Written interviews

I don't rememger if this was posted already, but who cares.


Title: Nice work If you can get it
Date: April 08, 2006
Article Type: Interview
Source: Blackbook Magazine




Nice work If you can get it

Text: Will Doig, Photography: Greg Lotus; Styling: John Moore

"True luck is the ultimate coup d'état," says Jonathan Rhys Meyers, referring to his character in Woody Allen's Match Point, though he could just as easily be describing his own career. Kicked out of school at the age of 15, he was discovered by a casting agent while loitering in a pool hall in Cork, Ireland. Five years later, he would don mettalic-blue lycra as the androgynous Bowie-esque glam-rocker Brian Slade in Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine. Since then, he's gone on to develop an extensive repertoire of characters that are equal parts beguiling and deviant- from Keira Knightley's soccer coach in Bend it Like Beckham to the Napoleonic-era male slut in Vanity Fair. In Match Point, he plays a duplicitous philanderer turned second-rate murderer. When he told Allen he was nervous about the role, the auteur replied, "Hey Jonny, you're like 80 percent the character when you wake up in the moring." Now 28, Meyers is temporarily residing in a Manhattan two-bedroom that he rents from Christian Slater, just a few blocks downtown from Central Park, where he's filming Kirsten Sheridan's musical fantasy August Rush. Arriving at our interview a little disheveled, a crescent of missed stubble under his chin, he seems quite the opposite of the stony, slant-eyed reprobates he inhabits on film. When he quotes Woddy Allen, he does so in Woody Allen's voice. He enhances his descriptions of things with sound effects and laughs inappropriately and loudly. "I"m not going to lie about it," he says. "It takes a lot of work to be the me that I feel people want."
BB: In your most recent film, Match Point, you play a rising British aristocrat, which couldn't be further from your working-class roots. Growing up, were you resentful of people with money?
JRM: When I saw wealthy people, I just thought they were born genetically different from me. As I grew older, I saw through it and thought, "They're not particularly brighter or more beautiful. They just have more money to hide their flaws."
BB: Why'd you get kicked out of school?
JRM: I was just an appalling student. School was fucking gladiator academy: 1,500 christian brothers, all boys, state-run. I spent most of my time in pool halls. By the time I was 15 years old, they were like, "Just fuck off." And then I felt into this acting thing. People always think I just fell into film. But what about the 1,500 auditions I did before I got my first job? What about all the times I get told by a great director, "Orlando Bloom is doing it, because teenage girls want to see him more than they want to see you."
BB: But you're not just some anonymous, struggling actor anymore. I always wonder, When two celebrities who have never met pass on the street, do they acknowledge each other? If you see Jude Law in a bodega, do you make eye contact and nod?
JRM: Oh, no. I'd be just like every other fucking person who's in there saying [whispers], "Hey, Jude Law's over there! Did you see Jude Law over there?" I'd run over and get his autograph.
BB: Do you feel famous?
JRM: I suppose I'm famous for doing a job, and that's all I want. I don't want to date an actress or have my life in People magazine. If I'm on a film set, and there's paparazzi there, I don't give a shit. Let them take the photograph. If you can get 250 fucking bucks for taking a photograph of my ass, go for it, man. If you can make a little dough off me, I'm all for that shite.
BB: You've worked in both fairly fringe and highly commercial films. I think some actors say, "I'll only do blockbusters, " while others say, "I'll only do art-house films; I'd never work with Jerry Bruckheimer."
JRM: Bollocks. I love Jerry Bruckheimer. I think he's a genius. My movie taste is trashy as fuck, and there's one or two jobs on my résumé where I just wanted to spend two months in Canada with Rachael Leigh Cook.
BB: Would you like to play the wholesome good guy someday?
JRM: It would be fun, but I don't think anyone would believe me. A lot of it has to do with my physicality. Why does Matthew McConaughey play the roles he plays? Because he's Mr. Fuckable. He's that guy. He's the smart jock. I look like a guy who could be quite cruel. I could be slightly arrogant; I could be nasty. My girlfriend back in London, she said, "You're lucky you weren't born rich- you'd be a prick."
BB: I think some people assume when an actor gets to your level, he has his pick of any role he wants.
JRM: Oh, for fuck's sake. I take out the trumpets every time a good script comes in the door. I roll out the red carpet and get my army of jesters somersaulting and throwing rose petals at it.
BB: If you hadn't been in that pool hall the day you were discovered, what would yu be doing today?
JRM: I'd probably have ended up playing music with my brothers.
BB: Is this one of the brothers you were hanging out with in your appartement?
JRM: Yeah. He's playing the drummer in August Rush. He and my other brothers have a rock band, Skydiver. They're fucking talented. Jesus talented. Stupid talented. I'm going to record some music with them.
BB: What do you play?
JRM: Guitar. I play in August Rush- it's all for real.
BB: And that's going well?
JRM: I'm having a blast. This is the first film where I feel a huge amount of responsibility, becaus the director's the same age as me. It's not like I'm looking up to an elder and going, 'Please pour your wisdom on me." It's my first film shooting in New York, and it's been an education. New York crews are fast, tough, clever.
BB: I saw Breakfast on Pluto recently, made by Neil Jordan, another director you've worked with. Have you seen it?
JRM: No, but I know Cillian [Murphy, star of Breakfast on Pluto], and I know the script because I screen-tested for Neil a few years ago, and I did the worst audition of my life. I wasn't in the right headspace, because I didn't really want to do it after Velvet Goldmine. After you've played that androgynous character and then you play a transsexual, it's very difficult for them to cast you in something like Jarhaed.
BB: Was it hard to advance your career after beginning with the unusual role as Brian Slade in Velvet Goldmine?
JRM: It made it a bit difficult, but I wouldn't have changed it for the world. I wish we could have had Bowie's music. I was absolutely woeful on the soundtrack. I think one critic said my voice had all the charisma of chewed bubblegum. I keep that one right on the fridge for every morning when I get my milk for my tea: "You have all the charisma of chewed bubblegum." It's good to remember.
BB: It's funny, but you and Cillian Murphy are the first two actors who spring to mind when I think of famous androgynous Hollywood roles, and neither of you are American.
JRM: Yeah, but I'm fascinated by the United States. I'm fascinated by Montana, Nebraska, the fucking heartland. I lived in Missouri while doing a film with Ang Lee [Ride with the devil, about the Civil War]. People think that war was about the emancipation of slavery. Well, it wasn't. All Lincoln wanted to do was preserve the union. Now, when you look at the cause of the South, what they should have done in hindsight is emancipated the slaves and then opened on Fort Sumter. Then other countries would have gotten involved. You see, the South was hoping the English would get involved, but the English were never going to back a country that had the institution of slavery.
BB: I don't interview a lot of actors who develop retrospective strategies for the Confederate army.
JRM: I know. People are going to read this and think, He's off his fucking head alltogether.

Thanks Audrey for these interviews.. Scarlett always said these type of things about Jonny...She´s a strange sense of humour..

Again, thank you Audrey.
I love Jonathan I really do but his interviews always leave a bad taste in my mouth and this:

Audrey wrote:

I don't rememger if this was posted already, but who cares.


Title: Nice work If you can get it
Date: April 08, 2006
Article Type: Interview
Source: Blackbook Magazine

JRM: Yeah, but I'm fascinated by the United States. I'm fascinated by Montana, Nebraska, the fucking heartland. I lived in Missouri while doing a film with Ang Lee [Ride with the devil, about the Civil War]. People think that war was about the emancipation of slavery. Well, it wasn't. All Lincoln wanted to do was preserve the union. Now, when you look at the cause of the South, what they should have done in hindsight is emancipated the slaves and then opened on Fort Sumter. Then other countries would have gotten involved. You see, the South was hoping the English would get involved, but the English were never going to back a country that had the institution of slavery.
BB: I don't interview a lot of actors who develop retrospective strategies for the Confederate army.
JRM: I know. People are going to read this and think, He's off his fucking head alltogether.

sunflowerj wrote:

Again, thank you Audrey.
I love Jonathan I really do but his interviews always leave a bad taste in my mouth and this:

Audrey wrote:

I don't rememger if this was posted already, but who cares.


Title: Nice work If you can get it
Date: April 08, 2006
Article Type: Interview
Source: Blackbook Magazine

JRM: Yeah, but I'm fascinated by the United States. I'm fascinated by Montana, Nebraska, the fucking heartland. I lived in Missouri while doing a film with Ang Lee [Ride with the devil, about the Civil War]. People think that war was about the emancipation of slavery. Well, it wasn't. All Lincoln wanted to do was preserve the union. Now, when you look at the cause of the South, what they should have done in hindsight is emancipated the slaves and then opened on Fort Sumter. Then other countries would have gotten involved. You see, the South was hoping the English would get involved, but the English were never going to back a country that had the institution of slavery.
BB: I don't interview a lot of actors who develop retrospective strategies for the Confederate army.
JRM: I know. People are going to read this and think, He's off his fucking head alltogether.

Hi sunflower, just wondering why this leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Hi Audrey!
His press interviews in general leave a bad taste in my mouth. Sometimes, I wonder if his answers are real or if he's joking around with the journalists.
Regarding the bolded part, well, I studied the Civil war when I was in college and I watched countless movies about it. I am not concerned by slavery personnally but knowing what happened and everything, let's say I was a little surprised by his position. But he is entitled to his opinions and I won't lose sleep on that.
Now after re-reading the quote, I'm wondering if I got the real meaning of what he was saying. I guess so... Oh well...

Another old interview. I like it, except his swearing. I like it that he is honost and trying to be himself, but I think Sunflower, you won't like it.


Title: The Luck of the Irish
Date: May 14, 2006
Article Type: Interview
Source:Premiere Magazine





So, we know you can't divulge any plot points in Mission: Impossible III, but can you at least tell us what it is like to work with Tom Cruise? What's it like inside the Tom bubble?

Number one, he's not just an actor on the set, he's my boss, and you couldn't ask for a nicer boss. You know how you always dream about that boss—the one that really thinks about you every day and wants to know if you are happy? Tom's that guy.

He has a great reputation for his professionalism on set.

That's why he's still the biggest star in the world [after] two decades. It's an education [to work with him]. If you're a young actor in the movies and you are starting to become successful and you really want to know how to handle your fame, work with Tom. He respects people, he knows absolutely everyone's name, he's kind to everyone, and it's a lot of hard work—I'm sure by the end of the day he's exhausted. I think it was Anthony Hopkins that called him a Tom-aton. I swear to God, he has so much energy that there'd be no lighting problems in California ... you just have to plug up to Tom's right hand.


What factors are involved when you pick a project?

Directors, always the directors—because I can learn from them. I've worked with some of the best directors in the world—not always on their greatest film, but it doesn't matter. A great director can make an okay script into a good film, but a great script won't go anywhere in the hands of a mediocre director. It can only be mediocre.

What did you know of Mission Impossible: III's director, J.J. Abrams? It must have been quite a challenge for him to take on this franchise with this cast.


He did it so naturally—like water off a duck's back. I think J.J. is going to be like the next Spielberg. He's a stadium director. You know how there are stadium rock bands like Aerosmith and Bon Jovi? J.J. is like that. He loves a big show.

You never had any formal training. How difficult was it for you to learn while on the job?

It's hard because I made all my mistakes publicly, and I grew up in front of the camera. I was once on the set of a film called B. Monkey, with Rupert Everett and Jared Harris, and they were looking at me and were like, "You haven't trained, have you?" Critics can be really cruel. I got great reviews for Match Point, but I got four or five in England that really tore me to bits.

Do you read all of your reviews?

Only the bad ones. And you read the bad ones, and you think, "Yup, he's right! He's the only f****** critic that understood it. I was shit. I was f****** wooden and more wooden than wood."

Do you go back and watch your old films?

Oh, God, no. It's f****** horrible—like a nightmare. Like watching your baby photos.

Do you have directors you are eager to work with?

