How you know actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers might depend on whether you’ve seen him in any of the movies he’s made over the past thirty years or whether you know him more for television shows like The Tudors and Vikings. On the movie side, Meyers mayk have become known from his role in Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, the classic Brit sports movies Bend It Like Beckham, or Woody Allen’s Match Point. Meyers has also done his fair share of big studio franchises with an appearance in 2006’s Mission: Impossible III, opposite Tom Cruise.
The reason for Rhys Meyers doing interviews recently was because a few years back he appeared in a neo-noir crime-thriller called American Night, written and directed by Alessio Della Valle, playing John Kaplan, an art forger who is dealing with the disappearance of Andy Warhol’s “Pink Marilyn” that was going to a mobster. It puts Meyers’ character into a relationship with Paz Vega’s Sarah Flores, which leads to some steamy sex scenes.
The movie got lost in the shuffle during the COVID pandemic, but it’s been on Hulu since then, and Cinema Daily US had a chance to speak with Rhys Meyers about his decision to make the movie.
“What made me do the film in the first place was I really wanted to work with Paz Vega and Emile Hirsch,” the actor told us. “I like them both as people and as actors. I like the character of John Kaplan because he’s never quite on terra firma, he’s always white water rafting, and nothing really ever works out for him, and those are quite fun characters to play, I suppose. Comic-tragic characters are quite fun to play. The only time he’s ever on terra firma is when he’s on his back at the end of the movie, and I think that’s a nice place for him to end up anyway.”
“The reason I’m doing the press now is because the director asked me to,” the actor admits with a laugh. “Unfortunately, a few of the projects that I did like The Yakuza Princess, Edge of the World, A Good Neighbour, The Twelfth Man, they all kind of fell into that time, where all these movies came out in 2019, ‘20, ‘21, ‘22. That was a very difficult time to have made films that were then going to come out in that time, because of course, there were no cinemas to do it. They had to rush to make streaming deals, and of course, things got lost. Because they had to go on to streaming deals, the editing budget started to go way down for some projects, where they just wanted to f*cking bandage it up and get it out. They did this obviously with lots of projects, not only small independent films, which I usually work in, but also for big-time studio films.”
“They had to find an audience very quickly for an audience that were no longer able to transport themselves to a cinema,” Meyers continues. “That was obviously a difficult time to bring your film out in, because things get missed and you don’t get the same amount of attention. You don’t get to have a premiere and hype people up and get them more interested in the project to see it. Things got missed.”
Since Meyers mentioned doing more indepedent films, we wondered whether he intentionally eschewed doing bigger studio movies like Mission: Impossible III and preferred doing independent films. “No, I’m an actor, and I do the films that I get,” he responded frankly. “It’s not like I get to choose as much as I would like to choose. You do the projects that are the best projects offered to you at that time. That’s what you do as an actor. It’s much simpler and more straightforward like that. I’d like to say that it was more convoluted, more determined than this. Because of that change in streaming things, there may be films I would rather I hadn’t done. Sometimes, you do films just because you want to take up time. There are many films, if I had my choice, just talking straight as an actor, I may only have done a dozen films in my career. It’s different as an actor: it’s a job, it’s a career, so sometimes you’re going to do things that are not things that you really want to do, but you have to do because one has to work, and I’m a father.”
Meyers did sign on to act in American Night despite not being familiar with Della Vale before joining the movie. “I didn’t know his work because that was his first film, so at least I knew the work of Paz because I was very impressed with Sex and Lucia, and I was very impressed with Emilio Hirsch in Into the Wild, of course. I’d seen their work. I’d never seen Alessio’s work, so sometimes, you take a chance on a first-time director. The first-time director, of course, has to make his first film. They’ve got to break their bones somewhere, and make their bones, funnily enough. That’s usually how it works out. He was an unknown quantity, but I knew the work of the other two, which is why I wanted to work with them.”
“I did like Paz,” Meyers says about his scene-mate for a number of steamy scenes. “She has that old-world Castillian energy, but she’s also quite liberated as a human being. She’s a smart cookie. And then I’m very fond of Emile. He’s got that quiet intelligence that I like in an actor.”
Although the movie does mostly take place in the States, the filmmaker’s Italian background and the logo for Italian production giant Rei might make some thing that the movie was filmed in Italy. In fact, it was shot mostly in Bulgaria, though Hirsch did shoot some stuff in Italy. Meyers has been acting for so long that he’s comfortable filming wherever his work takes him with no concerns about the language spoken by the crew. “I don’t tend to worry about language barriers ever, because I’ve had to work in different languages. You have to get lingual very, very quickly in places. If I’m working in Spain or Italy, after a week or two, my Italian starts to get better, my Spanish gets better. If I’m in France, the same, my French will get better. The 12th Man, I did the entire film in German, so you just surround yourself with different people, and you just start to pick up the linguistics as you go.”
