Interview: Jonathan Rhys Meyers on vampires, sex scenes and playing the antihero

The star of Dracula talks to Kathryn Bromwich about beards, lucky underpants, and why he would have made a terrible priest
Kathryn Bromwich24 March 2014
The Weekender

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“If you could live forever, would you want to do it as an 89-year-old woman, or at the peak of your beauty and health?” The second option, clearly, is a tempting proposition. Jonathan Rhys Meyers, star of the new NBC series Dracula, has some ideas about why vampire tales still retain their lure after all these years. “Everybody’s interested in living forever. People don’t want to die. What makes vampires attractive is that they’re frozen in their young, beautiful state.”

Vampire fiction is a crowded market, as Rhys Meyers is well aware. Of the countless film and television vampire productions, he admires Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre and, more recently, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In. “I like the camera distance they keep from the actual killing. It makes it almost more vicious.”

So what does his new show bring to the table? We meet the titular bloodsucker Vlad Tepes lying half-decomposed in an open coffin in a filthy crypt. A human sacrifice is bled to death over him, and the blood brings Vlad back from the undead. Once reawakened he reinvents himself as an American industrialist called Alexander Grayson. With much fanfare, he arrives in London promising unlimited clean energy for everyone (it’s a fraud), and the Victorians lap it up – except for a shady group called Order of the Dragon. A spanner is thrown in the works when Vlad/Dracula/Grayson sees a beautiful young woman in the crowd (played by Jessica de Gouw): she looks just like his wife Ilona, who was brutally murdered by the Order centuries ago.

Essentially it’s a revenge tale, with technology, witty repartee and fangs thrown into the mix. Broadcast in the UK on Sky Living over the autumn, it received mixed reviews and variable ratings. Nevertheless, thanks to JRM’s devoted fan-base there is a ready-made core audience for any show that contains a steamy love scene with the piercing-eyed leading man.

And like in all good neck-biting vampire stories, sex scenes abound. Rhys Meyers has become quite a pro at them over the years: at one point, he says, “every day was a new naked girl, so it became run-of-the-mill that I would end up in bed with some actress during the afternoon.” What does he do to prepare for them – does he have a pair of lucky underpants? “I don’t have any lucky underpants. I’m never wearing underpants when I do those sex scenes. I’m always half naked. Sex scenes, first of all, are very easy to do, because you’re usually given somebody to work with who is (a) very beautiful and attractive, so that makes it much easier, do you know what I mean?”

He doesn’t quite get round to point (b).

Just another day at the office? “Well listen, you try it a few times. I’m telling you, you do two days of shooting sex scenes on a film set, you’ll be exhausted after it. You’ll get back to your partner, you won’t wanna touch them. You’ll be like, ‘I just wanna have a bath.’”

He bristles at my suggestion that there may be some links between the characters of Dracula and Henry VIII in The Tudors: both are powerful men driven by their desires, with a darker, obsessive side to them (blood for Dracula, a male heir for Henry). “No. There’s no connection, there’s no similarity at all.” In a physical sense, he’s right: while in the later seasons of The Tudors he had to don fat suits and ageing make-up, no such transformation was necessary to turn him into Dracula. The carefully-trimmed moustache and goatee he sports on the show are of his own choosing (“unfortunately I’m not very good at growing a beard. I’m hoping that in the next few years I’ll be blessed with a full beard”), and the vampire’s paleness echoes his own (“I haven’t been in the sunlight for… oh my goodness. Almost two years, now. I am literally vitamin D deficient at the moment.”).

But the similarity goes further than that. “People don’t really cast me as the hero very often. I think my physicality lends itself more to being seen as a character who’s got a little bit more duality than that. I don’t look like the cowboy riding in on a white horse with a white hat. I’m more like the one in the black cap skulking in the corner.”

His struggles with alcohol, rehab and airport altercations have been well documented over the years. Rhys Meyers is clean now, and spends his free time painting (“for my own pleasure – I’m a dreadful painter. I painted a Samurai for my godson the other day”) and making music with his brother’s band Suzy’s Field (“but I’m no musician”). However, he has intimate knowledge of his own darker sides, which he brings to the character’s more tortured, self-loathing aspects. “Blood is a drug. Nobody wants to be susceptible or dependent on a drug, do they?”

Although rumours abound, there is currently no news about whether a second season of Dracula is on the cards (“we’ve got lots of time to decide. It’s outside of my control, so I don’t even think about it”). Next, Rhys Meyers will be kept busy shooting two films. Later this month he will star in London Town, where plays a father who works two jobs to keep his family afloat in 1970s England.

Over the summer he will shoot The Secret Scripture in Ireland alongside Jessica Chastain. Based on a novel by Sebastian Barry, the film will see him as Father Gaunt, a sinister and ruthless priest who has a difficult relationship with women. In a way, this role is a return to his roots: Rhys Meyers had thought about joining the priesthood as a boy. “I felt I was quite isolated, and I think that’s what attracted me. The monastic lifestyle is very isolated. But actually I wasn’t suited to priesthood at all. It would have driven me mad.”

Dracula: The Complete First Season is available on Blu-Ray and DVD now courtesy of Universal Pictures (UK)

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