Jonathan Rhys Meyers August Rush Interview

He’s a chameleon that’s for sure - how else can you explain Jonathan Rhys Meyers eclectic range of roles? From a David Bowie inspired glam-rock star in Velvet Goldmine, to a dedicated football coach in Bend it Like Beckham, to his startling performance as Elvis, a 4-hour mini-series that earned him an Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe win. But he’s also played everything from King Henry VIII in the award winning Tudors to a tennis instructor who is not quite what he seems in Woody Allen’s Match Point. It’s hard to imagine that it’s the same man in each and every one of those roles. His latest film is no less challenging. In August Rush, the New York set fable about a musical prodigy (Freddie Highmore) searching for his parents (Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers) he had to play guitar and sing his own songs. Gaynor Flynn caught up with the Irish actor at the recent Rome International Film Festival.

How difficult was it to play and sing in the film?

Not that difficult really. I would play as much as possible in my free time and I’d hang out with the real musicians as much as I could and play music with them. But the goal was never to become as master guitar player. Louis, my character is a singer-songwriter.


I understand you’re real brother is in the film and that you sing your own songs. Is that true?

Yeah it is. When we were about to make the film, we had a drummer who was meant to play the Irish drummer who backed out of the movie so at the last minute they were like we can’t get somebody, so I paid for my brother to fly in to be in the movie. Then the guitar I didn’t play the guitar very well so I had to learn that and I sing my own songs.


What did your brother say about it?

He was just like yeah, yeah, yeah. I get to go to New York, you pay ha, ha.


Was it his first movie?

Yes.


You started his career then.

Yeah sure and I remember being on set and Jim Sheridan, Kerstin’s father came on set and Jim loved my brother, he thought he was extraordinary and Jim is looking at the monitor at a scene that we’ve done on stage and I’m sitting there and Jim’s like, oh your brothers fantastic, and I’m like what about me? I’m meant to be fantastic but no he was great and a lot of fun and I wanted the Irish person to be an Irish person. Alex O’Loughlin plays my brother in the film and he’s an Aussie but I wanted to get an actually authentic Irish person in to play the drummer because there’s an energy there that doesn’t exist if it was an American playing an Irish person, it would be slightly different, the energy would be different you’d be able to spot an American anywhere you know. They’re a little bit too ruddy, their teeth are a little bit too white.


Did you have a bit of input then?

The input of my character, but not in how the production went. Certainly in the music because I had to record my own songs before we even started the production so I definitely had a hand in that. And in how we record them and how we would arrange them but everything else was up to the production team.


What is your taste in music?

My taste in music is different to the taste of Lewis Connolly, because he’s playing a singer/songwriter. He’s not Eric Clapton he’s never going to be. He’s very much an average singer/songwriter in New York.


And you?

Below average.


What’s your favourite band?

They change but I like Broken Social Scene, Kings of Leon, Black Rabble Motorcycle Club.


Would you agree Match Point changed everything for you?

Yeah it certainly changed. When Match Point came out everybody sort of thought that Woody’s best films had gone and then we made match Point and suddenly he makes this great movie and I get to be the lead role in it. It was a difficult part to play because I’m playing somebody who’s weak. It’s very hard to watch somebody’s who’s playing weak, he’s not strong a character, he’s never meant to be strong, he was never meant to be a psychopath. Instead of psycho he’s more pathetic and Woody kept saying this because I could have made him much stronger and much darker but Woody didn’t want this. He’s not a bad person, he just does bad things, so he’s a weak person and then Match Point came out and it was so much more financially successful and critically successful than people had imagined it would be but then when Match Point was out I also won a Golden Globe two weeks later for playing Elvis Presley and that suddenly went, suddenly I have the lead in the best Woody Allen film in maybe ten years and I’m also playing an American icon which I got a Golden Globe for, so that changed things.


Does it change the way you approach life as well? Do you get more recognised on the streets?

You do, but my life hasn’t change. Like I just work, that’s what I do. I don’t see myself as this big movie star at all, I’m just an actor getting work.


I saw the Tudor’s. It’s very good.

Yes its very sexy isn’t it.


I never thought his horrendous king would be like you.

He’s not. But they didn’t want to have an overweight ageing actor play the role. It wouldn’t have been sexy.


You have played a really diverse range of men over the years. Has it been difficult to convince people that you can pull some of these roles off?

