Alex Pettyfer has learned rather quickly that he has a real hankering for stunt work, even if it can get a bit dangerous sometimes. “You kind of want to get hurt, because it gives you more adrenaline, it gives you more pump,” the 20-year-old actor says. “But yeah, I love the whole action aspect of it.”
Luckily, his latest starring role, as the lead teenage alien stranded on earth in “I Am Number Four,” gave him plenty of opportunity to scratch that particular itch.
Though as a teen he starred in the British spy flick “Stormbreaker” and followed that up with another pair of films, “I Am Number Four” feels like a real beginning for Pettyfer. “This is the first thing that’s come out that I’m very, very proud of,” he says. “I’ve got so many different paths I can go down, and I don’t want to do anything I’m not proud of. The day you start doing work for other people or for different reasons than that you love it is the day that you start to go downhill.”
Even as fresh as he is to Hollywood, Pettyfer has already learned some important lessons — including staying off the Internet, where he’s been derided for being a pretty boy. “At the end of the day, there’s going to be a percentage of people that like what you do and there’s going to be a percentage of people that don’t,” he says. “It’s the people who like what you do you need to entertain.”