On the top of my list is Fernando Meirelles. I think he's fantastic. I'd love to do a film with Steven Spielberg, Milos Forman, Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Ridley Scott. There's a young South African director, Sunu Gonera—I might hook up with him next year. I'd love to do something with Ang Lee again. I could sit here all day, there are so many.

It sounds like you watch a lot of films.

I'm more of a DVD guy than a cinema guy. But that's because I'm a smoker and there's no way I can pop into an AMC for three hours. [He leans into the tape recorder.] But that doesn't mean you shouldn't go to the cinema. Go to the cinema! See my movies! I like watching really crappy movies—I mean, I like watching good films too, but like I love watching Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing, Sixteen Candles. You live in London, where the tabloids are legendary. Do you find it difficult? Yeah, they're f****** pricks. They're pricks to everyone, though. And you're always going to have a hard time being an Irishman in England. But I don't give a bullocks. They don't really even have a movie industry— they just have really talented actors who have to come to America to act. At the end of the day, I don't get paid in sterling, I get paid in dollars.

Would you ever try acting onstage?

I don't know. If I did, it would have to be on some tiny little stage in Oslo or something where no one can see it, because I'd probably be really bad. What I would like to try is directing. I suppose I want to do it because I just want to see someone else suffer. [laughs] I think I'd definitely be a sadomasochist director; I'd have my beautiful actresses crying their hearts out in their trailers, and the actors running to call their agents. Oh, yes, I'd definitely be in the Sam Peckinpah school.

How's that?

Cruel. If they move, kill them! [laughs]

Is there a certain type of film you'd like to take on?

I don't like sci-fi—I don't want to do anything with sci-fi. Star Wars? Star Trek? I'd rather eat turpentine and piss on a brush fire.

So it sounds like you're pretty content at the moment.

All you have to do is work on yourself, and be happy and grateful for the good things that you have. And I am. I'm grateful these days for my life and for the things I have. I'm going to take the opportunities I have, and I'm going to ride it



Credit: Boyskisses

Thanks for all the article.

Audrey wrote:

Another old interview. I like it, except his swearing. I like it that he is honost and trying to be himself, but I think Sunflower, you won't like it.

. LOL!
Jonathan and I have something in common: we hate Sci-Fi. People always call me crazy when I say that I don't like Star Wars.
You know what though? I don't think Jonathan is a bad guy and I even think that he seems to be a quite interesting person in real life. I wouldn't mind meeting and have a one-on-one conversation with him. But his interviews...NO! LOL!

August Rush interview, was posted on Twitter by @fortheloveofJRM.

August Rush strikes a chord with Jonathan Rhys Meyers
Vikki Campion Herald Sun
February 28, 2008 12:00AM

Jonathon Rhys Meyers and Freddie Highmore in August Rush. Source: Herald Sun
JONATHON Rhys Meyers has one addiction he will never go to rehab for -- music. It's what drew the Irish actor to his latest movie, August Rush.

‘‘Music is just an intrinsic part of my life,'' Meyers says.

‘‘I'm never far from my iPod, and I did all my own singing in August Rush, which was weird because I had to go back and lip-sync to myself.''

Rhys Meyers -- whose recent roles include Woody Allen's Match Point and playing Henry VIII in opulent TV drama The Tudors -- stars alongside Robin Williams, Keri Russell and Freddie Highmore in August Rush.

It tells the soul-stirring story of a cellist (Russell) and charismatic guitarist (Meyers) who have a chance encounter one night in New York. They fall in love, and pregnant, but are torn apart when they are led to believe the child did not survive.

Eventually that child, named August Rush (Highmore), embarks on a mission to find his parents.

‘‘The music in this film takes your point of view and allows you to see more than New York,'' Meyers says.

‘‘The music allows you to see what is going on in August's heart. You don't have to guess because the music tells you where he emotionally is.''

But it was the fantastic romance of the film, a triangle of estranged lovers and their son struggling to find each other, that really hit home for Meyers.

‘‘We all have one person in our life that we didn't get enough time with,'' he says.

‘‘It's that possibility that you can fall in love at first sight. Does that love ever leave you? I completely believe in love at first sight.''

While making the film, Meyers listened to the likes of Van Morrison, Kings of Leon and Regina Spektor. He appreciated such artists even more after shooting wrapped.

‘‘August Rush hears music on a completely different level,'' Meyers says. ‘‘Music is his air. It's his lifeblood. It's his food and water.''

Meyers' character Louis doesn't know he is a father or that his child is in an orphanage.

The actor doesn't know how that feels, but he does know how it is to grow up without a dad.

His own folk-musician father left the family when Meyers -- whose surname at birth was actually O'Keefe -- was only two.

‘‘I didn't use elements of my life in the film,'' Meyers says.

‘‘Johnny Rhys Meyers is an idea, it doesn't really exist.''

And that idea, he says, is what leads him to play the roles he does.

Meyers believes he looks too mean to play a good guy. ‘‘In acting, a lot of the roles you get are determined by how you look,'' he says.

‘‘I think my physicality lends to a character duality of dark and light. I do not look sweet. There's an air of arrogance, or elegance, about my physicality. Directors who are after that quality come to me.''

Not that he necessarily enjoys it -- in Match Point, Rhys Meyers played a wealthy, married man who shoots his pregnant lover. He admits it was ‘‘difficult to play and difficult to watch''.

‘‘But I like playing characters that are interesting.''

Unlike his character in August Rush, Meyers is not ready for fatherhood.

‘‘I love children -- I used to be one for years and years -- but I have no plans to be a father this minute,'' he says.

‘‘For the next 5-6-10 years, my career will be my main focus.''

Working with children is another matter. Meyers reckons most actors could learn a thing or two from 16-year-old Highmore.

‘‘There is no set age for brilliance. Somebody like Freddie could advise 70 per cent of other actors because that is his level of experience,'' he says.

August Rush is now showing.

And another one tweeted by @fortheloveofJRM. I didn't know these yet.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers on shooting TV-film sex scenes
By Ruben V. Nepales
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:45:00 05/14/2010

LOS ANGELES?JONATHAN Rhys Meyers memorably told Ellen Degeneres On her TV show that filming the many sex scenes in his hit series, "The Tudors, "was like doing it in Wal-Mart. In our recent interview with the star of the powerful historical drama about King Henry VIII, which is now on its fourth and final season, he was happy to oblige when we asked him to elaborate on his remark.

'We make the sex scenes as sexual as possible,' began Jonathan. 'However, that doesn?t necessarily mean that it's very sexy in the room. I learned from working on Woody Allen's "Match Point" that his set is not the sexiest one in the world. He doesn't like shooting sex scenes. So, for that type of set to create the sex scenes that Scarlett (Johansson) and I did in "Match Point," it took a lot of technicality. It's the same for "The Tudors."

'Yes, you do feel like you're having sex at Wal-Mart because there are 200 people walking around. They don't care that you're having sex. They only care that the actress' heel is not in the light too much. Everybody's got an individual job. Yet, you feel that everybody is concentrating on what you're doing and judging you on your performance (laughter).'

Last day

Since this was the final season, we presumed the series would show the monarch on the last day of his life. But, Jonathan said, 'Henry doesn't die. It was impossible for us to bring him to death. But, it's quite similar. I won't spoil it because it's quite a surprise.'

Jonathan quipped that maybe it was good to stop playing the king because the royal hauteur was beginning to suit him fine. 'Certainly, there's a certain amount of curtness that comes into your personality once you've played a king for a while,' he said to laughter. 'I notice that after a 12-hour day on the set, when I go into a store and ask for bread, I command that somebody give me that loaf of bread, please.'

Jonathan revealed, 'Certainly, on the last season, the extras would be slightly frightened of me because I would have to do extraordinary things, I would have to fly into extraordinary rages in the middle of the shoot. I didn't mind scaring them. I would put in a little bit more just to see what type of reaction I got. It was interesting to walk around the set with an aura about you and that people are slightly afraid of you. There's something funny in that. There's a kind of electricity that comes through you. It only propelled me on to be more obnoxious as Henry. I'm quite happy to be done. I think another four or five seasons in that show might have done me a world of damage.'

Workaholic

He added, 'But apart from that, I will miss the show. I will miss the structure of getting up and working 12 hours a day and coming home in the evening. I'm an absolute workaholic. There's no other word for it. I do love being on the set. It's where I'm at peace most. When I'm on the set and playing somebody else, that's when I feel most myself.'

We asked for his final thoughts on the man he has been portraying since 2007. 'Henry was a very exciting person,' he said. 'He did terrible things. I think he wanted to make his mark on history in such a way that nobody would forget it. He had many attributes to begin with. He was much taller than anybody else at the time. So it gave him enormous physical presence. Immediately, that gave him psychological advantage over most of the people he met. It gave him a shield that allowed him to protect himself from people.'

'Henry was very good at bamboozling people,' Jonathan declared. 'But, I think all of that outward confidence, exuberance and machismo took an awful lot from what he was spiritually. He believed he was like his father. He believed that he was decrepit inside because he couldn't find this love; he did not have these sons; and things didn't work out the way he wanted them to. But, I think most of Henry's psychological problems occurred when he was a teenage boy. When (his brother) Arthur died, Henry had to become king. I don't think he ever planned to become king. Once he became a king, it was too much for him to control. As it says in the first episode of the first season, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." He is the perfect example of corruption.'

Relationship

In real life, Jonathan has been linked to the same woman, Reena Hammer, for several years, unlike his royal character who had six wives. Of Reena, the creative director of Urban Retreat, a beauty company, he said, 'The longer you are with somebody, you become very good friends with her. Reena and I have been on and off for about five or six years. Your relationship becomes more respectful as it goes on. That's the real relationship. Through your 20s, you're working on films and stuff, so you're constantly flitting from one place to another. Now that I'm 32, I like peace and quiet more.'

'I have a wonderful girlfriend,' he enthused. 'She's very strong and independent. I like strong, independent women. The only problem is, they're strong and independent (laughter). You like it, but you've got to kowtow all the time. But she's an amazing woman. Having loved her for so long has changed my idea of relationships with women.'

'Certainly, in your 20s, you think of everything as fun and you want to be like a butterfly. It's natural for a young woman or man to be a butterfly. But, I've gotten the most out of the relationship that I?m in now because the growth has been more. You know each other more. You become more comfortable. I care for her deeply, more than I've cared for anybody else in my life.'

Nice interview about August Rush.

http://www.irishcentral.com/ent/Rush-Hour-On-Park-Avenue-1926.html?page=1

Found the interview I was talking about in the Belle du Seigneur thread. It's quite old. I'll post it in full, it's quite good. Andfrom this I actually make out that Jonny didn't really mean being manic depressed, but well. You'll never know.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers
By Olaf Tyaransen
Hot Press, December 2000

Hailed as one of the UK’s hottest young talents, and having appeared in such successes as Michael Collins, The Magnificent Abersons, and Velvet Goldmine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is in fact Dublin-born and raised in Cork. Olaf Tyaransen met the rising star. Thesp behaviour: Peter Matthews.

If fidgeting was an Olympic sport then Jonathan Rhys Meyers could win gold for Ireland. The 23 year old Dublin-born/Cork bred actor just can’t seem to sit still for a moment.

Throughout our interview, he changes his position more often than a Flood Tribunal witness – constantly moving his chair, picking at his chicken sandwich, lighting Marlboros, flicking his hair and fiddling with his mobile phone. He doesn’t look directly at you either, his eyes seeming to flick every which way but at the person he’s talking to. It’s somewhat disconcerting for a while but eventually I realise that he’s not being rude. It’s simply that, like many young actors, he’s restlessness personified – a strikingly handsome five-foot-something frame of typical thespian insecurity.

