‘From Paris With Love’: Jonathan Rhys Meyers revels in his role

By Michael Ordoña
Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2010
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The actor doesn’t know the formula for success, but his work in the movie reminds him he’s lucky to be making films.

Years later, Jonathan Rhys Meyers still rues the cool reception to his 2008 “The Children of Huang Shi.”

“Sometimes you can make a film that’s so extraordinary, quite a beautiful film, and it doesn’t work” at the box office, says the actor by phone from New York, “and sometimes you do a film and it’s, ‘Christ almighty, how the hell did that work?’ You can’t judge it. You can have 50 of the greatest actors in the world, the greatest director in the world, the greatest producers and an endless pot of money,” and still wind up with a bad movie, he says.

“And sometimes you’ve got a group of people that nobody knows with a little bit of money and a great story and they make ‘Juno.’ Or ‘Precious.’ ”

That’s not to lump his newest effort, “From Paris With Love,” which opens Friday, into any of those categories; it’s to illustrate some of what the 32-year-old has learned over the course of an already-long career.

“One of the only places I’m truly comfortable and I really become in my own skin is on a film set,” says the Irish actor with barely a trace of brogue. “For the last 16 years — that’s half of my life — I’ve been on film sets. This is where I’ve existed. This is where I’ve found myself most at peace and happiest.”

After a run of personal trials, including a few stints in rehab, Rhys Meyers is happy to be in a position now to turn down roles when he doesn’t care for them or to be offered parts that go in quite the opposite direction of what he’s recognized for. Apart from working with John Travolta and director Pierre Morel, he enjoyed the lead role of James Reese in “From Paris” as a change from his Henry VIII on Showtime’s “The Tudors.”

“Reese is an incredibly ethical, moral guy who believes in the greater good. But he doesn’t realize that sometimes the greater good costs lives. Also, it allows me to play on my naïveté,” he says, his phrasing finally betraying his Irishness.

“It’s nice being the manipulated rather than the manipulator for once.”

An aide to the U.S. ambassador in France — and a wannabe spy — Reese gets his fill of intrigue when kill-’em-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out operative Charlie Wax (Travolta) takes him on a wild ride to shoot out some bulbs in the City of Light. Morel directs with the same freight-train-on-greased-tracks efficiency as he did with last year’s surprise hit “Taken.” Rhys Meyers, appropriately enough, jumped on this express in motion.

“I left ‘Tudors’ on a Tuesday, did my costume fittings for this movie on a Wednesday and shot Thursday morning,” he says. “John was already shooting for two weeks when I got there, doing action stuff. So we really needed to hustle. Pierre’s a very compact director. He makes films that are no more than 100 minutes long. There’s not a moment of drag in this movie, in ‘Taken,’ in ‘District B13.’ He doesn’t like people sitting in the cinema for two hours when it’s unnecessary.

“I said it to Pierre and [co-writer and producer] Luc Besson when I first met them: ‘You’re touching on huge subjects here — cocaine addiction and terrorism and people dying. If you get too heavy into those subjects, you’ve got to give them their due.’ But this isn’t that type of movie. This is more like ‘Lethal Weapon’ with a little bit of ‘Shaft.’”

The obvious film fan savors every moment of his job, whether it’s prestige fare or a wild action movie.

“I remember sitting on top of the Eiffel Tower at 6 o’clock in the morning as the sun was rising, just myself and John. We just sat there with a cup of coffee, and he turns to me and says, ‘Can you believe what we’re doing here? Our work is 6:30 in the morning, the sun’s rising and the two of us are sitting on the corner ledge of the Eiffel Tower, gazing out over Paris.’

“The work was hard,” Rhys Meyers says, but adds, “it’s my privilege to be a filmmaker, you know?”

By Bill Goodykoontz
Arizona Republic, February 3, 2010

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a gentle-seeming, thoughtful Irish fellow, is not who comes to mind when you think of action heroes.

Which is precisely why he’s in “From Paris With Love,” playing James Reece, a desk jockey itching to get into the spy game, something with which loose-cannon agent Charlie Wax (John Travolta) is more than willing to assist him.

Meyers, who also plays a young Henry VIII in Showtime’s series “The Tudors,” spoke recently about playing with guns (fake ones), working with Travolta and selling King Henry to a young audience.

Question: You get to shoot guns and blow things up. Is that fun?

Answer: It’s grown-up fun, you know? And it’s a lot of hard work to make it look that fun. That’s the kind of movie it was. Even though you’ve got a movie that touches on a subject like a girl dying of a cocaine overdose, and terrorism, it only serves to fuel the action. In that sense, it was (fun). There was no pressure to do anything but have a good time. You have to go along with the ride. You have to kind of enjoy Wax’s character and, at the same time, retain your naivete concerning Reece’s character. It’s fun, it’s exciting to watch, but at the same time, you kind of hope that it’ll all work out for the young guy. You feel he needs encouragement. He learns to be cooler as he goes along.

Q: You’re much smaller than Travolta, and that seems to play into the story.

A: Look, I’m 5-10 and I weigh, what, 155 pounds. John’s like 6-1, and he’s a bulkier guy. He’s got big shoulders. That did play into it. And it was interesting because it did show the youth of the guy. He’s a young buck. I don’t think John wanted to come in and play a young buck. . . . He’s a guy coming from a different place. He kills when he has to, and he has to.

Q: You always hear good things about Travolta from his co-stars. Was that your experience?

A: John is one of the most gushable actors out there. It’s just really easy because he is that nice a guy. He told me a funny story that he did a movie with Madeleine Stowe, and she was like, “There’s no way he’s going to keep up this Mr. Nice Guy act the whole 12 weeks of shooting.” When it came to the end of the 12 weeks, she said, “You know, I thought the whole thing was (expletive), but actually, he’s just that nice a guy.” And he is. He doesn’t have to try.

