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"  I wanted to meet Matthew Goode at a wine bar. I remembered from an earlier encounter with the 30-year-old British actor that the guy is partial to the grape\u2014not in a let&amp;#039;s swirl and sniff while we muse on &amp;quot;the legs&amp;quot; way, but he knew his way around a wine list, confidently pronounced appellations, and is a believer in drinking glasses of it daily, because, you know, it&amp;#039;s heart-healthy.  His publicist, however, isn&amp;#039;t on board. He has a meeting with a director right after. Can I choose a coffee spot? I pick a small Italian joint on New York&amp;#039;s Lower East Side where they serve espresso, too. When Goode slips out of the black sedan that&amp;#039;s chauffeuring him around on this Monday afternoon and bounds through the door, he spots me, kisses me on both cheeks, and takes a seat at our small table nuzzled up against a floor-to-ceiling window. &amp;quot;Right,&amp;quot; he says, grinning. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s order some wine! And some bread and olives.&amp;quot; What about the thing with the director? Goode flashes me a look: Never mind that. &amp;quot;Two glasses,&amp;quot; He says to the waiter, who&amp;#039;s holding a bottle of Pinot Nero, about to pour me one. &amp;quot;And we&amp;#039;ll do a bottle of that.&amp;quot; If every woman in America could share a bottle of Italian red and a plate of olives with Goode, he&amp;#039;d be bigger than Clooney. Scratch that\u2014bigger than Brad. He&amp;#039;s wearing a wrinkled T-shirt, a black knit beanie, and faded Levis that hang just right off his hip bones. He smokes Marlboros. He quotes Cary Grant and the British columnist Jeffrey Bernard freely but so aptly that it doesn&amp;#039;t come off as jerky, just incredibly...cool. &amp;quot;`None of my party drinks singles, they do have some style, you know.&amp;#039; That&amp;#039;s one of my favorite lines in that play. I fucking love him,&amp;quot; Goode says in his plummy English accent, referring to Keith Waterhouse and his play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. He tells me I have olive bits stuck in my teeth, and to make me feel like less of an idiot he pulls his cheek open with a hooked finger and shows me a jagged bottom molar that&amp;#039;s half missing. &amp;quot;I have horrible teeth. I&amp;#039;ve been walking around like that for two years, and I still haven&amp;#039;t gone to see a dentist about it.&amp;quot; He pops off funny, self-deprecating stories, like the time Emma Thompson told him he had a large Roman nose just like Peter O&amp;#039;Toole&amp;#039;s before he got his done, that underline just how normal he is, despite the fact that his 6&amp;#039;2&amp;quot; frame and sea green eyes catapult him into that other plane of existence known as Ridiculously Good-Looking. To call him charming is kind of like saying Heidi Klum has a nice smile. Of course, because he can&amp;#039;t clone himself a million times over and steal wives and girlfriends away for a liquid lunch, the reality is that most women, and moviegoers in general, still don&amp;#039;t know who the hell Matthew Goode is\u2014mostly because we&amp;#039;ve only seen him in a handful of films, some of them uneven oddballs (Imagine Me &amp;amp;amp; You and Copying Beethoven) that haven&amp;#039;t exactly sent his career trajectory skyrocketing. Nonetheless, his rarefied magnetism, that room-owning presence, has managed to seep through all of his work, snapping critics and directors to attention\u2014even as a teen-dream heartthrob in 2004&amp;#039;s Chasing Liberty, in which he played a Secret Service agent ordered to protect Mandy Moore, the president&amp;#039;s daughter, as she jaunts around Europe. Though not exactly the kind of soul-stirring material for which Goode studied drama at the University of Birmingham (&amp;quot;It is what it is, but without it I wouldn&amp;#039;t have been here&amp;quot;), it did lead to a supporting yet crucial role in Woody Allen&amp;#039;s Match Point as Scarlett Johansson&amp;#039;s fianc\u00E9, in which he nearly upstaged his costars. Last year, Goode made himself unrecognizable in The Lookout, Scott Frank&amp;#039;s twisted take on the heist-movie genre. He nailed the character, a diabolical American ex-con who preys upon a brain-injured janitor. &amp;quot;The Lookout was what made me think, Yeah, he can do it,&amp;quot; says 300 director Zack Snyder, who cast Goode as a not-so-straight-ahead villain in his comic-book geek-out Watchmen, due in 2009. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s really interested in doing the work of acting.&amp;quot; Goode, who lives in London, is in town to promote this month&amp;#039;s Brideshead Revisited, based on the 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh, in which he stars as Charles Ryder, a reserved Englishman who forms an intense bond with an unhinged aristocratic Catholic family. Brideshead is a very British, very layered text, exactly the kind of material that&amp;#039;s nearly impossible to jam into a two-hour film. That, compounded by the fact that it was made into a beloved UK miniseries starring Jeremy Irons 27 years ago, makes this production a potential suicide mission. &amp;quot;I watched Brideshead Revisited,&amp;quot; I tell Goode. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a complicated film. I&amp;#039;m not sure what my question is.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s it about?&amp;quot; Goode smiles and crinkles his brow. &amp;quot;Right.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It reminds me of...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Gay porn?&amp;quot; We should probably get to that. In the book, Ryder forms a close relationship with his schoolmate Sebastian Flyte (the son in the unhinged Catholic family), and it&amp;#039;s unclear whether they are simply tight pals or Waugh meant to imply that they have a physical relationship. In the film, that question is answered\u2014subtly, but answered. Goode requests that we move outside so we can smoke. I ask him if he&amp;#039;s nervous about how the film will be received.  &amp;quot;Every job you do is nerve-racking,&amp;quot; he says, taking a drag off his cigarette. But it feels like he&amp;#039;s particularly skittish about this role. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not very well-known in England, so it&amp;#039;s quite interesting that this is a job that will make me a little more known, perhaps. And it can make me more known for not a good reason\u2014as in, they should have never fucking remade it. And that&amp;#039;s nerve-racking.&amp;quot; Though he&amp;#039;s the kind of actor who pores over script and dialogue (he could write the CliffsNotes for Brideshead at this point), Goode loathes describing his &amp;quot;process.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s no way you can possibly explain it. And the more you do it, the more you sound like a dick. I don&amp;#039;t want to hear, `I bled for you.&amp;#039; It&amp;#039;s like, Fuck off.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;d much rather talk about his girlfriend, Sophie, who lives in New York City but has agreed to move into a flat with Goode in London. He pulls out a billfold wallet with scrap-book-size 4&amp;quot; x 5&amp;quot;&amp;#039;s\u2014Sophie bearing two Big Gulp-size margaritas in Mexico, Sophie satirically striking a voguing pose\u2014all creased and worn around the edges. Goode has to meet the director soon. We have one last cigarette, finish off our follow-up carafe, and he&amp;#039;s off. I get a text five minutes later: &amp;quot;Fuck. I left without putting anything down for the bill. Sorry, even if it&amp;#039;s ELLE, I should have got the tip. I&amp;#039;ll get the wine in London. Love Goodey.&amp;quot; Ladies, meet the next leading man. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a9262/mr-perfect-19672/>