But then – no wonder he’s constantly moving. Although Rhys Meyers has now appeared in nineteen different movies, he’s far from being in a position to rest on his laurels – and he knows it! His star is definitely on the rise but it is not yet shooting. Until recently, he was best known for his role as the young assassin in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins. It was a small part but his looks made an impact with casting agents and gradually his career began to snowball, with him playing a series of increasingly prominent roles in films like The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Velvet Goldmine, Titus Andronicus and the forthcoming Prozac Nation. Irish audiences would have seen him most recently as the sly Steerpike in the television series Gormenghast. Not formally trained as an actor, critics generally agree that he’s far from flawless but is steadily, steadily getting there. He doesn’t particularly disagree with them either but his ambition and passion for his chosen craft are obvious.

Having worked alongside the likes of Ewan McGregor, Anthony Hopkins, Rupert Everett, Minnie Driver and Christina Ricci, Rhys Meyers seems well on the way to making a major impact in the world of movie-making. He’s in town today to screentest for Neil Jordan’s latest project – a role which, if he gets it, may well establish him as a leading actor. For the moment, however, he comes across as someone with a lot to prove…

OLAF TYARANSEN: I understand you had a heart condition when you were a child.
JONATHAN RHYS-MEYERS: Yes. I had a weak heart and very weak kidneys, so I was kept for seven months in St. James’ hospital, Dublin, where I was born. I was in an incubator. Then I was in Dublin for another year and a half and then we went to Cork city. I shouldn’t be smoking, really, you know (lights one cigarette from the butt of another).

Is that something that still occurs?
No. It hasn’t occurred. At the same time you want to watch it.

What kind of upbringing did you have? Was it middle-class Irish?
No, working-class. Definitely working-class Irish. I went to a state school, the whole ball-game. I knew what not-having was, but everybody didn’t have in the situation I was in. What my neighbours didn’t have, I didn’t have. And so I naturally didn’t think of it as too rough a thing. It was only as I got older that I realised how underprivileged it was. When I started to get a little bit more privileged and able to get more things I thought ‘God almighty, how did I live when I was a kid?’.

Actually I had everything I needed, in truth.

Your father left your mother when you were four?
Yes.

And you’ve got three younger brothers?
Yes.

What do they do?
They’re rock musicians. They’ve got a rock band. They live in Jersey and they tour around the islands. They’re incredibly fucking brilliant. And the thing is, it’s not even a biased opinion, because I don’t like their music at all, I’m into a completely different kind of thing. But I recognise who’s brilliant and who’s not. And they’re good. They’re incredibly tight for their age.

Did you always talk like that?
When I was a kid I used to talk with a Cork accent (said in strong Cork accent).

Did you refine the accent to do movies?
I started talking like this from about 17, when I started really getting into acting. I also started hanging around with a different type of person. I hung around with people who talked like this all the time so I faked it.

You were a bit of a trouble-maker as a child?
Well, I was a child. I don’t think there’s any children that aren’t troublemakers. Some kids get away with it and some don’t. I was one of those kids that never got away with it. My trouble always shone (laughs). It outshone the others for whatever reason. I got thrown out of school aged 15 – a very bad mistake. It was a monastery school in Cork. I suppose it wasn’t their fault. I wasn’t a terribly interested student. But it’s very difficult to get a 15 year old to sit down and learn something they don’t particularly want to learn about. Why would they? It’s like – I’m learning more from NWA than this geography class!

Was music always a thing for you?
Music was always huge for me. I’ve related to music. Of course, everybody does. I probably thought it was a unique thing as a kid. It was like ‘oh my god, I’ve got a song for every situation I’ve been in’. That’s the way it is. But it was always instrumental music that kept up memories for me rather than lyrics.

You sang a couple of tracks on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack. Is that something you’d do again?
Yeah, of course. Velvet Goldmine was going to be wonderful if I could have had David Bowie’s music because everybody would have recognised it. I never really wanted to try and play Bowie. I just tried to play a rock artist who was an icon. It’s very difficult to play an icon because they’re ethereal and not real. So I had to play the character as if I was not real and try to detract myself from it as if I was a machine; plus I couldn’t use Bowie’s music. So I was using music written by Grant Lee Buffalo and Michael Stipe, and Thom Yorke got involved with it…and it was incredibly brilliant stuff, but at the same time it wasn’t the hits of the 70′s that I should have been singing. That would have been able to make the character more believable to a lot of the people who went to see it if I was standing up there singing ‘Ziggy Stardust’ instead of singing ‘Tumbling Down’. A couple of in-people would have been into Cockney Rebel but the mass audience wouldn’t have.

When you got expelled from school at 15, what was the situation then?
I wasn’t prepared to do anything. I tried to go to other schools but they weren’t prepared to take a kid who couldn’t behave in a good school and had been kicked out of a state school. They were rather dubious and I suppose I didn’t try as hard as I would now. But I’m a different age now and I’ve copped myself on a bit more. I don’t think it was an incredibly good move to get kicked out of school. It sounds cool, but I got very lucky. I went on the hop a lot because I wasn’t happy being there. I wasn’t happy with my life either in school, at home or with my friends. I was always a loner.

So did you just bum around for a while?
I used to hang around the pool hall with my friend Gordon McGregor. These guys came in and asked if I wanted to audition for War Of The Buttons. They came up to me and asked me and I said ‘fuck off’! They said ‘go on, please’. So they brought me down to Skibbereen to meet John Roberts and I liked him a lot. I spent a weekend there and then I went home and then they brought me back and auditioned me again. I nearly fucked it up for myself because I got a ‘phone call on Monday night to come down Tuesday morning. I was so excited that I ‘phoned my friend Gerry and asked him to come over and I stayed up until 8 o’clock in the morning and slept in till 11 o’clock! I fucked up the audition. I was an eejit (idiot) and that’s why I lost the film. Apparently they thought I should have been in The Outsiders rather than War Of The Buttons. So I was a little bit too street-wise and mature for them, at that point anyway. I was very disgusted. I felt like a complete failure. I was completely self-pitying.

Is Cork important to you?
Hugely, yes. I don’t spend much time there now, but I love it. Wonderful people. When I was growing up I never thought it was ‘a shitty town, shitty people, I need to get away from it’. I never thought that. People are shitty wherever you go (laughs). What I wanted was their respect. No matter where they’re from, no matter who it is. It could be a beggar in the street or the king of the world. I still want their respect equally. And I want to be able to do the same. I want to be able to give the same warmth and respect to a beggar as I give to a king. And I suppose I wanted to be rich because I wasn’t.

Are you rich now?
I haven’t got paid that much money for the films that I’ve done. I’m not a millionaire or anything like that. But I bought my mother a house on Glanmyre in Cork last year and I was quite happy about doing that. I got her a little car and stuff and now she’s working for the first time in years and she’s very, very happy and independent and she’s got a new lease of life. Life really does begin at 40.

Is money madly important to you?
As important as it is to someone who is young and who grew up without it. I’d want to take care of myself. I’d like to be able to buy a house for myself and my girlfriend to live in the countryside. But there’s not lots of things that I want. I don’t want a fast fucking car. I don’t want to go to expensive restaurants. I don’t want clothes and to date supermodels. I don’t have to buy Tiffany diamonds for my girlfriend. Money is important because I’d like to get paid for what I do. But also it seems to be a sort of status symbol of how much you’re worth. So, yes, I’d love someone to pay me £1 million for a film – joyous! Of course I would, who wouldn’t? My agent says they’re running out of reasons to not cast me in these big films. I thought for years that I don’t look the way they want me to look. And I’ve got over that. Then I thought I’m not acting the way they want me to act. And so I’m constantly going to be fighting with that my whole life. So it’s basically me getting in there and seducing them into giving me the part. That’s quite difficult because I’m not American and so before I go in for an audition I have to make myself American.

How’s your American accent?
It’s alright now (in superb American accent). I just did Magnificent Ambersons. I played someone from Indianapolis. So I’m going to go over there with that mid-American accent and ah shucks attitude.

Are you watching the American elections at the moment?
I’m not. I have no interest in Al Gore or George Bush Jnr. George Bush is a white supremacist and Al Gore is the best of a bad lot, but he’s still not a clever guy.

Do you have an interest in Irish politics?
I have an interest in Irish politics, but more the politics of the early 1920s. Michael Collins era. Me being the man who shot him! You want to know the man you’re going to kill. Any good samurai is going to check out his opponent, isn’t he?

What do you think of Bertie Ahern?
When I think of him I always think of a Basset’s Allsorts packet, and Bertie is the Big Basset. (Basset’s Allsorts are liquorice candy). I always think of him as an oul eejit (old idiot). But he’s not an oul eejit – look at the fucking country! His term will be seen as like the 100-year Reich! It was so lovely. Everybody had lots of money. He had very few problems except for all the other politicians getting done.

Is your Irishness important to you?
It’s incredibly important. It’s a wonderful country to be from. I say that when I go to Los Angeles and I try to do auditions, that I’ve got to become American. I don’t mind that. I liked growing up in Ireland. I don’t think I would have liked to have grown up in the US. Plus it’s given an antiquity to my soul. I come from a place that’s got an awful lot of soul, history, culture and a lot of magic about it. I like being Irish.

Do you find that there’s much begrudgery in Ireland?
No. The Magnificent Ambersons was the 19th film I made. And I thought ‘oh God, I’ve made 19 films, shouldn’t I be getting paid a lot of money?’. Then I thought to myself ‘well I’ve never made a film that’s made an awful lot of money. I’ve never been in a successful box-office hit’. It would be marvellous. I said to my friend John Paul when I forts got into acting ‘do you think I’ll make it’. He said ‘No. I think you’ll be a good actor, but I don’t think you’ll make it like Tom Cruise or anything like that’. And I was ‘you’re meant to be my mate – you’re meant to say ‘take on the world man’. But that’s Ireland (laughs).

Who’s your role model as an actor?
Nijinsky gives me more inspiration as an actor than anyone else. But I do think Peter O’Toole is extraordinary.

Will you ever act on stage?
When I’m comfortable enough. Nothing to do with performance, just financially. I’m going to have to do it at some point and I’m sure I will do it. I like to be able to do it on my own terms, rather than looking for work.

Are you quite a distracted person?
Yes, hyperactive I suppose.

You don’t make very much eye contact. You look around a lot.
I do (looking away). Sometimes then I’ll just be in your face all the time. People do find me a bit too intense. I’ve had this problem when I’ve gone for auditions in the US. I’m far too intense.

Are you quite a dramatic person?
Yes, I’m a very dramatic person. I’ve got an awful lot of energy. I’m very hyperactive. And that comes out as being very dramatic. Even in the roles I play, people think I’m a very dramatic actor, almost operatic. Like driving a car is an opera, especially in Dublin. I can be scandalously dramatic.

Do you have many friends?
Not many. I have some and the ones I have are incredibly good friends. I’ve got one friend I’ve had about 10 years. I’ve got another friend, Gordon McGregor, who I haven’t seen for ages, but he’s one of my closest friends and always will be, regardless. Two of my brothers are very close friends, but I don’t see them very often. But it’s a blood-love and so they’ll always be there. My girlfriend’s my friend. Her sister’s my friend.

Are you enjoying life at the moment?
Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I don’t. But I’m into self-discovery and I don’t think anyone who’s into self-discovery is happy. It’s not going to be what you expect it to be. There’s that element of it. But at the same time you get what you can out of it. I’m trying to be a great artist and by trying to be a great artist you have to look at all the beautiful things and you have to look at all the horrible things and then find the beauty in them. It’s very difficult to do. To become comfortable with horrible things means you’re finding the natural beauty in them.

What are you doing at the moment?
I’ve just finished a film recently but today I’ve been screentesting for Neil Jordan’s film. It’s magnificent. Neil is one of my favourite directors. I haven’t got the part yet. I’m waiting for him to give me the part. If he does, I’ll do it and put everything into it, and if he doesn’t I’ll still love him as much as I do now.

He gave you you’re first role, didn’t he?
My first role was in The Disappearance of Finbar. He gave me my second role which was in Michael Collins. That was brilliant. The part was quite small but in the eventual film it showed out a lot more. It was very good for me. There’s something about him that’s very artistic. He’s someone I can look up to. I want his approval. There’s a couple of directors whose approval I really want. It’s not like I want millions of dollars and everyone screaming my name all the time. What I want is the support of people to help me achieve wonderful things in film.