Q: Are you surprised by “The Tudors’ ” success?

A: Yeah… I only expected it to go one season. I thought it had that much legs. It was an extraordinary sort of novelty, that you could have Henry as a young king, because you have to sell him to a 21st-century audience. You have to sell him to an audience that was into “Lost” and “Prison Break” and “Gossip Girl” and all that. You’re trying to sell them period (drama). So you have to go about it in a different way. Then it became successful, and now we’ve got all four seasons. And the last five episodes I think I’m most proud of… I really didn’t let anybody else get involved. I knew what I wanted to do and I went with it. And it’ll either be good or not, but the last five episodes are pretty much on me.

As King Henry VIII, Jonathan Rhys Meyers gets a lot of action on The Tudors, but in the actor’s latest film, From Paris With Love, he gets to stretch the action muscles he never knew he had — shooting at terrorists, dodging bullets, and running around with a coke-filled vase. That’s because his character, James Reece, who’s long dreamed of becoming an undercover agent, finally gets a shot, though he’s in way over his head. Rhys Meyers says that Reece only wishes he were James Bond.

Q: What was it like shooting in Paris?

A: Paris is the most beautiful city in the world, but I wanted to see the Paris that you don’t usually get to see. I was staying at the Hôtel de Crillon, which is a beautiful hotel, where Marie Antoinette learned to play the piano, and it’s an elegant living museum. But I walk out on the Place de la Concorde, and I see the Paris that everybody dreams of, and I also see the Paris that is the living nightmare that happens in any First World country: tons of people from different cultures trying to make a life. I wasn’t the tourist coming in and going to the Champs-Élysées or going to Ladurée and having macaroons. I was going out to these areas where people actually live. It made it a real city to me, not just a Disneyland fantasy.

Q: Your scene with John Travolta is in the Charles de Gaulle airport. That was the first time you two met?

A: I was shooting The Tudors on a Tuesday. I arrived in Paris on a Wednesday, and that was the first time we faced each other on-screen, when I busted him out of the customs office. I’ve seen John Travolta in many films, but I haven’t seen him like that. My character has dreamed of what it would be like, the undercover life, and he expects a worldly, sophisticated James Bond-type. But what he gets is a biker boy. And he’s shocked. And John’s character loves that. He enjoys the naïveté that James Reece has; he enjoys seeing him confused.

Q: Is that the basis of their chemistry?

A: It’s a buddy relationship, but it’s more of a mentor-student relationship, and there’s no better way of training him than by throwing him in at the deep end. But it’s all about their energy, and the moments they share, which are better than any explosion. I think it’s chemistry that makes a classic action film — if the characters like each other. Why does Lethal Weapon work? Because it’s Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — would that have been the same movie with Robert Redford and Warren Beatty?

Q: You get to skip out on a chunk of the action because you’re carrying the vase of cocaine.

A: And I accidentally dropped it, running on those steel stairs! I dropped the vase, and I went, “Oh f-ck, the coke!” I had to go all the way back up and do that scene again. The vase became a teddy bear, a blanket, to me, and I felt sad when I had to drop it for the other scene, because it had been my buddy, protecting me from the whole world, this vase of marching powder.

Q: How difficult was it to speak Mandarin in some of those scenes?

A: I did a film called The Children of Huang Shi, in which I had to speak Mandarin and Japanese, so I had already sort of been involved in that language. Actually, the girl who plays the prostitute that I walk in on with the German guy, she’s the girl who taught me how to speak Chinese. I asked the guy whom I was speaking to if he understood me, and he said yes. So that was okay. But that was level two. If I were level eight at Cambridge, I would have been a disgrace.

Q: Your character falls for a woman, but later on he realizes he knows nothing about her.

A: It’s like, how much do you know about your partner, really? He knows that she makes dresses, but he’s a naïve guy. Pierre Morel [the director] and Luc Besson [the writer] know that this guy will go for this girl and he will go for her blindly, because of the beauty, the charm, the elegance, and living in Paris, because that’s the dream. And that will all sort of divert him from what’s actually happening. I think it’s a great ruse. If you want to hide something, hide it in plain sight.

Q: So it’s about blind faith in more than one way.

A: For my character, I’m willing to ignore a lot of things because of love. For her character, she’s willing to blow herself up. Whether its love of religion or love for a human being, it’s about love, and it’s the relationships. Everything that happens in war or terrorism comes down to human choices, human emotions — whether it’s a father who loses a son or a wife who loses a husband. It all comes down to individual stories.

John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, director Pierre Morel, and writer Luc Besson chat up their flashy actioner From Paris with Love.

From Paris with Love, starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, is the latest stylish action caper from director Pierre Morel and writer Luc Besson, with Virginie Besson-Silla on board as executive producer. By day, James Reece (Rhys Meyers) is a smartly dressed, well-organized assistant for the US Ambassador to France; by night, he’s tirelessly working his way up the ladder at the CIA as an undercover agent. He’s got a gorgeous girlfriend (Kasia Smutniak), a fabulous flat, and the wherewithal to become a hotshot spy. Enter his new partner Charlie Wax (Travolta), a rude and crude American with a shaved head and rather unorthodox methods for getting his mission accomplished.

