I’ve let myself down by hitting the bottle again
After latest relapse, Tudors st ar Jonathan Rhys Meyers admits: ( alcohol ) ... and I don’t even like the t aste of
HE H his public HAS displays become of as drunkenness famous for a as for his award- winning perf formances in TV hits such as T The Tudors and Elvis. The latest episode of his battle with the bottle played out at a Los Angeles airport earlier this m month where he was photographed msf surrounded by police after a midf flight boozy row with his wife. And today, in a brutally frank a admission, Jonathan Rhys Meyers accepts: ‘I’ve let myself down by relapsing, and it’s my responsibility. Nobody else is to blame.’ In an exclusive interview with Event magazine, the 41-year-old reveals that he did not drink until the age of 26 and says: ‘I actually don’t like the taste of alcohol.’ He explains: ‘I would be known as somebody who relapses with problem drinking, not alcoholism. I don’t suffer from alcoholism – I suffer from an allergy to alcohol every time I drink it.
‘When I drink, the consequences are so devastating that it is a problem,’ he says. ‘But I never need a drink. It’s not something I crave.’
Airports have become the scene of the actor’s darkness moments. As well as the incident in LA, he was arrested for drunkenness at terminals in Dublin in 2007 and Paris in 2011. ‘ People who go through this look for things in their life that trigger them,’ he says.
‘And airports are a trigger for me, because they make you sit there for three hours, you can’t smoke and you’re surrounded by alcohol. That is not an excuse, there’s never an excuse for me to drink.’
The Irish actor is now seeking professional help, as he has done many times before. ‘I’ve been at meetings with politicians, High Court judges, one of the richest men in the world and a homeless man,’ he says. The actor hopes public attention will now focus on his new film, Damascus Cover, a political thriller in which he plays an Israeli secret agent tasked with smuggling a chemical- weapons scientist out of Syria.
It features the last big screen performance of Sir John Hurt, who died in January last year. Did Hurt give him any advice? ‘Yeah,’ says Rhys Meyers. ‘He said, “Give up drinking.” ’