Would you describe yourself as ambitious?
Very. I was always hungry. I knew I was going to be unique in some way. How unique I don’t know. I knew I was never going to have a normal job, never have a normal life. Some people never get roses thrown at them, but they never get sand kicked in their face either. I’ve had roses, and I’ve had sand kicked in my face.

What was the sand kicked in your face?
Rejection.

What – War Of The Buttons?
Everything. Everything I’ve been rejected for I’ve been really, really hurt by.

How about women?
I’ve had a very hard time with women. But I’ve made that hard time myself. I’m trying to understand women. But I can never truly understand them. The only thing I can do is accept. They’re completely different creatures and they’ve got a different way of thinking. I think if you accept them rather than try to understand them and you’ll have a better time. A lizard can’t understand what a bird feels like and bird can’t understand what a lizard feels like.

Are you in a serious relationship at the moment?
I’m in love with this girl called Chacha. She’s the most beautiful woman in Ireland, one of the most beautiful women in the world. I’m very much in love with her and very lucky to have her.

Is that a long-term thing?
I hope so. We’ve been going out for fifteen months now.

Are you looking for stability?
No, I’m looking for a partner. I’m looking for a Don Quixote to my, what was his name? I call myself the Don Quixote because I know if I call her the other character she’d fucking brain me!

You were with someone else before her..what was her name?
Toni Collette. She did Sixth Sense, Muriel’s Wedding. I met her on the set of Velvet Goldmine and we were playing man and wife – and then became such.

Do you find those situations happen often?
No. You have to pretend that you’re in love with the person if you need to be. And so immediately you feel something for them, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s love. You’re just much more affectionate to them because in your mind you’re more affectionate to them.

Would you sacrifice your relationship for a good role?
I’d sacrifice myself for a great role! I’d rather have ten minutes of an extraordinary unique life than 100 years of a happy, boring one. For me happiness all the time would be boring. I like a bit of failure. I’ve gone for a lot of auditions and been rejected and I’ve been really hurt at the time, but then an actor called James Conwell – who was in General’s Daughter and LA Confidential – turned to me and said there’s only lessons in failure, so the more you fail the more you learn. Failure isn’t being knocked down.

Does your job constantly put you in odd situations?
I’m constantly in odd situations, One week I was in six different countries in one week! I woke up and had to ask ‘what language do you speak?’. That’s strange, but at the same time you choose it. I feel as though I’ve been in guerilla warfare for about the last four years. It’s very tiring. You’re fighting a war, basically. And you’re the only army you have that you can control and you can’t control what the enemy is going to do. And your enemies constantly change.

What’s been your best role to date?
I don’t know.

What’s been your worst?
They’ve all had difficult things and they’ve all had great things – every part I’ve played.

Do you get emotionally involved as an actor?
Of course I do.

So when you did Gormenghast, did you become a sly little fucker?
No, I became more of a little fucker doing The Magnificent Ambersons. Because in Gormenghast he was made rotten by something that was done to him as a child. And so as he grows up he doesn’t grow up. Because you can’t grow up in a place that never changes. That was the whole point of Gormenghast – to try not to grow up, just to try to become more cynical as the film went on. In The Magnificent Ambersons I played a character who was born with absolutely everything and was a spoilt bastard. I became a little bit of a shit sometimes.

Do you behave yourself generally?
Yes, I do behave. But sometimes I misbehave. I don’t go to clubs and insult people, I don’t go to press conferences and say ‘blah, blah, blah’. I haven’t got a big head in that sense. I’ve never walked into a place and said ‘do you know who I am?’. I’ve never actually used my name to get into a club or anything. I’d never do that because it would seem to me that I’m a little bit more than I am. Well I’m not more than I am. That’s only other people’s perspectives. If I become famous they think I’m famous, but for me it’s always a struggle.

What’s your stance on the drug issue?
Basically there’s no good in them. There can’t be. It’s like drink is a drug and smoking is a drug. It gives you an immediate hit and it feels fine, but then it starves you. So it only makes you worse. I know some people who take drugs and they’re so clever that they’ll take it and get what they want out of it and then they’ll put it away. But most people can’t do that. They’ll take it and then life seems dull without it and then they’ll take it more and more and then life becomes dull and the drug becomes dull. I’ve never been into drugs. I’ve never been offered them.

Oh come on – never?
Alright, I took a line in Mexico. I thought that’s it, I’m on holiday backpacking in Mexico and nobody knows. But wasn’t very good. I don’t think it totally affected me. I think it was probably 25% sugarcane, 15% soda powder and maybe 3% coca. I’ve just never got into drugs in a big way. The temptation is always there. I smoke so many cigarettes, but I don’t drink.

Where do you see yourself in five year’s time?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I know where I’d like to see myself, but where I see myself I’m not sure. On top of the world, of course…Let’s put it this way, I’d like to give a great performance at least once for every one of the next five years. I’d love to give an outstanding performance in one film every year.

Do you accept that sometimes you don’t?
I try my best all the time.

Do you find that acting has encouraged you to explore as an artist?
Every creative thing encourages another creative thing. It’s a cog. Are you as “on” when you wake up in the morning as you seem to be now? Yes. I can’t take my mind off anything. My mind is always full of ideas. I still wan t to take on the world, today! And it won’t stop. But at the same time I’m lazy. I’m 23 now so I’ve got to start growing up. Mozart was writing symphonies by the time he was 10 years old.

Still, you’re pretty young.
I don’t know. I worked with a director and I was due to go to this press conference and I woke up at 8 o’clock in the morning and had to be there for 20 past 8. So I put on my clothes and I brushed my long hair through with my fingers and walked out. And he said to me ‘you’ll get away with this for just two more years, you know’. And I said ‘what’;. And he said ‘just coming to a press conference in the clothes you’re wearing and not combing your hair. You won’t get way with it forever. From about 24-25, watch yourself, because you’ll have to start behaving then, wearing good suits…’.

What do you want to come across in this interview?
That I’m not constantly depressed and negative.

You don’t strike me as being either of those things.
I have done in other articles..I’d say ‘I’ve done all this _ I’ve done the troubled youth, the manic depression youth puts you through’. There are parts of me that people haven’t seen.

Do you feel lucky?
Yes, hugely lucky and in another way hugely unlucky. That’s because you want more. I expect so much of myself. People keep saying ‘you’re not doing badly’. But if you say that to yourself you rest on your laurels. Getting to the top is the sparring round. Once you’re at the top you start fighting like a dog to stay there.

Do you feel you’re at the top now?
No.

Are you jealous?
Yes.

Of whom?
Of whoever gets the part. No particular actor. I wanted All The Pretty Horses. I was on the set in Missouri playing a bushwhacker and all these wranglers came up to me and said ‘I heard you were up for All The Pretty Horses. You’re fucking perfect’. And I met Billy Bob and he said I was a good actor. Matt Damon got it and I was a bit jealous. I really like Matt Damon, but I don’t like him as John Grady Cole, it’s too fucking obvious.

Why do you act?
Because I can do nothing else that pays me as much, that makes me feel as important in the world and that I can somehow achieve the greatness in life that I want. It’s like sex, it’s the closest thing to the divine you can be. You can say ‘why do you act when you never wanted to become an actor anyway?’. Well I act because I’m told I’m good at it. Plus I’ve never actually trained so I’m sure…when I was doing Velvet Goldmine and that sort of stuff, I was probably one of the only Irish actors who was doing that at my age, who had started doing that. And now there’s myself, Stuart Townsend, Colin Farrell. There’s three of us. But I still haven’t given a really great performance yet. I feel it has to come”.

Great interview, even some thinks was said in other places

kyra wrote:

Great interview, even some thinks was said in other places

Probably were, but was that before or after this one. This interview is from 2000!

Yes, I understand that

Bill Dawer, an American journalist has found an interview that he did with Jonny in 2000, but that never got published in the end. He has now written it up in his blog. It's a joy to read, I think.

Here's the link:

http://www.billdawers.com/2012/12/31/an-interview-with-actor-jonathan-rhys-meyers-from-2000-unpublished-until-now/

Just in case the link in my post above will disappear sometime in the future, I'll just put the interview up here too.


An interview with actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers from 2000, unpublished until now
By bill dawers On December 31, 2012 · in Arts & Culture

In the late 1990s, I was doing a fair bit of work – mostly unpaid – for now-defunct Savannah-based Contents Magazine. It was an extraordinary publication in many respects, with an edgy mix of articles, interviews, fashion, and photos. Tapping into the skills of a variety of artists, writers and talented SCAD student designers, publisher Joseph Alfieris managed to produce a magazine that, at its best, was both slick and substantive in its quest for the new and the beautiful.

Given the magazine’s mission, it seemed a no-brainer to me to run an interview and photo spread with actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He wasn’t yet on the radar screen of most American media consumers in 2000, but he seemed destined to be.

When I reached Rhys Meyers’ publicist, she told me that the young Irish actor was in the U.S. at the time, so a phone interview would be easy to set up. But he never called me back, and the publicist – I have long forgotten her name – was obviously irritated when she found out that he had returned to the U.K. without contacting me. At some point, the actor’s friend Christopher Croft joined the conversation, and it became clear that Rhys Meyers just really didn’t want to do a phone interview – but would be willing to talk to me in person.

So I got an early sense of a certain guardedness and fragility – traits that seemed wildly different from JRM’s vigorous, breathtaking on-screen turns. So I proposed to Joseph that I would do the interview in London if I could simply get reimbursed for the flight there and back. Amazingly, the trip worked out, and about a week later – in early December of 2000 – I took an overnight flight to Heathrow and met up with Rhys Meyers late the next morning at The Groucho Club.

But things were a little unpredictable in the Contents office and the magazine was never published on a strict schedule; my interview never ran. We had even had some gorgeous photos taken in London.

Recently, that unpublished interview with Jonathan Rhys Meyers has come up, so I decided to locate the handwritten transcript of our long conversation on that chilly day in London.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers was just 23 when this interview was conducted, but he had already led a remarkable life. After a tough childhood that included a fractured family and permanent expulsion from school, Rhys Meyers had improbably ended up in the movies after being spotted at a pool hall by a casting agent. (There’s more background on his IMDB page.)

At the time of this interview, Rhys Meyers had landed some notable roles, including a small part in A Man of No Importance with Albert Finney, the assassin in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins starring Liam Neeson, an American high school student in Tim Hunter’s The Maker, a passionate and desperate young man in the underrated The Governess with Minnie Driver and Tom Wilkinson, glam rocker Brian Slade alongside Ewan McGregor in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, a fairly small role as a psychopathic guerilla in Ang Lee’s Ride with the Devil, and as Chiron in Julie Taymor’s Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins.

That’s obviously an amazing list of directors and projects for such a young actor, especially one without any formal training.

At the time of this interview, Rhys Meyers had just finished playing Steerpike in the mini-series Gormenghast, but it had not aired in the States yet.

So this interview is long before Bend It Like Beckham, Match Point, and The Tudors. JRM’s full filmography is obviously on IMDB.

I remember the two folks at reception at The Groucho Club being a little taken aback when I told them why I was there. Maybe it was the fact that I wore casual clothes and carried a stuffed over-the-shoulder bag — or maybe that I just looked sketchier than usual after my overnight flight.

As I waited, I figured there was at best half a chance that Rhys Meyers would show, but he breezed in a few minutes later, looking pleasantly disheveled and a little wary, wearing a black jacket over a sleeveless t-shirt. Carrying a bag of his own, he likely looked at least as itinerant as I did.

In my notes, I later wrote: “Totally genuine. Easy to engage, hard to interview.”

I’ve edited this to a degree, but far less than I did back in 2000. It’s a blog post now, after all, not a magazine piece. And it’s long — no reason to edit for space — so I’m breaking it into three pages. As a result, it doesn’t have the same flow that a magazine edit would have.