This is the third outing for Morel and Besson as a writer/director team; they are also behind the parkour-infused French film Banlieue 13 (District 13) and 2008′s Taken, starring Liam Neeson. (Besson also wrote the screenplay for the sequel to District 13, District 13: Ultimatum.) The film has crazy bullet-flying action, but with its tongue firmly planted in cheek, like ’80s cop movies Lethal Weapon: Wax’s favorite treat is, yes, a Royale with cheese, and Reese spends a good deal of the movie protecting a Chinese vase full of cocaine. (More on that later.) Travolta, Rhys Meyers, Morel, and Besson appeared in New York to discuss their new film, from Travolta’s action moves to Taken 2.

Morel is also directing a new adaptation of Dune; read what he had to say when we cornered him for a hot minute here.

John, what did you do to prepare for this role?

John Travolta: I think between Pierre, Luc, and myself, there were lots of discussions about this guy. It was beautifully written, so he was easy to fill ’cause the verbiage was so ideal for me to attack. The look was very important in this movie, and we saw Soldier of Fortune covers where these guys are suddenly, I don’t know why, very glamorous-looking, with scars and shaved heads and goatees, and it was brave to take it all off and all that, but I think we decided that was the only way it would work, to be bold with it and go all the way. So that was some of what we did.

And, of course, I hung out with some undercover guys in my hometown. They were kind enough to let me hang out with them, so I would spend the night driving the streets of Ocala and going into these different areas that were in trouble, and see what these guys do, and it was like a microcosm of where it is all over the world.

Did you ad-lib at all?

Jonathan Rhys Meyers: No, it was pretty much there in the script, but also we’re making the film where I’m playing an American guy in Paris, so if I didn’t have someone like John there, I’m not quite sure it would have worked for me, because I had to have a true American. I had to have somebody there that I could play off, and that was a happy accident because [when] I met Pierre and Luc and Virginie in London, they said, “John’s going to do this movie, and we think the chemistry’s going to be fantastic.”

But of course, I was shooting The Tudors on a Tuesday, and I arrived in Paris to shoot the movie on a Wednesday, so the first time John and I really got face time with each other was onscreen, in that [first] scene where I go in and bust him out of [the] customs office. So that’s an extraordinary reaction, ’cause I’d seen John in many films but I hadn’t seen John like that, you know? So I didn’t know what to expect. And of course, James Reece’s character, he expects a sophisticated, elegant, worldly James Bond to turn up, and what he gets is, he gets a biker boy, minus the Harley-Davidson but [with] pretty much everything else.

James has dreams [about] what a spy is going to be like. He dreams that this is what a sophisticated, undercover life is. But the reality of it is, it’s a dirty job… James doesn’t have the cynicism [Charlie] Wax has, but James has the naiveté that Wax enjoys. He enjoys seeing [James] be confused, he enjoys seeing him get a punch, he enjoys seeing him be shocked at the shooting because there’s only one way to train somebody, and that’s to throw them in the deep end.

Luc and Pierre, what makes an action/thriller a classic?

Luc Besson: Oh my God, if we knew that, we’d be like….!

JRM: Can I jump in for a sec? I think it’s chemistry. I think [what] separates an action movie from a classic movie is the chemistry between the actors doing it. If they’re liking each other and they’re liking the story on—why does Lethal Weapon work? Because Danny Glover and Mel Gibson work with each other, and you can see the energy. They play off each other very well, so you’ll get some partnerships in life that will just mean more. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—if that had been Robert Redford and Warren Beatty, would it have been the same movie? Who knows? But it’s their energy that carries it… It’s the spontaneous element of the human being [that] is worth more than any explosion. If you can get that one little moment where people understand and they share a joke onscreen or share a nice emotional moment, that makes the movie. That makes a classic action movie to me.

LB: It’s also the amount of risk that you can take in the story… You also have to take some risk in the directing, in the script, when you talk about the movement, [when they say] “Checkmate, motherf*cker.” You take the risk.

Luc, Pierre, what challenges did you face in making this film in Paris?

PM: It’s not challenging, actually. I feel homey in Paris. That’s where I live, that’s where I’ve been working forever so I can feel more comfortable shooting in Paris than anywhere else… We didn’t have many, many issues. I feel very, very comfortable shooting Paris. Especially with this one [Travolta], because I didn’t have to make a postcard of Paris, you know? When you live there, that’s actually what you—your experience in Paris was different from mine, of course [because] I’ve been living there for so long. You definitely don’t want to be in a position of having to make postcards of the city you live in because you don’t see it that way. So actually having to show the gritty part of Paris was fun.

LB: Shooting the Eiffel Tower was the most challenging thing for us, because the Eiffel Tower is a nightmare to shoot in, actually. It’s a beautiful place, I love it, but it’s the most visited monument in the world. There’s millions of people coming every year just to visit this. And there is no way to shut it down, no way to privatize that. So you have to be all [pretending to duck] with thousands of people peeping, trying to look [at] what you’re doing, taking pictures, and we had to block—bring big, big screens to block the people [from seeing] what we’re doing and then manage to get the crowd to move around and still enjoy the Eiffel Tower, because that’s what they came for, but, you know, that was actually the most challenging part, was the Eiffel Tower for us.

JRM: Actually, I think it’s become one of the most difficult monuments to shoot in the world, because now they charge you for shooting it, because they have blue lights on it and it’s privatized, so if you want the blue lights on the Eiffel Tower in the back of your shot, it’s like 20 grand or something. It’s expensive.

Can you guys talk about the physicality of the role and if there were any scenes that were particularly challenging or fun to do?

JT: To me, the whole thing was challenging! I said to Pierre, “Do you really want me to do all these stunts? I mean, upside down on a pole and shooting two guns and rolling down buildings and jumping off?” I said, “I’m an old man!”

PM: I said, “So what?”

