By Bill Keith

Dominic Cooper’s first splash on U.S. shores came in 2006 as brooding cock-tease Dakin in Alan Bennett’s Tony award-winning play The History Boys. Since starring in the screen version of it that same year, Cooper, now 30, has been in demand, filming no fewer than five movies [see next page]. Next out for the London native is another stage-to-screen adaptation, the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! Cooper, whose character doesn’t seem to own a shirt -- “I think I wore a shirt occasionally! Actually, wait, no shirt, just tight Speedos and some spandex,” he jokes—shares the screen with heavy hitters Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Colin Firth.

“From the moment I was told I had the audition I tried desperately to not go. Then when I finally did, I realized I had to sing in front of ABBA themselves -- it was extraordinarily daunting,” he remembers. “And that was only the first daunting experience. The second was having to stand up and sing at a read-through with Meryl, Colin, Pierce, and Julie [Walters]. But we realized we were all equally terrified by the idea of singing in front of the studio executives with no accompaniment, so we abandoned that immediately. It was a good bonding moment.”

Meryl Streep was terrified by Mamma Mia!? “She’s hilarious. We all were on a learning curve figuring out how to translate a character through music and song without it becoming ridiculous or cheesy, but she was completely at ease,” he says.

Filming for seven weeks on the Greek isles last summer helped to ease any tensions for the classically trained actor, whose earliest noteworthy gig was appearing in a European ad for Durex condoms, in which he’s chased down the street by a pack of 10-foot-tall sperm. “Now I’m in a continual search to find a job that will take me back to the Greek islands, and it’s getting harder and harder, so I find myself walking stray dogs in England rather than walking down the beach.”

Speaking from a dog track on the set of his latest movie, An Education, he’s a world away from the sun-kissed coast where Mamma Mia! takes place, though it’s possible there’s one thing he doesn’t miss: ABBA. The movie’s plot -- a young woman’s (Big Love’s Amanda Seyfried) quest to find her real father on the weekend of her wedding -- is told entirely through the ’70s supergroup’s songs. Can he ever listen to their music again?

“No,” he laughs. “I can’t ever. I found some old video footage of me very early on wearing a fur coat, playing a guitar, and singing along to them, so I guess I’ve been keen on them since I was a youngster. It has always had a special place in my heart; now it does for a different reason.”



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