**************************************

BD: The first movie I saw you in was The Maker.

JRM: Tim Hunter’s movie. I thought it was a really good script and was going to be a really good movie. I was really glad I did it because I was playing an American kid, and I was given maybe a week to learn an American accent. But it didn’t work unfortunately.

What’s difficult is not doing the American accent but doing the physicality that Americans have – a physicality with the way that they speak, an easiness with their bodies and their lips when they’re speaking that’s not the same with Europeans. Americans are comfortable when they do something.

Actors in the United States have this brilliant talent I can’t quite get my hands on – and not many Europeans can. Like [switching to an American accent] “get me a cup of coffee”. We find this very hard in Europe.

BD: Why do you think that is?

JRM: I don’t know. Americans can find it very difficult to come here and do intense Shakespeare.

BD: I know you’ve been interviewed a lot about your youthful truancy –

JRM: Yes –

BD: Was it simply truancy that got you expelled?

JRM: No. What’s very difficult to understand as a child is sharing and not having. Not having a lot of things, I couldn’t learn, I couldn’t listen. I was so smothered by poverty and at that point there was no hope of being any other way either. I thought that this was what I would do for the rest of my life, so my truancy was fear more than anything else, fear of the future, fear of living. I know people that are given life, but they’re given life with special circumstances.

As a kid, material things make you feel very safe. If you don’t just have these shoes or this toy or that jacket, you feel very deprived – and I think material things have a huge emotional importance at a certain age. For me that emotional importances was seen as truancy.

Listen, if I’d been a rich kid and I was just fucking around, well that’s pure truancy. But truancy when it’s sparked by an emotion – there must be another word for it. I’m not sure what it is. People would like to call it tuancy – it looks cool: “He wasn’t in school, he must have been fucking. He was kicked out of school, isn’t he hot?”

BD: What about your peers, your friends?

JRM: I was a loner as a child and I was a particularly ugly child.

BD: I find that hard to believe.

JRM: No, I was a particularly ugly child. I was sort of the ugly duckling. There was something about the way that I looked that was slightly off. It made people not like me as much.

BD: When did that image of yourself begin to change?

JRM: It never has really. Other people can tell you what you look like, but no, I always think I look ugly, but there are other people who see differently and that’s very well and good.

BD: When you look in the mirror, you don’t see someone who’s even moderately attractive?

JRM: Not really. When I was in Velvet Goldmine and everyone was like “wow, such a beautiful boy”, I became self-conscious about it. Now I try to take advantage of it as little as possible. The whole thing about acting is keeping your interest all the time. I find it very difficult. You know, when you’re doing a film for 11 weeks, you’re just waiting, you’re sitting around all the time, and I think that’s the most difficult thing.

I’d like acting to completely cover me so that it’s the only thing that I need. But because of living, because of things that I need in my life as well — I ‘d love to eliminate every other want and desire. It would be very difficult to achieve.

BD: It sounds more like a spiritual quest than a professional one.

JRM: Yeah, well, I suppose it is. I’m trying to live a life that’s extraordinary, that’s unique in a way that no other life has been and to retain the intelligence of it, and the understanding of living, the understanding of humanity. Plus it’s an emotional job. I’m using my emotion most of the time in conjunction with my physicality. It’s coming from in here [touching his chest], so it must be spiritual in some way or another. For some section of actors, it’s a professional job. I’d love be able to think of it as a professional job, I’d love to be able to go into the set and come home in the evening and forget I was ever there. I’d quite like that, I just can’t.

BD: When I was preparing for this and looking at things on the internet, I found something you said about acting in a piece about playing Steerpike in Gormenghast:
“There is a space that you can get into sometimes – and you get one or two moments during a job that you do or a script that you do, where the world just disappears and it is nothingness and it is emptiness and it is fantastic. And it is almost like you are elevated off the ground a couple of inches, and you can’t feel the clothes you are wearing, you can’t even feel yourself.” Can you relate any specific moments like that?

JRM: No I can’t. What it basically is is you’re doing something so much at the point in the day it becomes natural. Say you’re a 20 year old boy and it’s your new job right and you’re punching this code into the computer and you do it 20 times and you’re constantly thinking about it and always making one or two mistakes. And then somebody asks you something or you’re having a cup of coffee, and then o yeah, — click, click, click, click, click – that’s it. That’s done. That’s a natural moment. Usually acting is a technical thing, you’ve got to walk here, do this, do that.

Those natural moments are very few and far between.

You have to be able to be strong like water and be able to be weak like water. You’ve got to be able to flow, rush, you’ve got to have rapids, but you also have to have the calm and cool.

BD: What is it about your acting that has drawn so many top directors?

JRM: I suppose physicality has a lot to do with it. When I met Ang Lee [for 1999's Ride with the Devil], I met him for the part that Toby Maguire played – I didn’t have what he was after. You to be an Everyman and he says there’s something “quite poetic” about the way I look. Todd Haynes was definitely interested in that for the Velvet Goldmine. I look the way I look, but nobody looks the way I look, and that’s good and bad. It would probably be a hell of a lot more fun and easier, and get more girls I suppose, if I looked more like a generic mutation of something that’s already there. When you look like nothing else, they have to really get to love you.

BD: I was impressed with your broad American accent in Ride with the Devil.

JRM: I find acting incredibly difficult and I’m sure most of the directors I work with find directing a difficult process, and to have to do the auditioning process between roles can be very damaging and you have so much time taken up with that.

If entertainment doesn’t happen, who cares? If bread doesn’t happen, everybody cares.

BD: What new projects do you have going?

JRM: The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s going to be very vibrant and very beautiful.

BD: Tell me a little about dealing with the press?

JRM: You have to. You have to make the press your friends. Sometimes I wasn’t in the proper vein to do interviews. I remember I did one interview in England, and because I was so sad at the time, the interview came out incredibly sad. I know that press determines what people think of you because this what they read – to always keep it fresh, always keep it interesting. I remember I did an interview once and I read almost exactly the same interview a few months later, and I thought, “Wow I must have given the same answers.” I’d like to make it really new and vibrant.

BD: So what would you like to talk about? What’s on your mind that you’re never asked about?

JRM: There are always thousands of things on my mind.

BD: I can tell.

JRM: But whether they’re things that will interest people from the point of view of a magazine is different. I like to write, I like to play music. Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of time to do them because what’s really in my life is work, all the time, traveling from one place to another. I was in North Wales two days ago and it’s an incredibly beautiful and inspirational place because the people are so quiet. This town is like a ghost town, and it was a great comfort to hang around the amusement park on the beach when there’s nobody there. They look like the ugliest things in the world, but in the summer they look so bright and romantic and fabulous. Fairgrounds in the winter with all the rain coming in from the sea – to see the amusement park which is usually alive now all dull and gray. It looked awful, but I found a certain peace in it because there was no one there.

BD: Why North Wales?

JRM: I was shooting there. I had a very small part in a very small low budget film. It’s very difficult to get lead roles.

BD: Like which ones?

JRM: There were a couple of films that I really wanted to do. I’d love to make films in America, because they’re very clever in America. They have a lot of money to make films, so I have to overcome not being an American first of all. Matt, Leo . . .

BD: You also said you like to write -

JRM: I’m writing a short story about the 1904-05 Russo Japanese War.I want to articulate it in a way that keeps people interested – because there’s a way, there’s a method. In the time I did The Maker, Velvet Goldmine, and The Governess, I’ve become a better actor because I’ve learned tricks and there are tricks with writing. I don’t want the characters to see each other as prey. It’s not about animal instinct. They shatter the illusion of what they’ve been brought up with.

BD: You’ve talked about admiring Daniel Day Lewis and Toshiro Mifune — other actors you admire?

JRM: The one I admire more than anyone else in the world – and who has inspired mas as actor more than any other — is Peter O’Toole. From watching him I’ve learned a lot about my own performance. He was incredibly cinematic.

BD: Do you aspire to do things they way he does them?

JRM: No, I do things the way that I do them, and he’s very inspiring. But I get inspired by Dostoevsky too, or Nijinsky. I can read about Nijinsky dancing, or look at photographs of Nijinsky, and be inspired to act.

BD: Any particularly early moviegoing experiences that stand out?

JRM: No. I remember when I was 9 years old I thought that Johnny Depp was incredibly cool and that was when I was watching 21 Jumpstreet. At 9 years old, I thought that he was the coolest guy in the world.

BD: What was it like being asked to audition the first time? [An agent convinced JRM to audition for the 1994 film War of the Buttons, but he was not cast.]

JRM: “Oh wow somebody wants me to do something.” I thought it was for a play that was going on in Galway, and then I found out that it was a film with Warner Brothers, and I’m like, “No, things like this never happen to kids like me.”

BD: Do you want fame?

JRM: I want to do a performance that’s extraordinary as a route to fame. Maybe that’s the wrong way to go about it. I need a media war on anonymity. I need a general.

I wouldn’t like to get into it too much anyway.

BD: You have a remarkable vulnerability on screen – how do you make those tough characters vulnerable? [Note that in his response JRM refers to a role he didn't get.]

JRM: For one role, what they wanted was a plain bad guy, not a bad guy who is at heart emotional. I would have played a bad guy who would have had all these emtions behind him. That’s not always what Hollywood wants. They don’t always want the vulnerability to come from the character – sometimes I have to understand that. [He lights a cigarette.]

BD: I’m thinking about those vulnerable sex scenes in The Governess.

JRM: I hate people who go “I won’t go naked.” You think there’s something so special abut your body that we can’t see it? What is so fantastic that you’re hiding? I hate that shite. If a character needs to naked, I’ll insist that he be naked.

BD: What kind of roles do you hope to get from here?

JRM: I’d rather be a small part in a good film than a big part in a bad one. All the films I’ve looked at they want older boys. I wanted to do Ridley Scott’s Blackhawk Down. Holden Caulfield.

But I’m shit in the movies I make. Maybe I’d think different if I made a film that was a huge hit, a performance where everyone goes wow.

BD: Is there ever a performance where everyone goes wow?

JRM: Haley Joel Osment did it, and he’s only 11.

BD: Are you interested in stage work?

JRM: I prefer movies. I like making films. Maybe it’s an ego thing.

The further I’ve gone making films the more competitive it gets – money is the status symbol within the industry.

BD: Were you religious growing up?

JRM: I was Catholic for a really long time, and I really loved God and then I stopped when other things started to become more important, like girls. When I was 10 and 11 years old, I used to sit there praying, praying for change. And now I don’t pray as much. Do I have a religion? I wouldn’t say I have a particular religion. That’s a really easy way of getting out of the question. I mean, no, I don’t have a religion but I think about religion a lot. Religion is about belief. I want that kind of belief you have in yourself. I find it very hard to believe in myself, so how can I have a belief in a fundamental way of thinking? I find it hard to believe in myself because I’m constantly in a fight. If I were truly religious I’d be like, “No, you take the part if it makes you feel better.”

I’d really like to play Jesus [he laughs] – “Come on Roman boy, nail me.”

BD: I could see you playing Jesus.

JRM: In my mind, he was this beautiful suffering man with this long beautiful drooping hair falling down over his shoulders – there was just something so giving about him that made me think that this person has done this for me – and that’s the power of the crucifix and Christianity I suppose. The idea that he died for me and no one else, not even your neighbor, not even your sister, not even that guy that got the job ahead of you. That’s what I thought as a kid anyway.

I’d love to be impregnable. I’d love to have no temptation. I’d love to desire nothing, but I do desire everything.

I want to be there for the right reasons, but the right reasons aren’t necessarily the ones that make money.

BD: You travel a lot, film in a lot of different locations. You like it?

JRM: The adventure. Sure, pure adventure. I’m far away from home and anything can happen to me at any time. I’d love be stolen and kidnapped and held hostage somewhere. I’d love to have been an explorere, but in some sense that’s what filmmakers are, this is what actors and directors are — the world’s explorers, exploring the internal thing, the internal universe.

