'ASYLUM' SEEKER: STAR CSOKAS' STEAMY LOVE SCENES MAKE FANS MAD ABOUT HIM

Stephen Schaefer
August 16, 2005
Boston Herald

But in "Asylum," opening Friday, the woman in question is a doctor's wife and the worker is an inmate in a British psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

For Marton Csokas, the film's hulking six-foot-three-inch tall Edgar Stark, an artist who murdered his wife in a jealous rage, making love to such beautiful women as "Asylum" heroine Natasha Richardson's Stella is a familiar day's work.

In 2001, the 39-year-old New Zealander with the Hungarian surname (pronounced Cho-KASH) gained international attention when he starred in the arthouse film "Rain'' as a handsome drifter whose affair with an unhappy wife destroys a marriage.

Since then, he's been working nonstop. He was Eva Green's warrior husband in the Crusade drama "Kingdom of Heaven" and is a tragic figure as a rebellious POW in "The Great Raid," currently in theaters. In the fall, he succumbs to Charlize Theron's considerable charms in the sci-fi adventure "Aeon Flux."

"From a practical perspective, 'Rain' enabled me to be seen," Csokas said. "But my character Cady in 'Rain,' he drifts, he's an inter-island adventurer with no real roots. He can be all things to all people. Edgar is very different. His psychological and emotional roots go deeper. We meet him in a place of calm, which, surprisingly enough, is a mental institution. One of the things we discover is that he's at his best in a mental institution."

The reason lies at the heart of Edgar's psychosis. "He suffers from a condition called morbid jealousy and personality disorder, but these things don't manifest themselves until he's in the real world. He doesn't understand that when he has medical treatment."

Ian McKellen co-stars as the asylum's chief, Peter Cleave, a gay man in 1950s England with an unhealthy appetite for cooking up chaos.

"They inherently need one another," Csokas said, acknowledging the homoerotic undertone. "Sexuality in life is complex and complicated, and with Edgar's attempt to get out of the institution, he's aware of Cleave's attraction and plays with that. It's a nice complement to Edgar and Stella's love story. People have said it's a triangle, but it's not so much that as a (quadrangle) because there's Stella's husband as well," played by Hugh Bonneville.

Though he has played his share of villains ("xXx," "Timeline"), Csokas unabashedly enjoys his lovers.

"It's a nice role to be cast in. But for the lover, there are other aspects than sex. The challenge is to bring out many aspects. In 'The Great Raid,' what interested me most, there was love again, but in a different form, this time about male friendship. I thought it interesting that within a war film, that male camaraderie and friendship and love was investigated. Joseph Fiennes is the major and we have an antagonistic relationship, but they're deeply connected and that allows the others around them to survive the war camp. It's not often in a Hollywood film you'd get to explore those relationships."

When it comes to those steamy love scenes, how does he prepare?

Csokas laughed off questions about his technique.

"Everybody's very different in my experience. The comforting thing - which is always nice - is to find in this kind of work that you do indeed have the work between you. If you veer away from that, you can find yourself in hot water. So the work is the thing! And then if you're onto a good thing, maybe dinner afterward," he said, laughing again.