Romancing the Stone?

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But I really don’t think it has to do with whether you get along with them or not. It’s really just magic on set. And it has to do with the kind of character you’re playing, too, and how you interpret it.

Sexy, sensuous, subtle: There is a romantic frisson between the characters played by Kate Mara and Charlie Cox in Stone of Destiny, the inspirational true story of Scottish nationalists who steal the relic back from Westminster Abbey as a gesture of Scottish pride in 1950.

There was also a romance that bloomed between the American Mara — who also played the 19-year-old edition of Heath Ledger’s daughter in Brokeback Mountain — and the Englishman Cox — who is the charming leading man from Stardust.

It was obvious they were a couple at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, when Stone of Destiny delighted audiences as the closing-night gala. The two were planning a cross-country drive together in the U.S. following the filmfest, Fox told Sun Media.

Who knows what happened? Mara remains coy about whether there ever was, or still is, a relationship.

“Well, he’s a great co-star!” she says of Cox.

But Mara, who turns 26 on Feb. 27, is willing to discuss how couples relate on-screen.

Especially in a true story in which her character, Kay Matheson, and Cox’s character, Ian Hamilton, are real-life people who did steal the artifact, which is also known as the Stone of Scone and Jacob’s Pillow. It had been pillaged by the English king, Edward I, in 1296, although he may have ended up with a fake.

REAL-LIFE COUPLE?

Mara is not sure if Hamilton and Matheson, both still living when the film was shot in Scotland as a Canada-Scotland co-production, were a couple, either.

“I don’t know … they certainly didn’t stay together.”

Matheson went back to teaching and eventually ended up in a nursing home. Hamilton wrote a book about their exploits, served as a consultant to Smith, entertained the film troops with his stories and popped up in a sly cameo as a grumpy Englishman.

In writer-director Charles Martin Smith’s version, there is a romance between Hamilton and Matheson as their adventure unfolds. It is sweet and spiked with dry wit. Mara says it does not matter if the actors portraying a romantic couple feel romantic themselves.

“You can really hate someone,” she offers, “but you can have like amazing chemistry with them in a scene. And you can really like somebody off-set and not have great chemistry. It’s weird. I don’t really know how it works because it really doesn’t make sense. It’s just either there or it’s not. But I really don’t think it has to do with whether you get along with them or not. It’s really just magic on set. And it has to do with the kind of character you’re playing, too, and how you interpret it.”

In Stone of Destiny, the reality appealed to Mara and overcame her fear of doing a Scottish accent for the role (thoroughly American, she was born and bred in New York as the great-granddaughter of Timothy Mara, founder of the NFL’s New York Giants).

“As a movie-goer but also as an actress, I love true stories,” Mara says. “It makes the movie just that much better for me.”

What Martin created, Mara says, is a film that captures the essence of the symbolic gesture that stealing the Stone of Destiny was for modern Scottish nationalism. And she is delighted that her character, Kay Matheson, was instrumental in the adventure.

“Yes! It makes you think, so she’s not just ‘the girl!’ She really had a role and had a really important role, in the taking of the Stone.”