Yes certainly. Match Point did what it did and Bend it Like Beckham did what it did from the commercial point of view, being in Mission Impossible 3 was very good, winning the Golden Globe was very good and then I did the Tudor’s which was a big hit in America and it’s a big hit in Europe now as well and that sort of masculated me away from sort of Velvet Goldmine which was very ambiguous and very androgenous and I was only 19, Suddenly I’m 30 and I’m playing this incredibly sexual very masculine sort of alpha male, and so now directors are looking at me for completely different reasons again.


Like what?

Well now they’re looking at me not just as an actor but as a leading man point of view because that defines it, because first of all if you want to become successful you’ve got to get, like Velvet Goldmine, you’ve got to get men interested, so you get sort of the gay audience interested in you right. But then you have to get the female audience, and that’s your audience because if you look at the shows that are successful on television, 70% of the audience is a female audience. The Tudor’s which get about 180,000 to 200,000 viewers a week in Ireland, 150,000 of them are women, only 20% of the audience is male which is kind of extraordinary but it seems a female audience will follow a series more than a male audience. A male audience might follow it for one or two weeks but then champion league football will be on. Like three weeks ago our lowest rating for the Tudor’s in Ireland was three weeks ago because the Champion League Football was on the same evening.


You live in LA right?

Right but I was brought up in Ireland.


Would they give you a hard time if you went back to Ireland?

Well the Irish always give their successful people a hard time anyway. It’s a very Irish thing and it’s nice to keep people on the ground. They give me a hard time and they give Colin Farrell a hard time, they give both of us a hard time.


It keeps you grounded right?

I think Irish people like to keep you level but they’re actually very, very proud of myself and Colin and Cillian Murphy because what we’ve done the three of us because what we’ve done as young actors is that we’ve opened up a whole industry to actors that wasn’t available. I mean until myself, Colin Farrell and Cillian Murphy began making movies over the last eight years, successful movies and sort of became big names in Hollywood what happens is directors, producers and studios are now looking at Ireland for talent whereas they weren’t looking at Ireland ten years ago. They weren’t looking England either or Australia for that matter. If you look at a lot of the top actors in Hollywood, you’ve got Cate Blanchette, Naomi Watts, Eric Bana, Heath Ledger, Alex O’Loughlin, David Wenham I mean these are a lot of the guys who are making big films in Hollywood. Then you’ve got the English contingent, you’ve got Daniel Craig, Clive Owen, Jude Law, Rhys Ilffans, Charlie Cox, Ewan McGregor I mean you’re taking up a vast portion of Hollywood’s leading men are not American’s now. They’re Europeans and Australians.


How do you account for that?

I think you account for that with the globalisation of the universe or the globalisation of our world.


They must bring something to the industry that American’s don’t, do you agree?

I don’t think its so much that American’s aren’t bringing something because there are still a lot of American movie stars and there will always be a lot of American movie stars, I just think that a lot of the big films that are happening these days are not being shot in America. They’re being shot around the world, so if you look at films like Babel, Sryiana, Rendition, Notes on a Scandal, Elizabeth, Atonement, Silk, Match Point, first time Woody Allen ever ventured outside of New York, that’s because of globalisaton. Its not longer America and Europe, its just the world and for an actor to be successful in the industry, doesn’t’ have to do the traditional route of living in Hollywood, he doesn’t have to.


Were you ever worried about being the face of Hugo Boss, in the sense that it could harm your reputation as a character actor?

No because I don’t think they ever saw me as a character actor. When I first made films they saw me as the opposite, a pretty boy. When I did Velvet Goldmine, Velvet Goldmine isn’t a character, he’s a physicality. I don’t think I’ve ever gone out and made just a character role, that was just a pure character. I’ve never done a film where they purposely uglied me up a role, whereas you find someone like Jude Law, who will actually hunt for a role that makes him ugly because he has to try to fight to get away from being what he is which is a matinee idol.


You’ve always been a proud Irish person. Is that an important part of who you are would you say?

Yes well I’ll never lose my identity, because I’ll always be Irish but I don’t want that to overshadow who I am as a person. But I don’t think being Irish defines who I am. I don’t want an identity to define me because I’ve only played three Irish characters in my whole life. I don’t usually get cast as that because I don’t look like a typical Irishman. So in the film industry its very simple, any actor who believes their physicality is not an intrinsic part of why they get the role is fooling themselves. You watch film so your physicality definitely it defines the roles that you play. The reason Angelina Jolie plays the roles she does is because she looks that way. The reason Julia Roberts plays the roles she does is because she looks that way or Matt Damon.