When asked whether languages was something he was always good at or it was something he picked up just by the nature of being an actor, Meyers responded, “You’ve got to work on it. No one’s that good. Because I play music [sings the notes ‘A, B, C, D’], that makes it a little bit easier for me. If you’re musical, learning languages is easier. There’s no doubt about that. That’s hands down.”
Mentioning that he plays music, wanted us to know more about Meyers’ musical background, since he had appeared in quite a few music-based films over the years, going all the way back to Todd Haynes’ classic, Velvet Goldmine in 1998. Meyers elaborated on how that interest in music developed. “For many years I knew just the basic chords. Just playing the guitar, you can play a few tunes and you know the basic chords. I had to play a little bit in Velvet Goldmine, and I certainly had to sing, but then I had to do the same thing for Elvis, then I had to do the same for August Rush, and then for London Town, playing Joe Strummer. I had to perform and record all the songs as Strummer, and so all the Clash stuff up until then, I knew the basics of being able to play the guitar. You can just play a bit of guitar, and a little bit of lead.”
Meyers continued to tell how his love of music continued, though it led to a sad note about losing his favorite guitar in this year’s L.A. fires. “In about 2015, I was in Louisiana doing Roots, and I met up with a blues guitar player. I had a really, really nice guitar, which now, unfortunately, I don’t have anymore, because unfortunately, my house burned down in the L.A. fires. All of my guitars, my artwork, my clothes, but I mean everything I owned up until 44 years old was in my house in Southern California, so the whole thing went up in smoke rather quickly, unfortunately. So that guitar is gone, but I met this player and we started playing a little bit, so from maybe 2016, I’ve been playing a lot myself, extensively, but I don’t record, but I do play pretty regularly now. I play on the daily, yes.”
Knowing the actor’s proclivity for blues guitar and the fact that Ryan Cooger’s Sinners also includes some Irish folk music, we wondered if he had a chance to see it yet since he hadn’t been in Southeastern Ireland, rather than in the States. “I’m not quite sure that it’s here yet, but I hear good things. He’s a talented man, Ryan Coogler. He’s a gifted director, and Michael B. Jordan is a gifted actor. He can definitely open a film anyway.”
Rhys Meyers won the Golden Globe for playing Elvis Presley in the CBS mini-series, Elvis, but he generally doesn’t watch his own work to confirm that it’s worth seeking out. “Personally I’ve never seen it, but then that’s not uncommon that an actor won’t see their own work,” he says about rewatching Elvis after his Golden Globe win. “I think at that time I would have been too nervous to look at it, and then I was getting awards for it and people said it was good, and then I really didn’t want to look at it, just in case I thought it was bad.And then, I got Golden Globe-nominated the next year for The Tudors, they asked me again if I had seen Elvis since I won the Golden Globe, and I still haven’t seen it. And then I thought, ‘I never should see it now.’”
When asked about what he’s looking for in projects that he accepts these days, having been told earlier that he goes where the work takes him, Meyers had a confident response. “Competent directors, that’s plain and simple. Actors appear in films, they don’t make films. Directors and editors make films, so depending on the quality of the director and the quality of the editor, that will judge the quality of how your performance is viewed. Film and TV are not an actor’s medium – they’re a director’s medium – so it all lies in the competency of your director. Directors make the film; actors just appear in them. If you’re an actor and you appear in a film with a competent director, your performance should be good, because the competent director is looking out, and then, if they make good films, people will see them. But it’s not an actor’s medium, so what am I looking for? I’m looking for a good, competent director. That’s it.”
And yet, Rhys Meyers has no interest in writing or directing something himself. “I question my competency,” he admitted.
Before letting Rhys Meyers get back to his day, we wondered why he didn’t appear in more comedies, since he was generally pretty funny when we spoke. “I don’t know, maybe I’m not a funny guy. That’s a different skill. I don’t think people look at me, and go ‘Ah, funny… ha ha.” I mean, I would certainly do it, but I don’t think I could do a Jim Carrey-esque type movie, or an Adam Sandler-ish type movie, or a Will Ferrell-type movie. I just think I’d suck.”
That said, he does have one comic filmmaker that would interest him to work with. “I’d love to do a comedy for [Armando Ianucci] maybe, because his comedies are extraordinarily smart. They’re very cleverly done, the situations are very funny, and he’s extraordinarily f*cking talented, and that’s it. The Thick Of It is funny, In The Loop is funny, The Death Of Stalin is funny, even though these subjects are deadly serious, but it’s because of the competency of the filmmaker. That’s why they’re good.”
You can watch the trailer for American Night below, and the movie is available to stream on Hulu.