BD: Are you making friends in these travels in the film world?

JRM: I don’t have any friends. I have a girlfriend. I’ve never had friends in the film industry because I’ve never been part of those celebrity circles. The funniest thing is that when people become famous they only hang out with famous people. I’ve wanted to hang out with famous people, but it’s never been my trip – I’d like for my trip to be wow and huge parties and I’d be dressed by some designers. That would be fabulous. I’d like that, but it’s just never been my trip.

BD: What do you do to relax?

JRM: This is as relaxed as I get. It gets boring sitting around boozing, and I’ve never been into that sort of gratification. It’s sort of like stealing divinity, don’t you think? Any sort of drinking or taking drugs is stealing divinty because it’s reaching enlightenment. But they don’t nourish you, they don’t feed you, they don’t quench your thirst. That’s what I like about acting. Acting is as close as you can get to divinity.

**************************************

Reading back over this now, I’m struck by how often Rhys Meyers disagreed with my questions – “no”, “not really”, and so forth. And I’m struck by his pervasive ambivalence – about his looks, about the prospect of fame, about God, even about intoxication.

After the interview, we briefly wandered around the corner onto Old Compton Street, in the heart of gay London. As nervous and rushed as Jonathan seemed when he arrived at The Groucho Club, he now seemed happy just to hang out for a few minutes. As we walked by the window of a fairly busy café, I noted a handful of stares – was it the actor’s nascent fame, or just his arresting look?

If he noticed the stares, he didn’t let on.

“How tall are you?” he asked me. “I wish I were a tall boy.”

When we stopped to admire some Elvis clothes in a storefront – t-shirts, underwear – I asked him if I could take a quick photo. He was happy to do so, but first wanted to make sure that I didn’t plan to publish it (a promise I am now breaking 12 years later). Of course, in 2005 he starred in the made-for-TV Elvis, for which he won a Golden Globe.

A couple of moments after this photo, he gave me a kiss on the cheek in the middle of the street and we went our separate ways.

I ended up having a remarkable weekend in London from there. I stayed at a hostel on Montague Street, attended an avant garde performance that night in a warehouse space on the other side of the Thames after a visit to the Tate Modern, met up with a local politician, attended Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man the next night at The Old Vic and used my Bobby Zarem connection to meet up with lead dancer Will Kemp and much of the rest of the cast for a few pints at a nearby pub afterward, and even attended a lovely service of carols at Westminster Abbey. But the highlight was the interview, of course.

My best to Jonathan Rhys Meyers as he continues to craft his extraordinary career.

This quote "I’d love be stolen and kidnapped and held hostage somewhere." is all we need to know.

I'll post this interview here as there is other stuff as Dracula in here as well. Don't know how accurate it is.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/jonathan-rhys-meyers-interview--2662877#.UnOyas0ewfJ.twitter

Dracula's Jonathan Rhys Meyers on alcoholism: "I was wild - but now I only drink blood"
1 Nov 2013 12:16
The destructive spiral saw him checked into rehab half a dozen times and rushed to hospital after a suspected suicide attempt



No fangs: Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Dracula
2013 NBCUniversal Media
Swigging extra-strong cider on the street at 10am.

Downing so much vodka for breakfast at JFK airport he was banned from a flight.

Arrested for drunkenness at Dublin airport.

Yes, it’s fair to say that Jon­athan Rhys Meyers had an alcohol problem.

But as he roars back on to the small screen for the first time since his sexed-up history triumph in The Tudors, the darkly handsome Irish actor has finally renounced the demon drink – unless you count the blood he constantly craves in his new incarnation as Dracula.

“I was wild, I was as wild as you can get,” he admits. “When you are on the front of newspapers for stupidity, getting drunk at airports, fighting with cops and stuff like that, you wake up the next day and you can hardly f***ing remember it. Responsibility gets diminished.”

So how did he put a stop to the destructive spiral that saw him checked into rehab half a dozen times and rushed to hospital in an ambulance in 2011 after a suspected suicide attempt with pills?

Like many former addicts, Jonathan, 36, talks into his hands and rarely gives eye contact as he recalls his darkest moments.

“As you get older you see the stupid things you have done,” he says. “It is not the consequences for yourself but your family get hurt, your friends get hurt.

“At some point you come to a place – and I was lucky because some of my friends have never got to that place – where I saw it as something that was separate from me. It is kind of insanity to do it to that level. I was able to come to that realisation and I look for different things in life now.

“I had a good chat with my really close friends and I came to the end of whatever, going out, getting p***ed, getting into trouble. It got really boring because I knew where I was going to go the whole time.I knew where I was going to end up.

“Now I don’t do nothing. Once you make the decision you have had enough of something, the decision is made you have had enough...”


Love bites: With Victoria Smurfitt as Lady Jayne Wetherby
2013 NBCUniversal Media

Those chats with friends helped him straighten out his life. He went teetotal and got back to doing what he does best – being a great actor. His Sky Living series Dracula is already a hit in America but he admits that his “shoulders drooped” when he was first linked with the part because he “didn’t want something supernatural”.

In the end he accepted after being convinced that this Dracula is different from those glittering good guys in the Twilight movies.

He adds: “Twilight is good – it did what it did. The girls liked watching it, the guys were gorgeous, the girls were gorgeous – it worked. We thought of vampires more from the suffering point of view, what would it be to live for 400 years and not die and not fall in love.

“Dracula is really a monster and he is addicted to blood. But you can’t make a 10-hour series out of the original book. There is not enough there. It is beautifully written but what we did is take the story and try to modernise it with modern elements of power, corruption, wealth

“We wanted to take the Dracula story and bring in a kind of Da Vinci Code. A financial and political side.

“There is a bit of sex as well,” he concedes, which will please the fans who enjoyed his Tudors role as the notoriously lustful Henry VIII.

This time around, Dracula is 15th- century Romanian warlord Vlad the Impaler, relocated to Victorian England in the guise of Alexander Grayson, a young European-American businessmen.

Has Jonathan cornered the market in brooding megalomaniac monsters?

“People ask me why you get the bad guy roles – but I look like a bad guy!” he says. “Why cast me to play Henry? He was a p***k. The more I got into the research, the more I found he was corrupt on power. But if you are given a kingdom when you are 17 or 18 you are going to be a p***k.”


Sexed up: In The Tudors
2010 TM Productions Limited/PA

Jonathan was determined that his Dracula would not be camp or overplayed.

“I made a point of saying to them, not too much of the neck biting, not too much of the teeth because I have a lisp when I wear the teeth. I used to take this really expensive fake blood – the cheap stuff really looks like s*** – and I used to drink a little bit of water then a bottle of this blood and spit it up all over me.

“I would go for the bite with the blood in my mouth and as soon as I bit you would see it splurging out. It is beautifully done but quite grotesque.”

Though he is open and honest, Jonathan is an intense presence, and Dracula producer Christopher Hall is only half-joking when he says there is “something of the night” about him. But he’s relieved the long shoot for this first season of Dracula is over.

“It was seven months, six days a week,” he says. “It is hard to keep that level of interest. It could be day 99 of a 100-day shoot but that one scene will be the one they show in every f***ing trailer. But you do your best. Some days you are on your game and some you are not.”

One of Jonathan’s best days came when he landed the lead role in Match Point, the 2005 film by director Woody Allen that gave his career a big boost.

“There was a certain amount of stress because you hear Woody fires people when they are not fitting into the production,” he says.

Making love with Scarlett Johansson for the camera was a particular stress thanks to Woody.

“He is a disaster when it comes to doing sex scenes,” reveals Jonathan. “He just doesn’t want to know. Sex is such a personal thing and when you have to do it for an audience it becomes a performance. Woody came in the first morning and said ‘I’m not comfortable’.

“So me and Scarlett came up with things which we thought were relevant. It was easy to do the scenes and Scarlett is a good looking girl.”

Jonathan says he is signed up with Dracula “for years”, suggesting at least one more series is highly likely. He is also linked to a new Star Wars film next year, which will see him reunited with director JJ Abrams. They last worked together on Mission Impossible 3.

“JJ is the closest thing we have to Steven Spielberg in Hollywood at the moment,” he says.

“When you first meet him you have this sense of meeting a big Hollywood player – but he is so gentle, so kind and so interested in people.

“First day of shooting Mission Impossible and Tom Cruise gets into this speedboat and there are people on the bridges shouting ‘It’s Tom Cruise’ and he is going up and down waving with his sunglasses. I’m sitting with JJ by a monitor and JJ looks at me and says, ‘I’m putting a stop to this right now’ and out comes a megaphone, ‘Tom, TOM!’

“And that was the end of it, back to business. Even though he was a young director who hadn’t done a big film he was able to cajole him in.”

Dracula is on Sky Living on Thursday nights. Episode One is repeated tomorrow night at 9pm. And Jonathan is a guest on The Jonathan Ross Show tomorrow night on ITV1 .

I quite like this interview.

http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/jonathan-rhys-meyers-imagine-what-it-takes-to-suck-the-entire-blood-system-out-of-somebody-1.1570727

Jonathan Rhys Meyers: ‘Imagine what it takes to suck the entire blood system out of somebody’
The Cork actor prepared for the role of Dracula in full-blooded fashion: by staring at strangers in Budapest ‘until they wanted to call the police, thinking I was a lunatic’


Jonathan Rhys Meyers: ‘[The name Dracula] comes from the Carpathian Mountains where people are very superstitious. Irish people are very superstitious, so I was able to engage in that’

First published:
Thu, Oct 24, 2013, 01:00

I am sitting in a crypt with Jonathan Rhys Meyers, star of The Tudors, Mission Impossible 3 and the most recent incarnation of Dracula. In an adjoining chamber there is a cabinet containing a mummified cat and mouse discovered in an organ pipe in the 19th century (isn’t there a film called Dracula Meets the Mummy?). Nearby hover the Sky PR team who are, in their way, just as spooky.
Earlier there were round-table discussions with other cast members (“It’s like a fecking seance,” muttered one journalist) and now Rhys Meyers is offering me coffee. He’s friendly, fashionably dressed in a low-cut T-shirt and suit jacket, but looks tired. “You’re caffeinated to the hilt, are you?” he says. He stares intensely at me as he speaks. He makes dramatic hand gestures and his accent shifts geographically over the course of the conversation.
There’s a pattern to this. The more passionate he gets, the more he sounds like he’s from Cork, where he actually grew up. And he is very passionate about Dracula. “Suffering is what drives him – the pain,” he says. “It takes eight minutes to strangle somebody. Imagine what it takes to suck the entire blood system out of somebody. How you have to stick with it. How you have to focus. It’s an extraordinary thing and it’s terrible and wonderful all at the same time.”
Was he method acting? “I didn’t lock myself in a casket or anything, but I chose an apartment [in Budapest where they were shooting] that was very, very Gothic and sometimes I would go out and walk the streets, and look at people and just try to unnerve them. I’d be in Budapest in a cafe and just stare at someone until they wanted to call the police, thinking I was a lunatic.”

Funeral experiences
He had completed his long stint as Henry VIII in The Tudors, finished a film called Belle de Seigneur and had taken a year off to paint and play music when he was approached to play the role by NBC’s Bob Greenblatt.
“I said, ‘It’s been done’. He said, ‘But not by you’,” says Rhys Meyers. “I’d grown. I’d had pain and loss and joy. I bring that experience. Then I lost my grandfather and I lost my best friend to cancer. I went back for funerals. And seeing all my family and the pain [they] were in, and my own personal pain with my best friend dying of a terrible, terrible illness, I was able to go back and shoot it into the camera as much as possible, to expel it out in a very aggressive way and a very focused way.”