JT: There was such a confidence that I could do it that I decided, well, hell, I’m going to live up to their expectation and I went and did it, and I really was proud that I attacked it in a full-bodied way. And it really paid off, because I’ve never done this much action in a movie. Ever. And even though I’ve been in two John Woo movies, this was the most running and jumping and fighting and flipping, and the body’s still able to do it. Now [Rhys Meyers]‘s a young whippersnapper, so his body is made to do this kind of thing. What was it for you?

JRM: It was okay, except I don’t like heights. I had to go up these stairs and I’m not a good height guy and I dropped the vase of cocaine going up the stairs. It was kind of funny… I went, “Oh f*ck, the coke!” I could hear Pierre laughing from three floors below, and John’s still running. He’s three floors ahead of me. And they were like, “Cut!” And I had to go all the way back down, and I’m scraping the coke [back into the vase] and it was just awful. And this vase, of course… I’ve got to hold this vase, which became a teddy bear. It’s like his blankie at one point. He’s sitting there [like], “It’s just me and my vase!” And I kind of felt sad when I had to drop it. It was my buddy for the movie; it was like, this is what protects me from the whole world, is this vase of washing-up powder.

Will there be a sequel to Taken?

LB: Yeah, I finished [the script] yesterday.

Over the past decade and a half, Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers has played – in no particular order – a women’s soccer coach, a sociopathic tennis pro, Elvis Presley, a selfless journalist, Michael Collins’ assassin, a Bowie-esque glam rocker, a murderous Shakespearean cad and a certain multiply-married Tudor king.

In the forthcoming spy thriller “From Paris With Love,” he’s something altogether different: innocent.

“I think it was fun to play, and certainly it would be fun for people to watch,” he says of the role, a wonkish U.S. Embassy worker who’s swept into an anti-terrorism case with a berserk veteran agent played by a very bald, very nervy John Travolta. Rhys Meyers’ character “is a naive guy – most of what he knows about spies he read in books. He’s just a gofer at the embassy, and as the film progresses, he starts to become what he needs to be.”

“From Paris With Love” was produced by Luc Besson and directed by Pierre Morel, the same frenzied French action merchants behind “District 13″ and “Taken.” What Rhys Meyers’ character “needs to be,” therefore, is in a hurry and handy with guns. He also spends a lot of screen time hugging a large porcelain vase. (“We had our moments, but I didn’t take it on a date or anything.”) The whole film moves quickly, kills with abandon and pauses for several well-placed quips, among them a chewy allusion to Travolta’s “Royale with cheese” bit from “Pulp Fiction.”

“You have to do it with a wink and a nod. You can’t take this sort of thing too seriously,” Rhys Meyers says. “If it gets anywhere near too serious, you can’t make that type of a movie. The whole point of it was, how much fun can we make it? And John wanted to do (his part) as a character homage to ’80s badass action guys. That’s the movie we set out to make. We didn’t set out to make ‘The Hurt Locker’ or anything like that.”

Rhys Meyers is on the phone from his London flat, a Chihuahua-pug mix barking in the background. (“He’s really little, but the bark is enormous.”) The actor talks in a pleasant zoom of words, touching on his love of the guitar (“I play for my own personal pleasure, nothing more”), Morel’s approach to filming (“He’s fearless, physically fearless; this guy’s a bit of a daredevil”) and the death of Travolta’s son after shooting wrapped (“I can’t imagine”).

The topic of his Wikipedia page comes up, a compendium of gossipy factoids that range from a heart problem in infancy to variously reported rehab stints over the past few years. Would he like to comment on any of this stuff? No. Does he ever pay any attention to it? No.

“I’d rather not know,” he says plainly.

So would he like to ditch the subject entirely? Yes. End of topic.

But when it comes to his gifts and constraints as a movie star, Rhys Meyers is perfectly willing to talk. Most of the time, he says, he’s a natural choice for darker roles.

“I think a lot of it comes from your physicality, what your physicality allows you to portray,” he says.

After discussing Gary Oldman, Dirk Bogarde and Montgomery Clift, he gets specific about his own appearance.

“I’ve got a very kind of bony face, and I’ve got big lips, and sometimes I can look kind of snarling … kind of Heathcliff-y.”

Aside from that touch of Brontë animalism, he admits that he’s also quite good at accents. Travolta was on hand to help this time, but he suspects the Irish generally have an easier time with American inflections – and he thinks his knack for regional dialects is just a function of his musical ear.

Without thinking, he says, he’ll often mimic someone else’s speech.

“People think that you’re making fun of them,” he says with a laugh. “Especially, I cannot be around South Africans without taking on the South African accent. It’s not a good idea.”

Ladies, get your hankies. This spring, the last season of Showtime’s hit series The Tudors will air. Even sadder, it’s the last time we’ll be seeing Jonathan Rhys Meyers in tights. Thank God he has other stuff in the works: This month, he stars in the action flick From Paris With Love. Oh… and if his superb acting chops are piercing baby blues weren’t enough to make you fall for him, he thinks every woman deserves a pair of Louboutins.

HOW WAS FILMING FROM PARIS WITH LOVE?
It was a blast, and it looks pretty hair-raising—of course, it’s not that hair-raising when you shoot it.

WHAT’S THE MOST FEARLESS THING YOU’VE DONE?
I play intense football, which makes me fearless because you will get crushed. It’s a boy thing; we get to beat our chests and get all gorillalike for a moment.

WHAT’S THE HOTTEST THING A CHICK CAN WEAR?
I think every girl should have two pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. All you need is good shoes, a good handbag, and a good coat.

