Jamie Bell stars as Esca, a Briton who becomes the slave of Roman soldier Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) in the historic epic, The Eagle. Based on the book The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff, the story follows the uneasy alliance between Marcus and Esca as they venture into hostile territory in order to find and return the lost Eagle of the Ninth Legion. Marcus' father led the 5,000 men of the Ninth Legion into battle 20 years prior and the entire legion was never seen again.

When Marcus hears a rumor that the Eagle's been spotted with a tribe in the north, he sets off to reclaim the Eagle and learn more about what may have happened to his now disgraced father and the legion. Esca, who knows the language spoken by the people of the highlands of Caledonia, has pledged to serve his Roman enemy after Marcus stepped in and saved him from sure death in the gladiator area, and accompanies Marcus on the journey to find the Eagle as he believes it's his duty to fulfill his oath to serve.

Their characters can barely tolerate each other, but Bell and Tatum hit it off immediately. "I met Channing before we started this job so I just thought he was such a nice guy from the second I saw him," said Bell during roundtable interviews at the LA press day for the Focus Features film. "He's so charismatic. His energy is so warm. I literally, after the first time I met him, I described him as the nicest person in the world because he is just the nicest guy. You know, our working relationship was really great.

We got along really well and we kind of pushed each other. Literally, when I was freezing cold to the point of almost passing out and going, 'I literally can not do this. My brain is saying you should not do this,' of course he's like, 'Come on, Jamie! Come on! Let's get on with it!' Which is great; you need that energy. My brain was shutting down quickly. But he's great. We had a great relationship and a great time on this. I'd do it again. I'd cross the wall again with him for sure."

On the weather conditions while shooting The Eagle:

Jamie Bell: "It was freezing, absolutely freezing. It's funny because we start in Budapest where it was actually kind of quite nice and warm, a beautiful, sunny European city where we could see all the crew. And then by the time we got to the Highlands in Scotland, everyone was kind of big, black pieces of plastic with fur on the edges. You couldn't tell one from the next. It was cold - very cold."

On researching the people of that region:

Jamie Bell: "They're such ancient people, the Brigantes specifically. It's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly where I'm from; it's kind of that generic geographic area. But it just represented the native people who are trying to resist an invading force and oppressing their customs on them - [that] is a responsibility, I think. And it was fun just to play someone who is the complete opposite of this other person, in terms of values and cultures and their customs. And realizing that your friend can actually be your enemy as well, which is kind of a nice story to play as well."

On how his background - and Channing Tatum's - in dance helped him handle the fight choreography:

Jamie Bell: "Yeah, I think it's funny - two dancers wielding swords and riding horses. There's a great competitive nature between the two of us, I think. Who's got the biggest sword, who's got the fastest horse, who can dance better...which is great because it's exactly what these two characters need to go on the journey with them. But bizarrely actually, especially with sword fighting for example, because I'm a dancer you kind of do a lot of opposites. You lead with your right foot, you raise your left arm. You go with your left foot, you raise your right arm. Everything is done in a very specific, coordinated fashion. With sword fighting, that breaks all the rules because you're supposed to go right arm, right foot forward. And with the fight choreographer - this great guy called Richard - he kind of had to unlearn the way you teach sword fighting and teach it backwards for me, because I literally couldn't do it. My brain goes, 'I can not make a step with my right foot and my right arm going at the same time,' because in dance you just never make this. It's a very unnatural movement. I had to unlearn some things and learn other things. But being a dancer it helps in every sense of every kind of physicality for a character, any kind of movement that requires physical attitude. And also for Channing, not to speak for him, but he's incredible physically. That's how he expresses characters, through his physical action, so the movement part of that side of things is very important to him as well."

On learning how to ride a horse:

Jamie Bell: "There's a weird thing because with horses, I think this is kind of a general misconception because they're so big and they're told to be unpredictable and they can bolt at any time - and it's a little dangerous - that there's this kind of built-in fear where you don't even know where it's come from. I was walking across a field with a few friends, there was a horse in the field - it was in a little paddock - and they went, 'Horsey!' They approached it and petted its nose and everything, and literally it took one look at me and backed away because it just totally sensed all of my fear, my anxiety, which I really didn't understand where that was from. But I learned to ride with this girl at this horse school and I guess because she was female there was something about the fact that I felt kind of emasculated. Like, 'Oh my god,' wearing this stupid little helmet and going, 'This is really scary, really dangerous,' that she makes you forget that you're riding a horse. She actually asks you really personal questions while you're riding this horse, and because you're so scared you tell her everything about your life. So it's like a therapy session on horseback and then you realize, 'Oh, I'm riding it backwards.' And literally within two weeks I was vaulting on and off, I was riding the thing backwards, and I could literally parallel park it into a parking space. And when the film was over, the saddest part about it was saying good-bye to this animal because they are majestic creatures and they're really, really beautiful things. I'm so pleased that I managed to conquer that fear, which wasn't even really a fear. It was just a misunderstanding. I totally appreciate that relationship."