He puts his palms together and shoots them out in front of him to demonstrate this. He talks about a scene shot in a courtyard at 4am where he was “half-naked, having my throat slit and an hour and a half later I’m going to my grandfather’s funeral. It was almost like the world was making me suffer in the same way.”
Once upon a time, he says, he would have struggled with the idea of appearing monstrous. “As a young actor you just want to look good. There’s a certain amount of ego and vanity. But as I get older I’d prefer to be really effective than really attractive. There’s a shot in the last episode where the camera is moving in on me and I look so handsome in it and I turn around and the way they’ve shot me, I look like a monster, so dreadfully pale, like a building whose facade has fallen off.”

‘Dragon monster’
This new version of Dracula is, as well as a bloodthirsty vampire, a charismatic entrepreneur battling a secret cabal of rich industrialists. It’s not the story from the book. It places Stoker’s characters in a new context. But why does Rhys Meyers think the idea of Dracula still has power? He considers this for a moment.
“I think there’s something terrifying about the name Drac-ula [he says the word like a pantomime villain]. I think it’s that simple. It’s a Romanian word, dracul, which means ‘dragon monster’, and there’s something about that word which scares the living s**t out of people. It comes from the Carpathian Mountains where people are very superstitious. Irish people are very superstitious, so I was able to engage in that.”
Does he believe in monsters? “Is a monster a monster?” he asks. “Or are they humans who do monstrous things? I believe monsters are humans who do monstrous things – wonderful things but terrible things, and I wanted to engage with that.”

Dracula starts on Sky Living on October 31

And this one is nice as well.

http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/tv/jonathan-rhys-meyers

JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS

Jonathan Rhys Meyers tells us about reinventing a horror icon in Sky’s new series, Dracula

You had a very serious air at the Dracula launch party – are you still channelling the character?

Because I have a producer credit, I only finished working on it last night. So I was playing Dracula for six hours yesterday. I can tell you, I have taken the Dracula jacket off now. I’ve been playing the character for seven months.

You were filming in Budapest – did you draw inspiration from the gothic architecture?

Yeah, there’s a certain element of that. Hungarian crews and the city are both amazing. When I first spoke to NBC, we considered doing it in London. I told them, “We need to get everyone out of their comfort zone and bring them all into one place.” Budapest is like Paris, it has that decayed history, and it was also the capital of an empire.

Did you get into Dracula’s wardrobe? We saw your crocodile shoes…

I have a pair of crocodile-skin cowboy boots that are from Texas. What you didn’t see, because my jeans cover them, is that the tops have barbed wire over them. They’re the real deal.

Will he become more rock’n’roll as the series progresses?

I have an idea of where it’s going to go, but I don’t want to tell anybody, because I think it’s going to be quite interesting and explosive. I want to keep it to myself.

Had you been reading the comic books?

I took my influences from reading literature on Vlad Tepes. I read Dracula – the original of course – and Polidori’s The Vampyre, which is not a very good book – he’s a terrible writer. But it has one or two good qualities about the nature of human monsters. The monster is not the story; it’s the human that makes it frightening.

In The Tudors, you play a man and a monster in Henry VIII…

Yeah. It’s also a different human that’s playing it. My Dracula is not that young, impetuous guy any more, he’s much more still and focused. So I’m more still and much more focused. I bring more experience to the thing. I bring whatever joys and whatever pains I’ve had in my life. I lost my grandfather and my best friend during the production, so I had to go to the funerals and then come back to playing Dracula. You take all that emotion and try to blast it out into the camera as much as possible.

Is this your grown-up self coming through, then?

Well yeah, all that tearaway stuff is f*cking bulls*t anyway. Nobody knows anything about my life, to be honest with you. People make up stories about you – I’d be reading with my dad and he’d be like, “But you weren’t even f*cking there that night because you were at dinner with me!”

Do you think you look like a partier?

I don’t look like a partier, I’m a young actor from Ireland. I’m friends with Colin Farrell, and Colin’s a gorgeous lad, he spends his time at home with his kids, and people make up stories about him. It’s the Oscar Wilde thing of the only thing worse than people talking about you is not talking about you. I hate having those stories brought out about me because I live a very quiet life most of the time.

But do you think the rock-star image has helped you get roles in the likes of Velvet Goldmine and Elvis, though?

I don’t know. But I’ve got three Golden Globe nominations and an Emmy nomination, so I have to be there and working. You don’t see photographs of me in nightclubs or at parties.

Did you all get to hang out on the set of Dracula?

We all bonded really well. It’s so easy when everyone likes each other. I had a hell of a lot more to do than some of the other guys, so they had breaks and could go home or hang out and go to restaurants, but I had to film six days a week. So there wasn’t time for anything else. But we’d meet up and go for dinner.

The show has a lot of sex scenes. You’ve said before that you find them quite difficult…

I suppose I was younger when I said that, and I was doing The Tudors and there were so many sex scenes in it. You have to do it, it’s part of your performance. Most people would think, “Oh I couldn’t do that because there are 200 people standing around staring at me.” When you’re an actor, you know that no one is staring at you because they’re too busy doing their own job.

Have you picked up any nerdy fantasy or historical obsessions working on this?

No, no, no. I spend time with my family – I’m building a house for my brother and my godson in Spain. I play music, I write and I paint. I collect Japanese and modern art. That’s what I spend my money on. That’s what I like to do.

http://jrhysmeyers.com/new-interview-magazine-scans

Check this French interview with Jonny. Translation by Jrhysmeyers.com. I'll post the translation Helen made here as well, in case her link changes.

You play different characters in the series: Dracula, Vlad Tepes and Alexander Grayson. What can you tell us?
Vlad is really the main character. He becomes Dracula at the last moment before anger makes him lose his footing. Dracula is the embodiment of his inner rage. As for Grayson, this is the name he uses to manage his American society.

When Dracula appears in the guise of businessman Alexander Grayson, sometimes he can bear the sun. How does he do this?
So that he can expose himself to the sun, my accomplice Van Helsing has created a serum that allows my heart to continuously pump blood and therefore keep me alive. But the remedy has a limited duration. After a few hours, Dracula must quickly get to the shelter from the sun.

What can you say about the relationship you have with Mina (Jessica De Gouw)? The obsession Grayson has for Mina is physical because it reminds him his late wife, Ilona, who was burned alive. Mina plays the double of Ilona. So my personage concentrates all his desire and his attention to it, with the idea to recreate and find his wife, although he knows that Mina is not Ilona. This is something that tortures him enormously.

Have you been inspired by many actors interpretations of Dracula before you built your character?
No, not really. I’m not in to the kind of old horror movies of the fifties The first time I saw a vampire movie, it was that of Werner Herzog titled Nosferatu, Phantom of the night. I did like Count Dracula by Klaus Kinski. I also like Willem Dafoe in the film Shadow of a Vampire (Shadow of the Vampire) and Gary Oldman, who was wonderful in the role of romantic Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola. But I can not really say that these different interpretations which preceded mine have influenced my game. I did not take anything of it sincerely

If you’re not inspired by previous actors to play Dracula to embody your character, what were your influences? You obviously had influences..
I’m an actor so obviously I’m inspired by others work. But for Dracula, I didn’t want to be ”influenced” by previous actors’ work. Here’s the difference. But for example, in episode 2, there is a scene where I bite the neck of a woman, then I put my head back to show my face with blood streaming. I got inspired by a scene from the film Midnight Express where Brad Davis pulls the tongue of a man with his teeth, then pulls back his head to spit the blood in the air.

I heard that you had some problems with the denture element that are essential for biting scenes..
What happened is pretty funny. I actually need a dental prosthesis, which is also extremely realistic. A true craftsmanship! The only problem is that when I spoke with the prosthesis, I had a lisp! It was so hard to understand my lines that technicians had to double my voice in post-production. He had to because Dracula speaking with a lisp was anything but scary..

Christopher Hall, producer of Dracula said you were perfect for the role because you have a very dark side in you. What do you think?
Well, I am, okay. I got the role because I am also a diabolical vampire (laughs)! No, let’s say I can fully understand the psychological distress experienced by the person, being myself in life a person extremely tortured. It does not take me a lot of research efforts to play the character ..

Have you read Bram Stoker’s novel before starting to film the series?
Of course. I find it pretty good, but it is not great literature. Say that it is the sensational literature of the nineteenth century. Bram Stoker was sort of the Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code) of his time

Dracula is both a vampire and a human being. How do these two personalities can they conflict?
I do not see Dracula as a monster or as a supernatural being. I see someone who is bewitched and trapped by a terrible disease against which there is no cure. The writers have kept this little human being inside of a monster, which creates a conflict and this duality is the real curse of character

This is the first series that you turn from The Tudors. Were you reluctant?
Yes, I was very reluctant to start this new project as doing a series is equivalent to filming four films. Entering a character can be complicated because it has a lot of different facets, it is a very long process. Keeping the same concentration is not always easy.

You already incarnated Henry VIII, a sulfur and diabolical character in The Tudors. Why do you prefer the roles of the wicked?
People always ask me this question! I think the bad guys are always multifaceted characters. You really have to dig to understand, and I find it much more interesting. What good is playing a nice character? The only thing we ask is to be beautiful. Finally, this is just my opinion

You’re playing this character who never dies, what do you think of immortality?
Immortality scares me. Everyone wants to be eternal. We want to be eternal to 29 years, when you are fit physically healthy and not bad .. But what about when aging a little more every day, we can not walk, when life becomes grueling rather than something beautiful that can be enjoyed?

This is the first time you are producing, why did you do it?
Just because I wanted to have an overall view of the series and especially that it is consistent with the vision that I had. I really wanted it to be upbeat and aesthetically perfect. It was essential for me. To have a say on these subjects, it is necessary to be a producer. That is how we impose ideas

How was the shoot?
It was really exhausting, even though I do not really have the right to complain because I love what I do. The way I work is, I must say, pretty particular, since I never go really my character. I was very isolated because of its nature. Once the day was over, I went home, read a little and then I slept. This was my routine. I must admit that I have not been particularly friendly during filming.

While you were filming in Budapest, your best friend and your grandfather died in London. What was the impact of bereavement in your work?
I went to London immediately, then I organized the funeral. It is true that life can be terribly difficult. On the one hand, it deals us traumatic experiences, on the other, it offers us moments of incredible happiness. And I think I have been pretty lucky in my life. Once back on the set in Budapest, I transposed my character all my pain and my pain. It was my therapy.

One last question. Are you at a stage in your career where we/they come to you or do you still need to audition?
For Dracula, I didn’t audition, they simply came to me. 3 years ago, I met Werner Herzog for Queen of the Desert. I had this appointment but I didn’t get the part. I think it’s probably for the best if I don’t do auditions

Huge thankyou to my friend Lora for going and buying this magazine for the site and scanning it for me to translate as best I can. Scans from this interview can be found here

Again, all text above is written by Helen from jrhysmeyers.com. Thanks a lot, Helen and to your friend Lora as well.

New interview, albeit with many answers we have heard before, but I guess if you get the same questions the same answers come as well or similar ones anyway.

http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/tv/jonathan-rhys-meyers-exclusive-interview-dracula-407955.html

by Daniel Falconer | 3 February 2014

Taking on the role as one of the most famous villains in the world couldn't be an easy task for anybody, and so when Jonathan Rhys Meyers decided to step into the cape of Dracula, nobody knew what to expect.

Here, Jonathan discusses his role on the show, the differences that people may spot when comparing Dracula to the original 1974 story and the central plot of the Sky Atlantic series.


What is this re-imagined version of Dracula and how does it differ from the Bram Stoker's original in 1974?

We took the blueprints that Bram Stoker made for it, set it at the same time - Victorian England - but we changed some of the characters around, and changed the nature of their position in the world around. Dracula in this, he wants revenge, revenge against the Ordo Draco, which is this secret society that did him wrong several hundred years ago. His anger and his fury has been building up ever since.

Who are Vlad Tepes, Alexander Grayson and Dracula?

Vlad Țepeș, the Romanian warlord, is the core character. For his cover in our story, in the world of commerce, he plays Alexander Grayson, a young European-American businessmen. They are the same person. Alexander Grayson is the façade that he's using for the world of commerce. Dracula does not exist; Dracula is the monster. Vlad Țepeș and Alexander Grayson exist.

