Sam Claflin Gives Us A Candid Look At His Chilling Character In Every Breath You Take

I'm sure when you tell people, "Hey, I'm in a new movie called Every Breath You Take," they start singing the Police song to you.

Yeah, I have to say it was one of the things I kept breaking into on set. You can't help yourself.

The song definitely sticks in your mind, too, doesn't it? That's part of it, though. It's an unnerving song if you listen to the lyrics, but now, it's the title of an unnerving movie.

It definitely has you on the edge of your seat. I think that was one of the things that really drew me to the story, I think, in all honesty. I think very rarely you read a thriller and are still shocked and surprised to the very, very last page. I think with each new twist and turn along the way, I think it is just, yeah, I was on the edge of my seat and I think that's usually the show of a good story.

I think that what's interesting here. You have this character, James, who has the power to manipulate people and insert himself into this family's life. As a performer, how do you even wrap your head around something like that? Now granted, we all are obsessive to a degree about certain things, right? But this is obsession to the nth degree. It was really unnerving to me to watch this film, because you made it feel very real.

Well, I remember talking to Vaughan [Stein], the director, quite early on and we were trying to work out accent-wise, and how realistic is it that someone can do an English accent or portray a character. Then, what we quickly realized is that me as an actor, my job is to sink into roles that are removed from who I am...

He was like, "Well, you do this for a living, and you do it for 12 hours a day." What I'm trying to say, I guess, is that it was easily relatable because I am an actor who pretends to be other people for a living. It was believable that there is another human being out there that could pretend to be someone else and make it believable. I think we just played every moment as if he really believed that he was living those moments.

So when James was with the daughter, he genuinely believed that she was the love of his life. When he was with the wife, he believed that she was the love of his life. Then when he was with Phillip, there was the sense of tease or play that had me feeling a little shady and feeling a little on edge. But at the same time, we were constantly playing with this barometer of like, "How much has he pre-planned this whole thing? What's the goal? What's his goal?" It was, well, to destroy his life. It wasn't to necessarily kill him or kill his wife or his daughter. There were parts of the plan that unraveled as he was going and parts of it that were pre-planned. I think that was the enjoyment. That was the enjoyable part, working out how much was real and how much was made up on the spot.