WHAT’S YOUR IDEAL DATE?
I’ll tell you what. My ideal first date is just not to fuck it up.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers knows Paris. A jet-setting star of TV and film with homes in his native Dublin, as well as London, Los Angeles and Morocco, the 32 year old has spent so much time in La Ville Lumiere (City of Light) that he can imitate the locals, if not pass for one.

But the Paris where he filmed his new movie, From Paris With Love, (opening Friday) wasn’t the “touristy” Paris. Oh no. These were the “bad” parts of town.

“Listen, they exist in any city, and if they didn’t, Paris would be very boring. A MUSEUM,” he declares. “The possibilities are endless in a city like Paris, possibilities for grandeur and beauty and history and art and culture. And great touristy things like The Eiffel Tower, which is also quite beautiful; Place de la Concorde, the Arc de Triomphe, the Musee D’Orsay, the Louvre.

“But Paris is also places like where we filmed, in Montfermeil (east of the city), which is just like going to any ghetto in the world. Except that people go, ‘Bonjour? Wassup? You lost? You like dooope? Ees cool, man! Soup-AIR cool!’”

That black Cadillac Escalade his character roars through the movie in? It fit right in. It’s a signature vehicle there, as here.

“Dude, EVERY French wanna-be rapper wants to be ‘Le SNOOP Doggy Dog,’ with Le Bling and they all drive Le Escalade Noir (black), with bad roues et jantes (wheels and rims). They want those massive rims because American culture stretches to everywhere.”

Often ebullient off-screen and “imminently watchable” (Christian Science Monitor) and “smoldering” (Tom Shales of The Washington Post) on screen, Rhys Meyers isn’t going to experience the city the way most of us would. He stayed in the four-star Hotel de Crillon (10 Place de la Concorde), one of the world’s oldest luxury hotels, “an old palace where Marie-Antoinette used to come take her piano lessons. Very grand, luxurious, but a little too hoity-toidy for me.”

“I’m on the set at five in the morning in a track suit and big boots, and back to the hotel at eight in the evening in the same get-up and all these chic French ladies are in the lobby in their Chanel and Louis Vuitton. They hear there’s a movie star staying there this week and they’re expecting Cary Grant. They didn’t get him.”

“But the hotel is right in the heart of the historic city, so it wasn’t like ‘What did you see in Paris?’ Man, what didn’t I see! It’s all right next door once I got off set — the Louvre, everything!”

Rhys Meyers took his meals at French super-producer and action auteur Luc Besson’s restaurant Market (15 Avenue Matignon) “a really cool place to hang out. And, well, I was working for Luc on the movie, after all.”

Though he lives in the States much of the time, he polished his American accent (he plays a U.S. Embassy officer teamed up with an agent played by John Travolta) while watching American tourists. And he has some advice about how Americans might approach that next trip to Paris.

“Listen, Parisians have that arrogance about them. But that’s their character. So what you do to cope is raise your own arrogance level so that you can fit right in. Now I have no problem with that at all. But Americans don’t think that way…Americans abroad can be so easily offended, when you don’t mean to offend them. The trick is to be just as arrogant as the French are!”

He doesn’t mind roughing it a bit, and we’re not just talking about his tabloid exploits and a couple of ensuing trips to rehab. The movie star gig, which Rhys Meyers hastens to call “a privilege,” is not all four-star hotels and French cuisine. Making The Children of Huang Shi (2008) in China, for instance, was “fantastically hard,” because of the conditions, the hours and the fact that “Chinese food in China is VASTLY different from Chinese food everywhere else.”

But he’ll go back to Paris any time.

“Well, not Montfermeil,” he says. “Been there. Seen it.”

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, fresh from playing that Tudor icon, meets his iconic costar cold on the set of “From Paris With Love.

The first time Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta met was on the set for their first scene together in From Paris With Love. Charlie Wax, a belligerent, shaved-headed, goateed American – a full-tilt Travolta – is being detained by a French customs agent at the airport. He’s trying to bring a bag full of energy drinks into the country, the French customs official is telling him non!, and the exchange is getting ugly.

Enter James Reese – an American-accented Meyers – as a young U.S. embassy attache with ambitions of becoming a CIA spy guy. Reese tries diplomatically to defuse the situation. Wax is no help at all. Finally, the two are allowed to leave – with the beverage cans, one of which, it turns out, is packed with an illegal powdery substance.

“It’s funny. I was shooting my last scene as Henry at 7:30 Tuesday evening, and I was on set with Travolta at 8:30 Wednesday morning,” Meyers recalls, referring, of course, to his job as the randy royal King Henry VIII, in the hit Showtime historical soap The Tudors.

“There was no time to meet Travolta beforehand, nor, needless to say, to do a read-through,” he says. “I had just time enough for a costume change, and my accent. And away we went. It helped that I was working with John straight away, though, because meeting him like that, not knowing what to expect, mirrored the experience of my character.”

From Paris With Love, a mayhem-fueled shoot-’em-up in the City of Light, comes by way of director Pierre Morel, who turned Liam Neeson into an action hero with 2008′s sleeper hit Taken. And now Meyers, better known for his tumescent Tudor, for the criminal-minded social climber he played in Woody Allen’s Match Point, for his uncanny impersonation of Elvis Presley in the CBS miniseries Elvis, is tearing down flights of stairs, firing automatic weapons this way and that, and caroming around Paris in the company of a kickboxing madman. Travolta’s Charlie Wax is a maverick, to say the least. He is also one of the Agency’s top operatives.

“Of course, it was tiring,” Meyers says. “You’re making a movie, you’re working 12, 14 hours a day, there’s no denying that. But I had so much fun that the adrenaline kept me going.”

