Relaxing at the recent press day for Stardust in a
T-shirt emblazoned with an iconic photograph of the famous meeting between Andy Warhol
and Bob Dylan, young actor Charlie Cox had plenty of time to reflect on his
meteoric rise from near-obscurity (he’d appeared in Casanova prior to being plucked for the lead role in Stardust by director Matthew Vaughn) as
well as his next movie, Stone of Destiny.
Written and directed by nebbishy actor Charles Martin Smith (The Snow Walker, Air Bud), the film is a rooted-in-truth caper comedy, in which Cox stars
opposite Kate Mara (We Are Marshall, Shooter), Billy Boyd and Robert Carlyle.

“I playing a guy called Ian Hamilton who’s a real guy,
still alive, and he’s amazing,” says Cox, who on his arm sports a butterfly tattoo
comprised of two skulls, created by New York
tattoo artist Scott Campbell. “It’s the story of him and three of his mates
during their university years in the 1950s, 1951 actually. They drove down to Glasgow
from London in the middle of the
night on Christmas Eve, and they stole a very famous Scottish relic out of
Westminster Abbey. …It’s called the Stone of Scone, but
it’s better known as the Stone of Destiny. I’ll tell you what
it was — Jacob had his vision of the ladder where he fell asleep with his head
on this stone. And so the stone become the throne of Scotland,
and the Scottish monarch would sit on it. So what happened was, when the
English got rid of the Scottish monarchy, they took it away and they placed it
under the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey, therefore symbolizing by
Scotland’s own rule that whoever sat on the throne of England was sitting on
the throne of Scotland as well. So it was kind of a massive gesture to steal
it.”

“But it’s actually very funny as well,” Cox continues. “I like to call it
the worst successful heist of all time, because it’s so badly thought out and
everything went wrong, but they did it. Somehow they broke this big stone, they
lost it — all sorts of things went wrong. But they still pulled it off.”

UPDATE 8/16: In regards to the comment below, there was a slip of the tape, and it was somewhat mangled. I assumed “Field” was a nickname, but upon further review, I tend to doubt that. I believe it was just “Ian,” garbled. Ergo, corrected above…