By Tonisha Johnson

Going from performing live on stage to the silver screen is a bit backwards but proves excellent for The History Boys; a film about the coming of age of young men embarking on a new era in their lives.

Coming from the stage cast are both Samuel Barnett who plays Posner and Dominick Cooper who plays Dakin; both are enjoying the fruits of their labor and have understood that at this young age they are lucky to play such important roles.

What do you guys feel about the transition from theater to film, in terms of this?

Samuel Barnett: The feedback that we've had particularly in America has been really encouraging, that people seem to feel that it's made a successful transition. They said it doesn't look like someone stuck a camera in front of the stage and pressed "record." It hasn't been opened out so that you've lost the authenticity of the school setting and all that, but it definitely feels like a film. That's what we've been told, so it's been encouraging.

Dominick Cooper: It was certainly, doing it ourselves as actors, the writing almost lent itself for the screen. We have two very intimate scenes that need a really kind of delicate, almost a whisper, and to do that for the film, it kind of worked.

Samuel Barnett: It was a pleasure doing it actually, because you could just be intimate, which is what you want to do with those scenes. It's like, of course they weren't written for the screen. It was written as a play but it feels like it was written for a film.

Dominick Cooper: And you had an opportunity to experiment so much more in that medium because you could find more intricacies with it and be much more delicate with it and try different things out because you're not performing in front of a thousand people.

Do you feel weird now that you're not on stage anymore and the film is in the can?

Samuel Barnett: What's great is that we have a record of what we've done for three years, and you don't get many plays that get that. And I feel grief that we're not doing it anymore, we've become a family. Any of us could have left at any point over these three years, and indeed, had it been about atmosphere, I'm sure we wouldn't have wanted to do anything more with that job. But we've become a family. I feel that I miss the work but I know I've got in this business eleven other actors here I can absolutely depend on professionally and personally.

It comes through in the performance both on stage and on film.

Samuel Barnett: We were very lucky that we got on. It could have gone the other way. There was no weak link professionally and there was no weak link personally.

There's such a luxuriousness to the words, that were there throughout the process were there moments where you learned new things about the ideas at all and can you tell me a little about that process as you played it and as you sort of "Wow, I didn't really think about that" because you were emphasizing one thing at one part and, it was just so rich.

Dominick Cooper: It was incredible. Exactly what you just said. Over three years we were discovering things everyday up until the last performance on Broadway, which is why it was so odd watching the film, having done it for another year and having discovered so much more, to then suddenly see a performance that was kind of a year old. It was announced on the date of the performance, but of course there's nothing you can do about that and you have to trust that it was your instincts at the time.

Samuel Barnett: Also, the changes are just in the details. The core is the same from day one as it was to the end of Broadway, throughout the film. It's the details that change, and I'm sure that unless you watch the play a hundred times and the film a hundred times, you wouldn’t notice the details. It's us that feel it so I'm sure it feels only different to us.

Dominick Cooper: That's his writing. For an actor, it's so wonderful because you never get bored. You can do so many variations of each word and each line.

Samuel Barnett: There were really specific bits, particularly when you're talking about when we have that scene with scripts and they're talking about putting their sex life into it, into a World War II metaphor, or whatever. Gosh, I should know what war that is. That was not funny when we first said it. It wasn't funny, because we didn't know what we were saying, and then we understood it, actually conveying the idea--it's a complex thing to convey--and that became funnier and funnier and funnier, and then you get the exact comic timing which you don't always get on any given night, and you get that off the audience, and the difficult thing about that, as Dom said, with the film you have no audience, so it was difficult pitching it, with the film.

Have you seen the film with an audience yet?

Samuel Barnett: Yeah, but we haven't actually seen it with an audience where you go in and you wear a cap and, actually, you don't even wear a cap. No one even recognizes us. And you watch it with just an audience who has paid their money to see the film.

Dominick Cooper: Very odd seeing the work you've been doing for three years suddenly up there and being amongst the audience and how different the character actually is from how you perceived it to be. I was quite shocked by how revolting I was.