Born in Dublin, and an actor since he was expelled from high school, Meyers, now 32, says he and Travolta hit it off from the get-go. And since From Paris With Love is a buddy picture, it helps that the buddies have chemistry.

“We’re actors, and what do actors do when they’re hanging around together waiting for the scene to start?” he says. “We talk shop. We compare notes, tell stories. And John has stories to tell. He knew Marlon Brando, possibly the greatest actor of them all…

“I wasn’t even alive when John Travolta started his career, and I was 5 when Saturday Night Fever came out. And that wasn’t for me at 5, but I still remember watching the way he walked, swinging that paint can down the sidewalk at the beginning of the film… That walk is iconic. John Travolta is iconic.”

In From Paris With Love, which opens in theaters on Friday, Meyers plays a mild-mannered Danny Glover type to Travolta’s nut-job Mel Gibson. It’s a tried-and-true formula, and one that producer Luc Besson neatly recycles. Like Jean-Pierre Melville 40 years before him, Besson, who also dreamed up Taken and The Transporter, to name but a few, takes a sturdy American movie genre and gives it an artful Gallic twist.

“Luc is involved, hands-on, in every project that he does,” Meyers reports. “But at the same time, he makes two or three films simultaneously, so he’s a busy guy and he’s always writing. He’ll turn up on his motorcycle unannounced, in a track suit. Luc is that type of guy. He’s beyond relaxed. He’s a super-intelligent guy, a complete workhorse, and you’d see him every so often.

“You knew that you were taken care of, but you were there to shoot a movie. We’re all grown folk, and we take care of ourselves.

“So myself and John, we’re off shooting something. Literally shooting something – or being blown this way or that.”

The villains in From Paris With Love include a clan of Chinese drug dealers and a cell of Middle Eastern terrorists, brooding and armed with suicide bombs.

Villains, ethnic stereotyping – that, too, is an old formula.

“When I met Luc and Pierre, I said to them, ‘Look, this has got to be tongue-in-cheek, it’s got to be as much fun as possible.’ The subjects that it touches – you know, a young girl OD-ing on coke, and these terrorists – it’s topics to fuel the action. Yeah, very heavy topics, but you don’t want to get bogged down in those. You’ve got to put your Lethal Weapon goggles on for this…

“And as for the terrorists – terrorists are stereotyped everywhere, you know what I mean? They’re just the bad guy of the moment.”

Emmy-winning series The Tudors is back for a second series on BBC Two, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the young King Henry VIII.

The series chronicles the Tudors’ reign in the style of glossy 1980s soap Dynasty – a glamorous take on the family which ruled England and Wales from 1485-1603.

Rhys Meyers, 31, plays one of history’s most charismatic yet despotic monarchs.

The Irish-born actor insists producers took a risk making a drama set in the Tudor era.

“TV shows which tend to be successful are to do with contemporary life, and this is so far removed from life as we know it,” he says.

“Physically, I’m nothing like the pictures of Henry and therein lies the boldness. We needed to do something to get a contemporary audience watching, to draw in people in their 20s and 30s.”

‘Prudish’

In order to achieve just that, there have been some complaints from TV critics that the series has been “sexed-up” in every sense of the phrase.

There is a lot of semi-nudity – but it is shown to a post-watershed audience.

According to Rhys Meyers, however, its detractors have failed to note an inescapable fact of history – Henry had six wives, and many mistresses.

“And Elizabeth Taylor had eight husbands and that’s 20th Century Hollywood, not just 16th Century England. Sometimes I think people are just prudish.”

If royalty was the equivalent of celebrity in that age, Rhys Meyers knows all about the psychology and pressure of that. He tries to relate his character to the modern day.

“Henry was never supposed to become King,” he explains. “He was the spare, he was Prince Harry now, if you like.

“His elder brother Arthur, our William – he was supposed to be King, but he died. Henry was 14. Nowadays we’d never expect someone of that age to deal with that.”

Written by the scholarly Michael Hirst – who also wrote Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett – The Tudors’ lavish production budget attracted names like Peter O’Toole. He plays the Pope who is asked to grant the King a divorce.

The Tudors has gained a lot of fans in North America – one wrote in to a newspaper to ask what happens to Anne Boleyn – but Rhys Meyers warns that people should not look to it for a history lesson, as it focuses on personalities, not politics.

I have to draw on his personality and I had to research deeply into the flaws of the man
Jonathan Rhys Meyers

“It might not appeal to an older, more critical audience. We have to condense everything by about ten years,” says Rhys Meyers.

“For example, the whole Anne Boleyn thing happened when Henry was into his 30s – we set it in his 20s. Otherwise we’d end up with about 50 hours of television that nobody would want to watch.”

It would also be impossible to make the slight Rhys Meyers appear like the ruddy, overweight King of Holbein’s later famous portraits.

“With Henry, I don’t look at any pictures of him,” he says. “I have to draw on his personality and I had to research deeply into the flaws of the man.”

The Tudor monarchs, which include Elizabeth I, have already gained younger fans from films like Elizabeth and The Other Boleyn Girl.

Rhys Meyers insists Henry VIII is equally fascinating, but he certainly doesn’t play him as England’s stereotypical merry monarch chewing on a chicken leg.

“Do I see Henry as a good guy?” he asks. “I don’t play him as a good man. I think he was a smart man, and a charismatic one, but his bad deeds outweigh his good ones.

“He gave his country a lot of pain with the Reformation. People had to choose between their head and their hearts, his way or the Pope’s way, and God help them if they chose the Pope’s way.”

‘Sexy’ history

The second series starts with the beginnings of the Church’s split with Rome as Henry tries to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry his then mistress, Anne Boleyn.

