Love divide

ACTOR Stephen Moyer could relate from personal experience to the trans-Atlantic relationship that his character, city broker Michael, enjoys in C4's new drama NY-LON. In the seven-part series Michael falls for New Yorker Edie while she's visiting London and, on her return home, the pair embark on a long-distance romance.

Former Royal Shakespeare Company member Moyer, who also starred in C4's controversial Men Only series, knows how difficult such relationships can be as he fell in love with a girl who lived in LA.

"I think we both really wanted to make it work," he says. "The problem was that when we first got together we couldn't bear to be apart, so we'd be flying to see each other a lot.

"It's easy to sustain that intensity for a few months, but then it becomes incredibly difficult to keep that intensity when you've been apart from two or three weeks. I was probably a bit too young to be able to handle it. I also didn't have Michael's money."

NY-LON has the distinction of being the first-ever UK drama series to be filmed partly on location in New York. Producer Peter Norris feels it will show viewers a different part of the city. After shooting in London, production transferred to New York, where filming mainly concentrated on the Lower East Side - far removed from the Manhattan skyline of Sex And The City or the Greenwich Village seen in Friends.

For Moyer, visiting New York was one of the highlights of making the drama. His final shot was in the middle of Times Square at four in the morning screaming his head off. "I was crying my eyes out. It was a tight shot, just of my head, but just out of shot there were cars pulling up and people heckling me," he recalls.

"There's a moment in Rocky where he wins the fight and shouts out for his wife, 'Adrian, Adrian' and somebody actually came up to the side of me, off camera so no one would see and started shouting, 'Adrian, Adrian' like Rocky while I was trying to do my crying scene. I thought it was hilarious."

The object of Michael's affection is Edie (played by New Yorker Rashida Jones), who works in a record store by day and by night teaches literacy in the Brooklyn Heights. Not that the city trader wears his heart on his sleeve. He appears quite cold, according to Moyer.

"He's dealt with a lot in his life and has become the patriarch of his family. Therefore a lot of the reason why he's found himself doing this city job is that it's the only way he can pay for everything in his life," he says.

He's very bright, from a working class background, got a scholarship to go to a university and was probably one of the only ones from his school who had that opportunity and made something of himself.

"Michael does have a heart but I don't think it's on show. He does everything he possibly can to cover it up. When he meets her it opens up that part of him he thought had been hidden away."

The actor can see similarities between himself and his character, a working class boy from Essex who's made his own way in life and supports West Ham. "When I read the script I immediately thought he was someone I could relate to," he says.

"A lot of my mates from school in Essex went off and actually became Michael. I knew I wanted to be an actor but if I hadn't, that probably would have been the path I would have gone down too. We were all gobby Essex boys who were cocky and able to talk the hind legs off a donkey."

Michael is probably just an old romantic at heart. At the beginning, the relationship with Edie is almost an obsession. "To make that decision and go to New York, it's kind of crazy and something that's completely uncharacteristic for him, especially as he's doing all that for a woman," says Moyer.

"The big difficulty with trans-Atlantic relationships is that you want them to work and your whole heart is invested in it. But it's the logistics that make it tough to keep it going. If you are an old romantic then it's really tough when crap things like logic take over."

He found filming with Americans something of a culture clash.

"New York was amazing, a dream come true," he adds. "We'd all been really stupid because when we'd been filming the interiors for New York in London, it was so hot in the studio we were in T-shirts and little flimsy jackets. All the costume ladies said to us, 'Make sure you wear nice big coats because it's going to be cold in New York' and we were all like, 'Yeah, yeah' not taking any notice.

"Of course, when we got to New York we were tied in to our continuity and we couldn't add anything to our costumes. So we were freezing our tits off, all of us, and it was the coldest winter in about 125 years or something."

* NY-LON begins on C4 on Tuesday at 10pm.

Published: 19/08/2004