After a mere 40 years in the business, Jeremy Irons has finally made it big:
he has just recorded a voice part on The Simpsons.
"I play a pompous bar rat," he says. "I read the script when it
was sent to me and it said,'The Bar Rat speaks in a very sonorous voice.
'And then it said in brackets, 'Think Jeremy Irons.'"
He permits himself a sonorous snicker at how he is perceived and then says that in his acting roles he tries to avoid the stereotype where possible.
The problem is that in person he could not be more Jeremy Irons.
Our interview takes place in his garden. He unfurls himself horizontal, barefoot, on a bench beneath a pergola, in a white rollneck, bearded, tugging on a cigarillo. It is a wonderful role that just happens to require zero acting.
What he is not is in any way sly, paranoid or badly behaved, as many of his most famous characters have been. For his latest role, he's bagged another one: Irons is playing Pope AlexanderVI in The Borgias on Sky Atlantic, a man renowned throughout history as one of the most crooked, grasping philanderers ever to wear the mitre.
As fate would have it, the last major TV adaptation of the Borgias story was
released in 1981, when it went head-to-head with ITV's Brideshead Revisited,
starring Jeremy Irons. The latter was one of the high watermarks of
television; the former was blown off the screen. "Oh dear," says
Irons when I apprise him of this irony.
This new Borgias, produced on a vast scale by the American cable network
Showtime, is Irons's first major television series since Brideshead 30 years
ago. It was written and directed by Neil Jordan, another movie veteran who
directed The Crying Game, and it was Jordan who persuaded Irons to take the
part.
"Neil's a film writer, a great novelist, a great director. So there's a
good pedigree there. I'd also been watching what had been happening to
American television: better things are being made on TV than in independent
film, which is dying through lack of funding. And in my business mind I
thought, 'Film actors working on television, is it a difficult crossover?'
Well no, there doesn't seem to be any stigma now. So I thought why not?"
It helped, of course, that for an actor with Irons's in-built regal sneer,
Rodrigo Borgia is a gift of a part. In The Borgias Irons takes the gift and
banks it - he is electric from the first scene. His Borgia is a man riven
with inconsistencies, but never the pantomime villain his family name now
represents.
"There's one book where the author lists the adjectives used to describe
Rodrigo by all other writers. And it's a rainbow. It starts with Great
Church Reformer, Great Organiser, Great Military Leader, Wonderful
Company... and it goes all the way down to Fornicator, Seducer, Murderer...
You begin to see this very complicated and rather extraordinary man who
isn't at all what history has handed down to us.And with the luxury of nine
hours of television - and we're going to do more - you can find out how that
all links up. I've never had a character I can explore in so much depth,"
he adds." Not since Brideshead."
That is quite a statement for an actor who, since Brideshead, has starred in
films including The Mission, Dead Ringers and Reversal of Fortune, for which
he won the Best Actor Oscar in 1991. But he says that starring in Adrian
Lyne's 1997 adaptation of Nabokov's Lolita damaged his reputation.
"Lolita was a great wound in the side for me. I stuck my neck out maybe
further than I should have and castigated the studio for not getting behind
it. A lot of people didn't like the fact I made him [Humbert Humbert]
likeable. But he's likeable in the book. I'm doing the same with Rodrigo.
I've never disliked a character I've played. I've always tried to find the
humanity and the reasons for what he does."
These are plainly the thoughts of an actor from the old school - one who
spends more time thinking about character and motive than their own
prominence on the poster.
On The Borgias, Irons is surrounded by a slew of young talent - François
Arnaud, Holliday Grainger, Aidan Alexander - but he says he doesn't envy
them one jot.
"It was a better time to be a young actor when I started out. There was a
repertory system where you could go and practise. My son [Max Irons] is just
starting out now and he's 25. I keep saying to him go and do theatre and
he's trying, he's done a couple of things. But films are just saying, 'We
want you! We don't know how long we want you for - but we want you!' So one
has the possibility now of being thrust very high, having no roots and
withering in the sun."
As for Irons, he says that at 62 and with his children educated he is able to
be more choosy about his roles.
He'd like to get to grips with some of the
big Shakespearean parts - "I think maybe a Lear is waiting for me in
the next 10 years" - but he seems quite content in his repose.
"I find myself with less need to work," he says." A bit less
appetite I suppose, a bit fussier. But I could live for another 20, 30
years, so one can't stop. And nor would I want to. Because when the work's
good and fun there's nothing like it. And I have to say, The Borgias is both
good and fun."