“The simple fact is that Henry wanted a younger, more beautiful wife, who could bear him sons and this is a man who was used to getting everything he wanted.

“Very few people in the world, apart from a few dictators, know what that feels like these days. Certainly no-one in Britain has held that kind of power for centuries.”

The Tudors seems to have achieved what it set out to – to make history accessible and sexy to a younger generation.

A third season is already under way in the US and a fourth has been commissioned, with Jonathan Rhys Meyers committed to playing Henry.

Certainly there is plenty of scope for this one to run on – there are at least four more wives to get through yet.

Who else to play a swaggering drunken Henry VIII than the swaggering (but only occasionally) drunken Jonathan Rhys Meyers?

Jonathan Rhys Meyers walks into the Live photo shoot dressed in a pair of snakeskin cowboy boots, jeans, a tight V-necked T-shirt and a deconstructed designer jacket. Heads immediately turn.

Is he drunk? Is he on the rails? How long will he stay? Rhys Meyers has ‘previous’. We’re all fascinated to know how today will turn out.

In April last year, his publicist announced that ‘after a non-stop succession of filming, Jonathan Rhys Meyers has entered an alcohol treatment programme’.

Hopefully, he got his money back: a few months later his girlfriend Reena Hammer declared they were taking a break from each other and that ‘part of the reason is that Jonny is dealing with his problems with alcohol’.

Later in 2007, he was arrested at Dublin airport. Staff had refused to let him stagger on board a flight to London because he was too inebriated. He collapsed to the floor, allegedly swore at an airport worker and was arrested and charged with public drunkenness and breach of the peace.

He sobered up, got a flight the next day and was all over the papers again after being photographed drinking a can of cider in the street at 10am; it emerged that his beloved mother, who he spoke to almost every day, had passed away just hours earlier.

He’s unpredictable, too.

‘Jonny has always been on the brink of going really off the rails,’ said a friend, quoted in one of the innumerable profiles written about him at the time.

‘He was supposed to be heading to New York for a publicity junket, but he left a party with Lindsay Lohan and no one could find him. He vanished for two days. But that’s Jonny for you. He had a difficult childhood and he’s screwed up and wild.’

Will he, I wonder, remember our last, strange meeting?

It was at the wrap party for Woody Allen’s Match Point. Two of the film’s producers had been assigned the job of keeping him on the straight and narrow.

‘It’s been a bloody nightmare, but worth it,’ one of them told me.

Jonathan and I shared a cab to a nearby Mayfair club. When we got there, his eyes darted and his body fidgeted like a caged ferret. After two drinks he was immediately sloshed, and he disappeared.

And today? He’s bang on time. He rapidly introduces himself to everyone in the room: the photographer, the stylist’s assistant, the tea boy and the dog.

‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’m Jonathan Rhys Meyers. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Right – let’s get on with it. What would you like me to wear? What colour scheme would you like?’

Very much sober and reliable, then.

Later, in the café at the studio, I ask what all that drama was last year. With a flash of his improbably blue-green eyes, he replies in a soft Irish accent, tainted by a slight American intonation.

‘I haven’t even thought about drinking since my mother passed away. Drinking is not the way forward for me at all.

‘I never even drank till I was 25 anyway. I was in Thailand on my own, filming. I was a little bit lonely and I started drinking.

‘Since I was 27 I must have drunk maybe a dozen-and-a-half times – but when I do, I’m like Bambi. I’m all over the place, hopeless, like a 16-year-old kid. People notice.

‘Now drink doesn’t fit into where I want to go. I want to do something useful with my life. Drinking is not synonymous with that. And I don’t put any emphasis on it.

‘To be honest, I just leave it alone and hope people will, too, but I don’t really care. The whole drinking thing with me has been blown out of all proportion anyway.

‘I kind of like people having this idea that I’m this wild, rebellious guy. But the reality is that I’m not, and I’m not quite sure I want to reveal how boring my life is. Of course, as a young Irish actor you’re tarred before you start. It’s the enduring cliché.’

He should know. His idols are Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris and Richard Burton. Like them, he delivers edgy, troubled, enigmatic characters with devastating aplomb, because he is edgy, troubled and enigmatic.

He has presence – he is most definitely more handsome in person than he is on film – and there is something both fragile and explosive about him, and he has used this dichotomy to great effect.

After his breakthrough role alongside Keira Knightley in Bend It Like Beckham, he won a Golden Globe for his dazzling turn as a young and vulnerable Elvis Presley, outshone Tom Cruise as an undercover agent in Mission: Impossible III and excelled opposite Ewan McGregor as a conniving, bisexual glam-rock star in Todd Haynes’s underground cult hit Velvet Goldmine.

I would urge anyone to see him reprise his role as Henry VIII in the second series of The Tudors. Rhys Meyers’s persona of a regal, and perhaps slightly feral, rake makes for a brilliantly paranoid, charismatic and dangerous king of England.

‘I thought I was always going to come over as arrogant and precocious, because young kings were arrogant and precocious,’ he says.

‘Henry wasn’t even expected to wipe his own bottom. There was a man who was known as the Groom of the Stool and he was very honoured to do the job. Anybody that has that privilege from birth is going to be pretentious and arrogant and think he was a living god.

‘When I took on the part, I was concerned I didn’t have any physical resemblance to the character.

‘But Lady Antonia Fraser, who is an authority on Tudor England, thought the only part of my performance that was disappointing was that I didn’t have red hair.

‘To be honest, the reason I didn’t have red hair was because it looked terrible. I look absolutely ridiculous in a red wig.’

Rhys Meyers was born prematurely, in 1977, and was immediately christened because it was presumed he would soon die from a heart defect. He left hospital seven months later.

