Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Actor relishes a power role

Although they lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Borgias, the subject of a new nine-part Showtime miniseries that began Sunday, were a family made for TV. 

The Borgias were rich, ruthless, scheming and corrupt - and so sexually voracious that if you believe the rumors, they slept with everyone, including one another.

Mario Puzo, who worked on a novel about them, called the Borgias the Corleones of the Renaissance. 

They also resemble "The Sopranos" a little. Imagine if Tony, instead of running a garbage hauling business, had bought himself the papacy.

"The Borgias," which cost $45 million to make, was created, written and produced by film director Neil Jordan, who also directed several episodes.

It's Showtime's latest entry in what is becoming a high-stakes game on cable TV now that it's no longer enough merely to show Hollywood movies or the odd sporting event. 

If you want to sell cable subscriptions these days, you need not just original programming but a long-running, franchise-defining series such as "The Tudors," Showtime's recent hit.

A bankable star doesn't hurt either. 

In the new series, the Borgia paterfamilias, Rodrigo - who became Pope Alexander VI - is played by Jeremy Irons. He's not exactly typecast.

To judge from his famous portrait by Cristofano dell'Altissimo, the historical Rodrigo, corpulent and hatchet nosed, looked as if he had been inflated with a tire pump. 

At the time of his death, or so the legend goes, he was so bloated and debauched that when his body was inserted into the coffin, someone had to jump on the lid to get it shut.

"When we first talked about the part, Jeremy was worried that he didn't have that bulbous weight," Jordan said recently, speaking by phone from his house in Ireland. 

"I told him that if we can get this guy properly situated, torn between God and politics, the weight wouldn't matter."

Irons, still elegantly handsome at 62, doesn't look much like Pope Alexander. 

He nevertheless has, both on screen and in person, a slightly detached, regal quality; a darting, glinting intelligence; and occasionally an air of weary melancholy. 

All are very useful papal attributes.

He also has a long history of playing characters who are morally ambiguous if not outright villainous: Humbert Humbert in "Lolita"; the deranged twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers"; and the accused wife poisoner Claus von Buelow in "Reversal of Fortune" (for which he won an Academy Award). 

And with that deep, rumbling voice, like an organ echoing in a cathedral, he sounds the way a Renaissance pope should sound: the sibilant S's, the luxurious drawn-out vowels suggesting knowledge acquired outside the seminary.

The roles of characters who are strange or morally enigmatic have come to him, he went on, partly by accident - or because he has a reputation for playing them. It's also partly because he has sought them out.

"Certainly they attract me," he said. "I'm always interested in good and evil, who's a good person, who's a bad person, believing, really, that we're all rather gray."

No one is grayer than Rodrigo Borgia, who bought the papacy in a rigged election, had numerous mistresses and fathered four children - yet was also a skilled diplomat and patron of the arts. 

Jordan said he thought the whole family has suffered from bad press because "a lot of the history was written by Rodrigo's successors."

Irons said that in researching the part, he made a list of all the qualities attributed to Rodrigo Borgia. 

"The list goes all the way from generous man, wonderful company, a great organizer to poisoner, cruel and despotic, all the worst adjectives you can think of."