"My horse was called Dali, as in Salvador. This is a very famous horse in the horse world of films. I was very privileged. He was actually faster than Channing's horse. He's known as the mountain goat because he never falls, he has the best footing out of the horse stable, and he took really great care of me. But the weirdest thing is that when you really learn - because I was doing like three lessons for six weeks, just pounding out the hours in the saddle and stuff - and I was really never afraid of falling off. I was more afraid that the horse would hurt itself on the terrain, but I never had that fear."

Jamie Bell recalls the best and worst parts of filming The Eagle:

Jamie Bell: "Just to preface it with physical environment always inform performance, so even if it's bad it's good because it looks really bad and it feels really bad, so then it looks really good. I would say the best was when we were in Budapest and they were doing all that kind of Roman fighting thing and I was just hanging because I wasn't in that part of the film, which is really nice and really warm."

"The worst part was when we were in these rivers. Now, I've done some stuff in Scotland before, in lochs in Scotland. They're very cold - very deep and very cold. And literally it can affect your body in such a primal way. It basically says to your brain, 'You need to get out or you're going to die.' And we had to do this scene where I'm pulling Channing because he's all messed up, and we're falling down these little waterfalls. It's really, really deep and we kind of crash at the next little pool. And I could only do it twice and I had to stop because I literally was going into a mild hypothermic shock. Like I could stand up properly and everyone was talking at me but I couldn't really see anyone. I couldn't stop shaking so the medics said, 'He probably shouldn't do it again.' Channing did it a further seven or eight times, so he definitely got me on that one for sure. That was the worst thing I've ever done."

On his visit to Hadrian's Wall:

Jamie Bell: "I did go there on a school trip as a young kid. Of course it was rather boring as a child, watching a lot of rubble on the floor. 'Wow, this is great...' But of course, these are very great, mythic, real things that happened - we can get into really boring specifics - but the way they would communicate with each other on that wall, the way they stationed it, the architecture of this thing... Let's be honest, they wanted to keep something out. They were very afraid of what was on that other side. When I went to Scotland to kind of start filming, I actually went before the crew got there, it's kind of unbelievable to think that these guys wearing tunics who'd come from Tuscany would then step into the Highlands of Scotland. I mean it must have been a pretty formidable opponent. They must have been absolutely terrified. I'm not surprised they built a wall that big."

Looking into the future: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn:

Jamie Bell: "It was definitely a change of pace. It was a lot warmer, which was good. You know, 'Motion capture...what is it?' That was my first initial thing, like, 'What is it? How do you do it? What does it require? How does it work? Does it even work? Let me see some evidence of it working.' And I watched some of those motion capture films which are kind of very early, primitive in terms of the technology. All props to Robert Zemeckis for kind of spearheading that industry and saying, 'This is something that we need to take note of.' Because I knew everything about Tintin. I was already a Tintin-aphile or Tintin-aknowledgist, I think - there's two different words - so I was very into that. It was literally just trying to understand the mechanics of the technology. 'You want me to stand in a grey room and act as though I'm in a seaplane in the ocean, in the middle of the Sahara Desert with nothing around me that informs anything about this character's journey, anything about anything in the physical world?' And that's great because it just means I can make it all up. I mean to a degree some of it is all there pre-animated in a 3D kind of a world which they've built in the computers and you're seeing real-time playback with. But other than that, it's all in your head, which is great."

Will American audiences get into Tintin?

Jamie Bell: "I think anyone who understands and appreciates Indiana Jones understands and appreciates Tintin, and they don't even know what it is yet. So I feel like it's not going to be difficult, you know? I think the characters are great because they all have kind of human flaws, and this Tintin character's a very driven, ambitious guy. And the structure of the story and the adventure is something we all know and love. There's something at the end, they've got to get to it, and they're going to go through all kinds of stuff to get there in the end. There's a very bizarre and quirky and exciting relationship in the center of it between these two guys, and it's Steven Spielberg at the helm who does this story incredibly well. This is what he does. And also, for Steven, it's new technology for them. I think before Jurassic Park, CGI was not a common word. We didn't really understand what it meant, so he kind of invented CGI. He put it into people's living rooms and we understood what it meant, in the similar way that James Cameron has kind of made motion capture understandable. Steven Spielberg is such a household name and is so linked to childhood and kind of fantasy for children and dreams and all this other stuff, I think he will make motion capture something that we understand and appreciate."

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The Eagle hits theaters on February 11, 2011.