Do you have to have a certain amount of vanity to be an actor?

To get up in front of a camera of course you have to have a certain amount of vanity. All acting is narcissism in some way. Would I be a narcissistic person? Absolutely. Am I vain? Absolutely.


It’s brave to admit that.

It’s not brave its reality, and any actor who sits down in front of you and tells you they’re not vain its bullshit. I’m sure a lot of actors are like oh no, I’m not vain I just look fabulous everyday. Now they’d like to believe that themselves. Its all very carefully manipulated, and I’ve met and worked with some of the most beautiful actors in the world and then you see them on a cover of a magazine they don’t look like that, any of them, they just don’t.


At the same time what’s interesting, why did you want to act?

I wanted to act because it was soft money.


You’ve said you’ve never taken an acting lesson and you never would.

I just think I’m too far down the road to start taking acting lessons and the reality is you can’t take an acting lesson for film, you really can’t you either have it or you don’t. You can’t learn it, you can’t achieve it and nobody can give it to you. I can go to a million acting classes but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll be good on film, you either are or you’re not.


How did you get your first lot of soft money?

Well the first thing I ever did was a commercial and I was 15 years old and I got 500 pounds to do that commercial for two hours work. Then the next film I was on it was my first lead role and it was a small low budget film and I got 20,000 pounds for hanging out on a film set and acting. I was 17. What boy is not going to go I’ll do this?


When did you realise that you really liked it?

I think when I went on to the set of Michael Collins which was the second film that I shot. And it wasn’t even the acting it was that whole atmosphere and suddenly I was on a film set with Liam Neeson and Alan Rickman and Neil Jordan and it was the whole buzz about it and the big cameras and suddenly it was kind of like this is a pretty fucking cool job.


You left school at 16, and I read that you quite rebellious is that true?

I don’t think I was rebellious. I think I just didn’t suit school. I never went out to be rebellious, when I was younger and when I was doing interviews when I was younger I think I made a mistake because I was young. I talked a lot about my younger life and then people make up this fantasy that I lived in degradation and that I had to crawl my crawl my way up from the gutter. This is people being poetic with their pens, it wasn’t exactly like that, that’s the image they want to promote, here he was a young rebellious Irish rogue now we’ve tamed him to be an actor. That’s not the reality of the situation, that’s just the fantasy people have in their heads.


You bring a certain intensity to every character you play, is this difficult to achieve time and again?

Well yeah you certainly have to give an awful lot of intensity. I think it’s easier for an actor to be tense and dramatic than it is to be light and comedic. For me its easier to be dramatic. Even in that film My Favourite Year Peter O’Toole turns around and says dying is easy, comedy is difficult. Because comedy is the most difficult thing to do, I find comedians extraordinary and I was talking to Robin Williams about it and its like doing two actors do a very funny scene in film its great. But they’ve done that scene 20 times in front of a crew that’s’ not laughing. Comedy is more serious than drama and I’m not sure I’d be able to do that to be able to play a joke where everybody is standing around and they’re not laughing, but the audience will laugh and you’ve got to get that in your head and forget about the crew because they’ve heard it 20 times you have to think about the audience who will hear it for the first time.


What attracted you to this film?

In August Rush I was able to play somebody who was compassionate and who was looking for that first love. You know there’s always that girl or that guy who you just didn’t spend enough time with or maybe you’re sitting in a café and you see this beautiful girl or this beautiful guy and you never see them again but they stay with you.


What do you think about love at first sight?

I completely believe in love at first sight and it happens to Lewis in August Rush.


Did it happen to you personally?

Yeah once, I fell in love at first sight.


Is that one of the main reasons to make this film?

There’s that and I get to shoot in New York and I get to work with Kirsten Sheridan who I really wanted to work with and Terrence Howard who I really wanted to work with and Freddie Highmore who I really wanted to work with. And I get to be a musician and its a big commercial film that shows a lighter side to a character and allows me in the future to get roles that are different to Match Point. When somebody looks at the body of work that I’ve done and they put Bend It like Beckham, Match Point, August Rush, The Tudor’s and Elvis next to each other they can see very many different layers of what I can do as an actor. So for a director to sit down and go well I need a bit of that and a bit of that well he’s our man. That’s why I do different roles so people can see your range.