When the family moved to Cork soon after, his parents’ relationship disintegrated. His younger brothers Jamie and Paul went to live with his father, a musician, while his mother raised him and his brother Alan in a tiny council house. He was expelled from his Catholic school for truancy.

‘I had a disadvantaged youth. But then so do 95 per cent of the people on this planet, so I’m just one of many.

‘I just happen to have been lucky that my life has turned out this way.

‘The way I see it, I’ve had two separate lives. I was kicked out of school when I was 15 and I’m about to be 31, so half my life I’ve been different from that boy.

‘When I look back at the person who grew up in Cork, I’m not sure I even recognise him. Basically, I spent a lot of time playing pool when I should have been in school. And eventually I was expelled. Not because I was a bad boy; I just didn’t want to go.

‘But I’d rather it hadn’t happened, because it’s not good for a kid to read an article and think it’s OK to be expelled – it’s not something to be proud of. The Christian Brothers did what they did – they weren’t as well-trained as teachers today. I was just one of those kids who trouble followed.’

His career began when casting agents spotted him at a Cork pool hall and encouraged him to audition for a movie. He didn’t get the part, but ended up in a Knorr soup commercial.

His first proper roles were as Liam Neeson’s assassin in Michael Collins and a rogue in Stephen Poliakoff’s The Tribe.

‘We had to do this three-way sex thing – me, Jeremy Northam and Anna Friel. I’d never done a three-way sex scene with a man and a woman, but I knew that Jeremy was very uptight about it, so I tried my best to make him even more uncomfortable by grabbing his backside. We Celts love the wind-up. It’s what we do best.’

Bizarrely, he then had to kiss Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine.

‘Even though a huge amount of the female population might think that snogging Ewan McGregor is the best thing that might ever happen, for me it was not the most pleasant on-screen snog I’ve ever had. But at least I was his first.’

After playing creepy Steerpike in the BBC series Gormenghast, he bought his mother a house.

‘It was nice to be able to do it,’ he says, his intense eyes suddenly welling up.

‘It was one of those things that sons have to do. It wasn’t anything special and I wasn’t looking for brownie points. I just felt that it was a way for me to invest my money into somebody that I loved very, very much.’

He’s probably bigger in the States than he is in the UK now, thanks to his lead role in the US TV series Elvis.

‘The thing about that was that I never saw Elvis as this massive superstar.

‘I saw him as a kid who used whatever he could to get out of the situation he was in, but the problem was that he brought that situation with him and it suffocated him.

‘He was filming King Creole in New Orleans and really wanted to eat at this very famous restaurant called Antoine’s. All the guys were getting suited and booted ready to go out to this restaurant, then Colonel Parker came in and said, “Elvis, you can’t go to Antoine’s – your fame is so big you just can’t go. You can’t leave this room.”

‘He was 23 and that was the first time he realised the size of his fame, and that he thrived on it. Because believe me, all actors and performers, including myself, thrive on attention; otherwise we wouldn’t do what we do.

‘I read a lot of little snippets about people saying, (he puts on a luvvie accent) “I just want my private life”.

‘But they can’t have it! It’s that simple. You’ve got the money and the fame, but you’ve had to give up that one thing – so accept that, as that’s how your life is going to be. If you don’t like it, find something else to do.’

He isn’t easily impressed with the Hollywood machine.

‘The business is full of young lads from Cork and Ridley Scott from Tyneside and Russell Crowe from Down Under and Ewan from Perth and Jude from London and Colin from Dublin, all of whom grew up in really ordinary situations but have this really extraordinary job.

‘They may wear fancier clothes and have prettier girlfriends, but if you look back, there’s that pudding-headed haircut and the school uniform on somebody’s mantelpiece.

‘I don’t get invited to all those glamorous parties anyway. And if I did I’m not sure I’d want to go.

‘I’m not quite sure I have the bravado that these 23-year-old young bucks out there have, thinking it’s so exciting and so fabulous. But very soon they’ll become jaded, and I’ll be 45 with a beer gut and a Ferrari checking out the young chicks.’

He brings us back to Henry.

‘That’s what he was like. He only left Catherine of Aragon because he wanted a new young wife.

‘It’s like when you get some man who has married his wife and makes millions, and when he reaches 45 he starts dating a 22-year-old model.

‘But it wasn’t so easy for Henry. For him everything was a matter of state. But I have a lot of admiration for him. He built England’s navy. He decided to give England jurisdiction over their religion and how their spirituality was viewed.

‘And yes, he did have six wives, but six marriages won’t make a man happy, so anybody who’s had six wives isn’t going to be walking around jollified.

‘I actually think he was less of a lad than people believe. He had a lot of very hard, very frightening experiences as a young boy living in that court.

‘His father put down a rebellion when he was a child and he and his mother were locked in the Tower Of London for seven days and didn’t know whether they were going to be executed or not.

‘People died all around him, his brother included.

‘And in those days war was very personal. You stood there with this big sword and heard the tear of the flesh as you killed your man, personally, yourself. It took a lot of bravery for a man to stand opposite another man in a field and have it out mano a mano.’

And the endless sex scenes?

‘Yes, there’s a lot of sex in The Tudors. But in England the sun goes down at 4:30 in the afternoon and there are only so many legs of lamb you can eat of an evening.

‘Sex was the highlight of the evening. And it helped warm the bed.’

With those intriguing remarks, we end our conversation.

‘People have this perception of me, and they always will,’ he told me earlier.

‘But I do the best I can with what I have. I think you have to have a certain dark and a certain light within you to be interesting.’

Relieved to have spent several sober hours with Rhys Meyers, I now know exactly what he means.