How are the themes of this story and the characters relatable to a global audience?

I think revenge, pain, love and loss are universal themes. It is extraordinary how setting something in a historical basis can make people turn on their imaginations, allow them to branch out their ideas and to accept worlds that they would not normally accept. I think using beautiful sets and putting people out of their contemporary comfort zone is a way of allowing them to embrace the fantasticness of what is happening; the brutality but also the beauty. It is easier to digest in a historical setting.

Each character changes when Alexander Grayson comes into their lives. How does Grayson change when the other characters enter into his life?

He meets Mina Murray (Jessica De Gouw) and this is not something that pleases him. She reminds him of his wife, Ilona Szilágyi. But he sees her almost in a protective, paternal way, not lustful. The image of her distracts him from his main purpose which is revenge, to kill a lot of people who need to be killed. Rich, powerful men who have manipulated the world for their own gains. In one way he is slightly vigilante but he is no hero. He is the bad guy. He does great things but terrible, terrible things too. Hopefully the audience will be amused and intrigued but what he does is pretty diabolical. Jonathan Harker (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) is the hero of the piece. Not Vlad Țepeș.

What is the overall look, feel and tone of the series?

It is very, very lush and very, very beautiful. It is using rich colours and certain types of camera lenses that Chris Segear (Cinematographer) has developed to give it a tonal base which is almost Victorian graphic novel but at the same time contains the beauty and majesty of Downton Abbey or Boardwalk Empire. It has these beautiful tonal images depending on what emotional strain that the scene is reading at the time.

What is Dracula?

He is a manifestation of pain and loss. He is a tempest. It is what happens when you break somebody to that extent, when you completely demolish their spirit, when you completely demolish their environment and take away those things that they love. Not only taking away his wife and taking away his kingdom, taking away his power, taking away his life but not allowing him the peace of death. It is the ultimate cruelty. It is torture on an epic level – which is why he waits so long for revenge. It is a dish best served cold. and why he waits so long is revenge is a dish best served cold.

How does Alexander Grayson entrap Jonathan Harker (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and bring him into his world.

Jonathan Harker's an ambitious man who needs money. He is impetuous, he is young, he is inexperienced. His immaturity makes him gullible and therefore he can be manipulated - for now. His character has to change as the season goes on because he is going to come up against probably the most difficult thing he's ever come up against in his life. Vlad Țepeș does not hate him. He pities him in a way and he is envious. Not of Mina Murray (Jessica De Gouw); but of Jonathan Harker’s ability to feel love at all. His ability to have that thing.

What is the relationship between Alexander Grayson and Renfield (Nonso Anozie)?

In the original, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1974), Renfield is the lawyer that goes to Transylvania, and he ends up going mad because Dracula gets into his head. For our Renfield, he's also a lawyer but he's a lawyer who Vlad meets while he is travelling America and making his fortune. He helps him out of a situation so Renfield in a way feels indebted to him. They have a very, very strong bond and connection. There is only one person in the entire cast that is closest to equal with Dracula and that's Renfield. He does not work for Vlad Țepeș, he is his right hand man and he's the only one who Vlad listens to.

Could you tell us a bit about Van Helsing’s (Thomas Kretschmann) role in this version?

Van Helsing is a bitter doctor and professor, whose family were murdered by the Ordo Draco. He brings Vlad Țepeș back to life, back to the world. They make a deal - he makes a deal with the devil, essentially. That deal is to destroy the Ordo Draco but in so doing Van Helsing knows that he will be destroyed himself.



Read more: http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/tv/jonathan-rhys-meyers-exclusive-interview-dracula-407955.html#ixzz2sIQM2TNY

http://jrhysmeyers.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=643&pid=63306#top_display_media

Thanks to jrhysmeyers.com (JRM Source) a new interview. This is not the telephone interview from a little while ago, which will come on Monday. Below the text of the interview.

Actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, 36, most recently starred in the NBC drama Dracula. Having won a Golden Globe for Best Actor for his role as Elvis Presley in the biographical miniseries Elvis, he was nominated for playing King Henry VIII in the The Tudors. He splits his time between London and Los Angeles

Just about anything can keep me awake at night
It could be a film I just watched or the disorganisation of my sock drawer. I’m not a great sleeper

I should’ve given women a wide birth till I was at least 25
They take up an awful lot of your time when you’re starting out and should be concentrating on your job. Instead, you’re chasing some hot young actress round the set who has absolutely no interest in you at all because the guy playing the lead has already been in three films and you’re just some 18-year-old scrapper from Ireland

Any job that pays well is going to be difficult
Trying to command all the different emotions first thing on a Monday morning? It’s bloody hard. There are no easy gigs in acting

Just because you’re rich, it doesn’t mean you can’t be naive
Somebody told me recently that they’d had dinner with the CEO of a large investment bank in Geneva. And it had to be explained that movies are actually edited. He couldn’t understand the concept of shooting, stopping, editing, changing camera, etc. He just thought it all happened in one go

When you hit your thirties, the mistakes you were making in you twenties don’t look so cute
It suddenly becomes very uncool to wake up on the floor of a bar. You’re getting too long in the tooth for all that

We think that immediate success is the norm now
But to be successful in anything, you need to experience. And to have experience, you normally have to have failed a bunch of times

Nobody blogs about carpenters
I work in an industry that comes with a kind of Big Brother level of hyper-scrutiny regarding what we do. Actors can be held up as role models, but we’re not necessarily meant to be that. We are actually meant to be human

There’s something almost Buddhist about cleaning your house
I find it very therapeutic, almost meditative. It’s like cleaning your head

Bad reviews will always feel like a slap in the face
I remember having a conversation with Colin Farrell one night about you can get a thousand of the most wonderful reviews, and then The Times gives you a bad one and it’s the only thing on your mind

Men will come to blows over women, money and sport
If they’re chasing the same trophy, basically. But they get over it quite quickly. Women will still hate someone who pulled their hair at school 30 years ago

An Irish character is very different from an English character
Woody Allen asked if I’d give my character in Match Point an Irish accent rather than an English one. I shouldn’t have done it; it never felt quite right. For a start, there just aren’t any Irish professional tennis players. But it made me realise that we have an entirely different way of speaking, of seeing the world, to the English. Unless you know the lyric of their language, writing an Irishman is impossible

People think I’m out partying the whole time
The reality is that I hardly ever leave my house. The other day, my dad was reading a tabloid and saw a photo that was supposed to be me in a nightclub. And he said “But weren’t you with me that night? And, um, isn’t your hair 3in longer than that?”

I’m terrible at golf
Absolutely awful. I consider it a badge of honour

Dracula: The complete first series is available on Blu-Ray and DVD now through Universal Pictures

Interview by Ben Machell

Interview: Jonathan Rhys Meyers on vampires, sex scenes and playing the antihero
The star of Dracula talks to Kathryn Bromwich about beards, lucky underpants, and why he would have made a terrible priest.

KATHRYN BROMWICH
Published: 24 March 2014 Updated: 11:47, 24 March 2014

“If you could live forever, would you want to do it as an 89-year-old woman, or at the peak of your beauty and health?” The second option, clearly, is a tempting proposition. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, star of the new NBC series Dracula, has some ideas about why vampire tales still retain their lure after all these years. “Everybody’s interested in living forever. People don’t want to die. What makes vampires attractive is that they’re frozen in their young, beautiful state.”

Vampire fiction is a crowded market, as Rhys Meyers is well aware. Of the countless film and television vampire productions, he admires Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre and, more recently, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. “I like the camera distance they keep from the actual killing. It makes it almost more vicious.”

So what does his new show bring to the table? We meet the titular bloodsucker Vlad Tepes lying half-decomposed in an open coffin in a filthy crypt. A human sacrifice is bled to death over him, and the blood brings Vlad back from the undead. Once reawakened he reinvents himself as an American industrialist called Alexander Grayson. With much fanfare, he arrives in London promising unlimited clean energy for everyone (it’s a fraud), and the Victorians lap it up – except for a shady group called Order of the Dragon. A spanner is thrown in the works when Vlad/Dracula/Grayson sees a beautiful young woman in the crowd (played by Jessica de Gouw): she looks just like his wife Ilona, who was brutally murdered by the Order centuries ago.

Essentially it’s a revenge tale, with technology, witty repartee and fangs thrown into the mix. Broadcast in the UK on Sky Living over the autumn, it received mixed reviews and variable ratings. Nevertheless, thanks to JRM’s devoted fan-base there is a ready-made core audience for any show that contains a steamy love scene with the piercing-eyed leading man.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Dracula
And like in all good neck-biting vampire stories, sex scenes abound. Rhys Meyers has become quite a pro at them over the years: at one point, he says, “every day was a new naked girl, so it became run-of-the-mill that I would end up in bed with some actress during the afternoon.” What does he do to prepare for them – does he have a pair of lucky underpants? “I don’t have any lucky underpants. I’m never wearing underpants when I do those sex scenes. I’m always half naked. Sex scenes, first of all, are very easy to do, because you’re usually given somebody to work with who is (a) very beautiful and attractive, so that makes it much easier, do you know what I mean?”

He doesn’t quite get round to point (b).

Just another day at the office? “Well listen, you try it a few times. I’m telling you, you do two days of shooting sex scenes on a film set, you’ll be exhausted after it. You’ll get back to your partner, you won’t wanna touch them. You’ll be like, ‘I just wanna have a bath.’”

He bristles at my suggestion that there may be some links between the characters of Dracula and Henry VIII in The Tudors: both are powerful men driven by their desires, with a darker, obsessive side to them (blood for Dracula, a male heir for Henry). “No. There’s no connection, there’s no similarity at all.” In a physical sense, he’s right: while in the later seasons of The Tudors he had to don fat suits and ageing make-up, no such transformation was necessary to turn him into Dracula. The carefully-trimmed moustache and goatee he sports on the show are of his own choosing (“unfortunately I’m not very good at growing a beard. I’m hoping that in the next few years I’ll be blessed with a full beard”), and the vampire’s paleness echoes his own (“I haven’t been in the sunlight for… oh my goodness. Almost two years, now. I am literally vitamin D deficient at the moment.”).

Always the antihero: Jonathan Rhys Meyers
But the similarity goes further than that. “People don’t really cast me as the hero very often. I think my physicality lends itself more to being seen as a character who’s got a little bit more duality than that. I don’t look like the cowboy riding in on a white horse with a white hat. I’m more like the one in the black cap skulking in the corner.”

His struggles with alcohol, rehab and airport altercations have been well documented over the years. Rhys Meyers is clean now, and spends his free time painting (“for my own pleasure – I’m a dreadful painter. I painted a Samurai for my godson the other day”) and making music with his brother’s band Suzy’s Field (“but I’m no musician”). However, he has intimate knowledge of his own darker sides, which he brings to the character’s more tortured, self-loathing aspects. “Blood is a drug. Nobody wants to be susceptible or dependent on a drug, do they?”

Although rumours abound, there is currently no news about whether a second season of Dracula is on the cards (“we’ve got lots of time to decide. It’s outside of my control, so I don’t even think about it”). Next, Rhys Meyers will be kept busy shooting two films. Later this month he will star in London Town, where plays a father who works two jobs to keep his family afloat in 1970s England.

Over the summer he will shoot The Secret Scripture in Ireland alongside Jessica Chastain. Based on a novel by Sebastian Barry, the film will see him as Father Gaunt, a sinister and ruthless priest who has a difficult relationship with women. In a way, this role is a return to his roots: Rhys Meyers had thought about joining the priesthood as a boy. “I felt I was quite isolated, and I think that’s what attracted me. The monastic lifestyle is very isolated. But actually I wasn’t suited to priesthood at all. It would have driven me mad.”

http://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/starinterviews/interview-jonathan-rhys-meyers-on-vampires-sex-scenes-and-playing-the-antihero-9211983.html