Jeremy Irons Interview (page: 3 / 5) Oscar Winner for Best Actor	Print Interview

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all. Funny enough, four nights ago I had dinner with three other colleagues who were at theater school with me, and Tim Piggott-Smith (who was in The Jewel and the Crown, I don't know whether you saw that) -- he had always thought I would give up very quickly, like in a year or two years after leaving drama school. He said, "You had no talent."
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And I didn't. I wore clothes well, I decorated the stage well, but I wasn't an actor in the way that Tim was, or many of the other students. I remember we would stay for the weekend -- a group of about ten of us -- and the staff would interview us as a group, asking us questions so we'd hear everybody else's answers.

I remember particularly when the principal -- a great man called Nat Brenner who is sadly now dead, a great man of the theater -- he was talking to us, and he was asking people why they wanted to become an actor and what they had been doing. And there were people, they had done -- they'd sold ice cream in Mongolia, they'd made ballet shoes in Brisbane, they had done extraordinary things. He said, "What have you done?" I said, "Well, I haven't done anything really. I sing a bit." He said, "Why do you want to be an actor?" I said, "I don't know. I just think it's quite nice." Anyway, he talked to me. I think he saw the window that I was and took me on. But as I say, in the two years I learned various skills. I learned a little bit about the theater, about styles, about how to speak, how to stand, how to sing -- not using my nose like Bob Dylan, but actually sing -- using my diaphragm. And at the end of the two years, five of us were chosen to go down into the theater, into the Bristol Old Vic company itself.
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I thought, "Well, they want someone to stand up at the edge of the stage looking nice." You know? Went down there for three years. I outlived them all. I stayed on and I finished off playing the juvenile leads -- very badly. And eventually somebody in a coffee morning said -- one of the theater club people said, "I expect you'll be moving on soon," and I thought, "Oops, when the audience starts saying that, it's time to go." So I moved on. And by then I decided -- and I suppose this is one talent I do have, is that I know my direction usually -- and I knew that I didn't want to keep being a repertory actor. Repertory actors move around from town to town, repertory theater to repertory theater, and do maybe six-month contracts, but they don't earn very much. And I knew that I was too middle class, that I wanted a family, I wanted a house, I wanted a mortgage. And I knew I wouldn't be able to afford one doing that, so I thought, "I have to go to London. I have to go to London and do a West End show or a film." So I came to London, and to live -- I thought I needed something to live because I don't want to have to take a job because I need the money -- so I worked for a domestics agency which cleaned houses and sometimes did up people's gardens.
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Because I had a car I was quite reliable, so they used to use me quite a lot. And I auditioned for everything, because I hated auditioning. I found it very difficult and thought I'd better get good at this. So I kept doing auditions, and if I was offered the job I'd say, "I'm sorry, I can't do it. I thought I could do it, which is why I came to the audition, but I can't."

Eventually I did an audition for an American show called Godspell, by John Michael Tebelak, which was coming to be launched in London. Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don't; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line. Every time I sort of slouched, a little voice would say, "Stand up, Jeremy, could you please?" Anyway, they gave me the job. I did that for two years in the West End. And I remember one night sitting on the stage during a song someone else was singing. I played John the Baptist, and David Essex who played Jesus was sitting on the other side. And I thought, you know, I slipped these theatrical shoes on without a lot of thought, but they fit me like kid gloves.

At that moment you knew, "This is it."

Jeremy Irons: Yeah. I had given myself to the age of 30. I said, "At 30 I think I could change careers. Much after that will be difficult. So let's see how I'm doing then."

What would it have taken to satisfy you that this was the right choice in life?

Jeremy Irons: That I was happy, and that I was succeeding, that I was having a relationship, which is what I wanted, and that I was earning money, and having a life that I was proud of.

How old were you during Godspell?

Jeremy Irons: Maybe 25. So I had about five or six years left, but I knew that I was on the way.

Godspell was a good leap for me; it was a good shop window. And although it pulled things out of my nature that weren't particularly good, in that I have a sort of insecurity and a desire for perfection, which when mixed is somewhat volatile, so what I was able to do with that show -- there were ten of us -- is we all developed into a very frank group and we could speak eye to eye with people and say, "What you're doing there is rubbish. We've got to do better than that. That's terrible. It's lazy." You know? And we finally were able to talk to each other like this. I've always tried since then whenever I work with people to speak like that.
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It's very difficult, especially now when I'm working with film stars who are sensitive about their talent. I think in the American tradition it's probably different, because American actors don't come out of company theater in quite the same way that English actors do. There is more defensiveness -- a pugnaciousness towards each other. A good performance to an American actor would be a threat. For me, it's a joy.

I know that if I'm to play tennis, if I play with Ivan Lendl my game is going to look better than if I play with my mother. So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game. I love and I feed off that. And sometimes I have relationships with actors where that happens. Glenn Close and I have worked a lot together, and we are always keeping each other on our toes saying, "It has got to be better than that. You know that's not the answer." And I think many good actors are like that. Meryl Streep, she's very frank with me and I'm able to be frank with her.
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Is that because you have respect for each other?

Jeremy Irons: And trust, yes, which is important, but that is what I aim towards. Now that is difficult for some people, and with that desire to get things as good as possible, I would say that I'm probably regarded as quite prickly to work with.

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