Source: Trailer Addict

Another quick clip of Jonathan on the red carpet signing autographs:

They’ll be broadcast in the UK on February 21 starting on BBC Three at 7:30pm for red carpet highlights. Then at 9pm on BBC One will be the full awards ceremony. BBC America will also be airing the awards ceremony starting at 8pm and repeating at 10:30pm this Sunday.

And reminder that the Irish Film & Television Awards are airing live on RTÉ One at 9:30pm tonight. It’s unknown if Jonathan will be attending.

• Los Angeles Times
• Arizona Republic
• AMC News
• Tribeca Film

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?”

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.

And the CW Sacramento, California station has a video interview up with Jonathan as well. Be sure to check it out. Jonathan tells a hilarious story.

Source: atteniger

And thanks to Accidental Sexiness, watch Jonathan’s interview on the Martha Stewart Show. Watch both clips while you can! Jonathan confirms that he is NOT on Twitter. As mentioned before, all those posing as Jonathan on these sites are imposters. Please be aware.

Also thanks to 59walnut56, hearing word that Jonathan may be appearing with co-star John Travolta on BET’s 106 & Park show tomorrow. John Travolta is scheduled but Jonathan might be joining him.