"Two dancers on horses" --The Eagle's Jamie Bell tells SF Gate

In online version of the San Francisco Chronicle, SF Gate, Michael Ordoña spoke to Jamie Bell, Channing Tatum’s co-star in The Eagle, for his piece “Jamie Bell: Billy Elliot' trades shoes for sword.” The young actor who made a name for himself by playing the working-class dancer in Billy Elliot years ago talks about how his dancing skills came in handy (both for himself and co-star who’d previously hoofed it up Step Up) for the action scenes in The Eagle. At the same time, there are differences between fighting and dancing, as Bell explains:

It's hard to undo that dancer's brain because you learn things very specifically with your body, like, 'I will never put my right foot and my right arm out at the same time' - that just doesn't make sense. But in (our) sword fighting, it's all that. I literally had to learn it all backward. 'Forget the swords; put them all down. Teach me the feet, then teach me the swords.' But it's great fun. I went from being terrified of horses to riding on them backward, vaulting on them, doing all kinds of tricks, within weeks.