“The film is really a showcase for the chameleon talents of Jeremy Northam, an actor whose blend of coy charm and debonair confidence is both quintessentially English (he’s from Cambridge) and pure golden age Hollywood. … Cypher offers him such a perfectly tailored character that it’s hard to imagine anyone else was in the running at all.”—from a review by Hannah McGill for the Herald (Scotland), September 2003
“It's the performances that elevate the pic beyond a simple intellectual exercise. Adopting a rotund, perfect middle-American accent, and changing body language, Brit thesp Northam has considerable fun in the central role, as a kind of Hitchockian everyman; Northam's transformation at the end is almost into that of a different actor. Liu, who often has difficulty bringing warmth to her characters, is genuinely noirish and sexy here as the tough Rita, and both [Timothy] Webber and David Hewlett (as a subterranean Sunways techie) also bring some humor and human personality to the picture.”—from the review by Derek Elley for Variety, July 2003
“Northam is ideally suited to playing spies. It’s something to do with the rich, honeyed, seductive voice, the perfect English diction and the sly eyes which can ooze charm and cunning in equal measure. He’s had one go already: he was perfect as the machiavellian British spymaster in the World War Two drama Enigma, opposite Kate Winslet. But in his latest film, Northam beautifully subverts all of his natural characteristics – not least his good looks – to turn almost every cliché about the screen spy on its head.”—from an interview with JN by Demetrios Matheou for the Herald (Scotland), August 2003
“Cypher is a strange, complex, futuristic spy thriller, which its director – the Canadian Vincenzo Natali – quite justifiably calls ‘James Bond meets Kafka’. In it, Northam plays an American accountant, Morgan Sullivan, who is so bored with life that he joins a multinational company as a corporate spy. He’s given a new identity and sent to a series of hilariously tedious conventions (one is on processed cheese, another on shaving cream distribution outlets) in order to tape the proceedings. ‘He’s a nerdish, bone-achingly normal guy in a boring job,’ says Northam. ‘And now he thinks he’s going to be James Bond.’”—from the Demetrios Matheou interview
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So there you go. I thought you'd like to see this to refresh your memory about Cypher's reception in the press. Lot's of well-deserved praise for our guy all in one place!
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'”
-- C.S. Lewis
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