Alex Roe, interview: 'I try to avoid being friends with actors — most of my tickets for the premiere were for my football team'

Alex Roe, the smouldering star of YA film The 5th Wave, is set to be the next R-Patz. Will he cope, asks Joanna Della-Ragione
New blood: Alex Roe
Matt Writtle

Alex Roe is at that potentially life-changing point in an actor’s career. An army of publicists and photographers are bombing around his Soho Hotel suite trying to locate a designer suit for an imminent photocall. He should be in a state of high anxiety or exhilation, but instead the 25-year-old is lounging calmly on an armchair while a make-up artist powders his nose.

It is the eve of the global release of The 5th Wave, the latest multi-million- dollar franchise aimed at the teenage audience who made Twilight then The Hunger Games box-office gold and turned Robert Pattinson and Jennifer Lawrence into global superstars.

I’m not convinced he knows what he’s in for. “People don’t know who I am,” he says. “Last week after the LA premiere there were girls coming up wanting pictures… it was the first time anything like that’s happened.”

Six-foot, blond, chiselled and raffishly charming, Roe is reminiscent of a young Jude Law. In The 5th Wave, a dystopian tale of alien invasion and global destruction, he plays farm boy Evan Walker, the romantic male lead to 18-year-old star Chloë Grace Moretz.

Blockbuster: Chloë Grace Moretz in The 5th Wave Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures

As with The Hunger Games or Divergent there is already a sturdy Young Adult fiction fanbase from Rick Yancey’s bestselling novels — very attractive to the studios — that means Roe has signed a lucrative three-movie deal.

Add to the mix the lead role in another big franchise, the reboot of The Ring, and you have a failsafe formula for guaranteed furore — not bad for a handyman’s son from Ladbroke Grove.

Yet sitting here in the midst of a gruelling schedule that has taken him in three days from LA to Paris to London, the west Londoner is pleasant, polite and as yet totally unaffected. “You do the acting because it’s fun and rewarding but all of this side of it is a bit weird,” he confides.

Roe grew up in Ladbroke Grove where his grandfather was a fairground boxer. “My dad thinks a proper job is being a plumber, whereas my mum was a ballet dancer and has a more creative background and I suppose passed a little bit of that to me.”

At the age of 10 he attended an open audition and won his first acting part, playing the Antichrist in straight-to-video horror flick The Calling, but football was his real passion. “I played semi-pro at Chalfont St Peter but it’s so hard to become a pro footballer — I think there’s even more competition than acting. If you’re not in a team like Chelsea or Arsenal by the time you’re 15 or 16 you don’t stand a chance. It was a real learning curve realising that it probably wasn’t going to happen.”

It was his talent for sport, married with the fact he’d had some success as a child actor, that won him a sixth-form scholarship to Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith. The school has a rich history in breeding acting talent with alumni including Hugh Grant, Lily Cole, the late Alan Rickman and Imogen Poots.

“It was a different experience from any other school I’d been to,” Roe recalls. “The private sector is so connected, everyone knows each other, it definitely broadened my horizons.”

Jennifer Saunders spotted him in a school performance of Our Country’s Good. “She came to see her daughter Freya and approached me afterwards to audition for TV comedy Jam and Jerusalem. That really helped kick off my career.”

‘I have no desire to be famous, definitely not. It would be lovely to sit under the radar and make good movies’

From there, Roe did the rounds with bit parts in Holby City, Hollyoaks and cult teen drama The Cut. “At the same time I was still playing football and doing all manner of jobs. I worked on a fruit stall in Chiswick High Road, helped my dad out with handyman stuff and did a stint as a painter and decorator, although I was artistic in the multiple ways I conjured up to doss off.”

Drama school beckoned but Roe found he was getting enough work not to bother. “Don’t get me wrong, there were forms filled out, but something always came up that stopped me going for it.”

Last year he relocated to LA. “I have to be there for work,” he says in his west London drawl, well-spoken but definitely not posh. Now he lives in a flat in Venice Beach, preferring to frequent Downtown dive bars than glossier private members’ clubs. “I go through phases of not liking the pretention and sycophantic nature of LA but I can be surfing in 10 minutes and snowboarding in two hours — I love the connection with nature.”

What about Hollywood networking? The stream of openings, screenings and premiers? “My publicists say: ‘Alex you should really go to this one’, but they know I’m not into it. If I go I’m always the first one out the door, off to get a beer with my mates instead. I try to avoid being friends with actors — most of my tickets for the premiere were for my football team.”

The Hollywood Reporter just called him “a pretty, very earnest English actor in the Robert Pattinson-Theo James tradition”. How does he feel about impending heart-throb status? “I think Rob’s great. The good thing about being that well-known is that your name can green-light movies that wouldn’t otherwise have been made. I have no desire to be famous, definitely not. It would be lovely to sit under the radar and make good movies and have just enough recognition so that you could book jobs, but not so that it affects your life. But if that’s what happens then you have to just roll with it, I guess. My mum will ensure my feet stay firmly on the ground. She came to the premiere and the only thing she said after was, ‘Thank god it’s not bad!’”

The 5th Wave was filmed in Atlanta over several months last year and nearly all of Alex’s scenes are with Moretz. Inevitably they became close. “It can go either way with a co-star — sometimes people just hate each other but luckily Chloë and I really hit it off.

“Her family is from Atlanta so I went to her house for Thanksgiving. They’re all awesome — I think that’s a big part of how she’s managed to stay grounded.”

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Despite the internet rumours of romance with his co-star, Roe insists he’s happily single. “We are very close friends but that’s it. I’m just focusing on work right now. That’s not to say if someone amazing came along I wouldn’t be interested,” he grins.

Is he nervous about the film’s reception? “This isn’t a critics’ movie but it does what it says on the tin,” says Roe. “If you get the chance to do something like this you’re never not going to take it. It’s a fun, exciting film that I’m really proud of.”

He’s here for a week, staying with friends in west London while his mum holidays in his LA flat. You won’t find him at any trendy showbiz parties tonight though.

“I’m off to play five-a-side football on the green in Chiswick.”

The 5th Wave is released January 22

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