grammar as if I was having to pass an exam when all I really needed was to speak and sound okay.
"When I realised I wasn't going to be tested, I switched tack and learnt it phonetically, like learning an accent, and had a French person working with me."
Sam Spade was most famously played by Humphrey Bogart in John Huston's 1941 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon, and there's no greater Bogart fan than Clive. So when he was approached to take Spade on a new adventure, he admitted: "It was a very easy, quick yes." If there are any perks to his job, then the opportunity to live and work in France – filming around the village of Bozouls, two hours north-east of Toulouse – certainly counts among them.
"I made sure I put in the work and looked around," he explained. "I figured that if I was going there, I wanted to stay in a great place and live the full experience."
Although the original Sam Spade was a younger man, Clive's Monsieur Spade is 60, and decides to remain in France in the 1960s after a case takes him there. Facing his mortality, in one scene he puffs on a cigarette as the village doctor examines him and suggests he give up smoking if he doesn't want to die in an oxygen tent. However, Spade slips back into his old ways, smoking, drinking and having relationships with inappropriate women.
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"I think it was a very clever move of Scott to locate him 20 years later in a different environment, like a fish out of water," Clive reflected.
Nobody could accuse the actor, who shot to fame as a charismatic conman in 1990 ITV series Chancer, of being typecast. Flipping between TV, film and stage roles, Clive has played characters including Ernest Hemingway, former US President Bill Clinton, King Arthur and Sir Walter Raleigh, as well as guesting on Ricky Gervais's show Extras. But Spade stands out among his favourite roles.
"It was a lovely job," he said. "With every job, my first reaction is: 'Why have they come to me? I don't see it.' And then you start to dive into it and something inside me goes: 'Be brave.' I understand that the opportunity is there to mess it up, but then something ignites within me that wants to take it on. I'm quite fearless."
Monsieur Spade is available to stream on AMC+ and Acorn TV.
Report by Gill Pringle