‘I enjoy exploring the edges of morality’
As he stars in a dark new superhero series, Jeremy Irons tells Jane Mulkerrins why he can’t resist controversy in both life and work
Jeremy Irons is discussing the brutality of showbusiness in his distinctive, velvety tones. “There can never be equality,” he declares. “Some have more luck than others, some have more talents and some have more opportunity. I would say to any young person: life is not fair and, certainly, our business is not fair. But that’s the nature of it, so we have to put up with it.” He pauses, throws one long leg over the opposite knee, and takes a pensive drag on his roll-up cigarette. “I’m rather glad it’s not fair,” he proclaims on the exhale. “I think if it was fair, it would be incredibly boring.”
Certainly Irons, now 71, hasn’t experienced the precarious side of acting. Privately educated (Sherborne), classically trained (Bristol Old Vic), he enjoyed early success in the theatre, before rising to prominence as Charles Ryder in the adored 1981 adaptation of Evelyn
Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for ITV. He is one of the few actors to have won the triple crown of acting, with an Emmy, a Tony and an Academy Award (for his role as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune in 1990). Few can pull off villainous but seductive moral ambiguity quite like Irons.
He also has something of a reputation for being tricky in interviews; Lynn Barber famously wrote: “I don’t want to give a cool appraisal of Jeremy Irons. I just want to boil him in oil.” Perhaps age has mellowed him, but the man sitting in front of me today is thoroughly charming, even complimenting me on my dress. We’re in a hotel room in Gramercy Park, New York, and Irons looks trim and dandyish in a longline checked jacket and matching waistcoat, a polo neck and skinny jeans; a very dapperly dressed bohemian. We’re smoking a couple of cigarettes he has just rolled for us, made with elegant black cigarette papers and a thrilling sense of transgression (Smoking! Indoors!). Transgression is very much Irons’s thing. He has long been famed for his unconventional approach to his 41-year marriage to Sinéad Cusack, which is widely speculated to be open. “I enjoy pushing boundaries,” he says. But only in his work these days, he insists. “I live a fairly circumspect life, and it is very interesting to explore the edges of life, of behaviours, of morality, and to see why those edges exist.”
He has certainly done that in several of his performances, including playing literature’s most notorious paedophile, Humbert Humbert, in the remake of Lolita.
His latest role, as the enigmatic Adrian Veidt in HBO’S new highconcept series, Watchmen, also explores some serious ethical edges. Created by Damon Lindelof – the acrobatic brain behind Lost – the series is based on the graphic novel of the mid-eighties, and set in a parallel world where superheroes are considered vigilantes, the US won the Vietnam War, and Watergate was never exposed. Where the paranoia of the original story was fuelled by its Cold War context, Lindelof has made racial tensions and the rise of the white supremacist movement the central themes for the contemporary adaptation. The main story – starring Regina King, as an undercover detective/vigilante, Sister Night – is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
‘I’ve never loved acting – I like creating characters more than performing, and I think as you get older the thrill goes’
where a project is being trialled for the police force to wear masks protecting their identity when apprehending and interrogating offenders, but Irons’s character is far removed, sequestered in a castle in a much more green and pleasant realm (his scenes were largely filmed in Wales). If Irons looks very much at home in the stately surroundings, it might be because he has his own castle in Co Cork. Could they not have saved him a commute and filmed there, I ask. “No, too small, too windy,” he says. Entirely unfamiliar with Watchmen, Irons decided to take the risk after Lindelof “talked at great speed and enthusiasm over lunch in LA”.
He says it is always about instinct. “You’ve got to go [with your] gut,” he says. “Gut, gut, gut. I think gut on everything – I always have.”
While this attitude has served him well in his career choices, it has, one could argue, landed him in hot water in other areas of his life. “My instinct as a person is to say what I think and to be devil’s advocate, but I don’t do that publicly any more,” he admits. “It is just a gorgon’s head that you want to avoid.”
I’m about to press him further on self-censorship, when his longsuffering publicist, who is sitting at the other end of the room, chimes in. She doesn’t see where this is going. I explain that I believe self-censorship is a pertinent topic when talking about Irons’s career choices, as well as navigating the rigours of being a public person. “Things are taken out of context, and I just don’t know that it’s going to be verbatim and how it’s going to be interpreted,” says the publicist. She asks if we can go back to talking about Watchmen.
Gallantly, Irons backs me up. “It is clear that if one’s going to do a 40-minute interview about a show that hasn’t been seen, it’s going to be quite difficult to stick solely to [the show],” he points out. I am charmed to within an inch of my life. “But don’t get me in the s---,” he warns me.
I retreat to safer territory: does he still love acting? “I’ve never loved acting,” he replies. “I like creating and fashioning characters; I like the creative aspect of it more than the performing part of it,” he says. “I think as you get older the thrill of acting goes a bit, the thrill of filming is lessened.”
But the workload is lighter too. “As you get older you get asked to do a bit less, because you’re harder to cast, I suppose – naturally film heroes tend to be in their 20s, 30s, 40s and I’m just past that. And I’m very happy with that,” he shrugs. “It’s harder to winkle me out to work these days than it used to be.”
Such is his ambivalence about the profession that he strongly discouraged the youngest of his and Cusack’s two sons, 33-year-old Max (who starred in The Wife and The Little Drummer Girl), not to follow them into the industry. “I wasn’t encouraged [either]. I was told, ‘If there’s anything else you can do, do it.’ And I think that’s good advice,” he says. “But he really wanted to give it a shot and is amazingly good, much better than I was at his age.
“The business is very different now to how it was when I was starting out. I think, for young men, it’s more like it was for young women. If they were pretty, they’d have their opportunity to become a starlet, but a lot of them would fall by the wayside. Now, it’s the same with boys.” Fortunately, the younger Irons is incredibly pretty and works as a model as well as an actor.
I ask what he believes to be the secret of his own career longevity. “I rarely go on a bus,” he admits. “But if I do wait for a bus and there’s not a bus coming, I’ll make a cigarette and light the cigarette and I know the bus will come. I’m a little bit like that with my career,” he smiles. “I’m getting on with something I’m really interested in doing and then suddenly the phone calls come. So that would always be my advice: make sure you’ve got an interesting life that you don’t want to leave.”
Watchmen airs on Sky Atlantic and Now TV from Monday