COULD NEW ZEALANDER MARTON CSOKAS, ONE OF THE STARS OF THE BLOCKBUSTER KINGDOM OF HEAVEN, BE THE NEW RUSSELL CROWE?

Felicity Lough
July 2005
Australian Vogue

The work-related reading would be the 16 scripts ("here, I'll count them") Csokas has stacked around his apartment, not including the ones already in the recycling bin. Although he cautions, "That's more smoke than fire."

Regardless the number of screenplays scattered around his apartment, Csokas (pronounced chok-ash. "It's never going to be perfect [pronunciation] unless you're Hungarian") is hot property in Hollywood. "I've had a run of films, now I'm getting myself together. This is as nice a place to do it as anywhere and it's practical." For the first time in three years, the 39-year-old actor has a place to call home. "I've seen a lot more of the world than I had before," says Csokas, whose last gig in his native New Zealand was playing Celeborn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Since then, he has bartered for souvenirs in Morocco, where he filmed Ridley Scott's sword-and-sandal epic Kingdom of Heaven, which screens this month. He skulked about the English countryside for the arthouse flick Asylum with Natasha Richardson and Sir Ian McKellen. He worked in Queensland on the World War II action movie The Great Raid. And after putting Matt Damon's back out in a fight sequence in The Bourne Supremacy, shot in Berlin, he returned to Germany las year for the sci-fi thriller Aeon Flux, in which he plays Chairman Trevor Goodchild opposite a jet-haired Charlize Theron.

Ask him what Theron was like in person and the New Zealand Drama School graduate dodges the question. "She's a lot more sensitive than she appears to be." What does that mean? Csokas isn't telling. In fact, he's downright evasive. Like Crowe, he is a difficult interview. Ask him if he has a girlfriend and he says, "I'm getting along just fine." In response to a casual question about his plans for the next day, he shoots back "It's a secret, ha ha ha."

So how did a guy with his own experimental theatre company and Xena: Warrior Princess at his resume cross over to studio blockbusters? 'I don't know," he says. "I didn't hold Los Angeles as a prize at all, which is maybe why I'm here. I know some people really had it in them to do all that and I was very against it. I just had no taste for it. I was doing very well in Sydney [where he was previously based] and then things happened in my personal life." (Which, of course, he won't go into.) "I just wanted to get away. I was doing Garage Days and we had a month before we had to come back for the Homebake Festival, I was fortunate enough to get an agent [in L.A.]. I wanted to shake up my habits. And there we are. Things have continued very well."