Female models have a habit of making multi-faceted brands of their careers and Nick Hopper is taking their example - and raising it: modelling, acting, photography and directing the burgeoning Hemsley & Hemsley food and lifestyle business (Jasmine Hemsley is his girlfriend), there's a lot going on. But just now we can't help but like him best for being the man in the car in the Galaxy ad starring Audrey Hepburn.
"I had a good feeling about the audition - the brief wanted a young Gregory Peck and my 94-year-old great aunt who is my biggest fan has always insisted I'm a ringer for him," Hopper says. "In the first audition I had to sit on a plastic chair holding a Nintendo game steering wheel and pretend to eye up a piece of paper stuck to the wall."
Filmed over the course of a week on the Amalfi Coast (all of which Hopper documented in pictures), the cast originally included three women to play Hepburn - their mouth, eyes and body to be fused by the wonders of CGI to bring a 1953 version of her to life - but the final cut only includes two: Jenny Ishammar & Lou-Helene Barbry. Shot by Daniel Kleinman, famous for the James Bond title sequences, it subsequently led to another driving role for Hopper in the ads for the new E-Class Mercedes - all of which suggests an aspiration to play James Bond one day.
"At the moment I'm loving photography and Hemsley & Hemsley is really going through the roof," says Hopper, who was commissioned by Ebury Press Random House to do the photographs for their forthcoming cookery book - due out next summer. "But there's always a window for Bond of course."
"I've reached that age now, there's a little bit of salt and pepper going on. I wish I'd done the silver beard years ago - it's done me good. But I've turned into one of those people I never wanted to be - a model-slash-actor-slash-photographer-slash-entrepreneur. I love the creative variety and the challenge of it all, but having now run a business of my own I really appreciate the life of a model which means you just have to turn up, do it and then go home - the lack of responsibility is great."
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