Vogue.com –Taron Egerton keeps his cap on throughout dinner at White City House. It’s not that he’s worried he’ll be “spotted”—this West London outpost of Soho House attracts a crowd that would look the other way if the pope were propping up the bar. The 29-year-old actor is simply suffering the aftereffects of a “terrible” haircut; to play Elton John in the forthcoming biopic Rocketman, he had his hair thinned and his hairline raised.
It’s a forgivable sliver of vanity from an actor who has spent much of his professional life running away from his good looks. Egerton’s 2015 breakthrough role in the action flick Kings­man: The Secret Service placed him—jawline first—on the conveyor belt of conventionally attractive Hollywood heroes. Almost immediately, he wanted off. “It’s more fun to play things that are ugly,” he explains. In pursuit of that ugliness, he took on the titular role in Eddie the Eagle—a 2016 underdog comedy based on the true story of a hapless British ski jumper with a prominent underbite. And now he’s playing (and singing) the part of Elton: a man famous for many things but not, primarily, his good looks. “I mean, I think he’s got a lot of sex appeal,” counters Egerton when I point this out. He momentarily loses his train of thought. “Sorry, my mind was just imagining Elton reading this.” (Encountering the famous singer for the first time, he tells me, was a bit like “going to meet the queen.”)
Born in England, Egerton moved to Wales at age three. For a while he lived in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch—a village with a name so ridiculous that pronouncing it has, reluctantly, become his talk-show party trick—“particularly in America, I think, because it’s so alien.” He then spent his formative years in Aberystwyth, a remote town on the Ceredigion coast of Wales. When he left to pursue acting in London (at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he sang Elton John’s “Your Song” to audition), he missed Wales ferociously. He actually moved back there for a while after Kingsman, making the surreal transition from blockbuster fame to a room in his mum and stepdad’s bungalow. “I didn’t have enough money at that point to buy a place in London,” he says. “I was quite anxious about what the future held.” Even now, the walls of his West London flat are decorated with the work of artists from his hometown.