Smash hit

If Allen is the master, then Rhys Meyers plays the uncharacteristically obedient disciple. He refuses to divulge any details about the film, still officially called the Woody Allen Summer Project (unofficially, it is called Match Point). Set somewhere between upper-class English society and the world of competitive tennis, it stars Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johansson.

He lowers his voice to a dramatic, husky whisper, glancing around conspiratorially as if Allen himself were about to walk in and accuse him of breaking rank. “It’s not a comedy, it has nothing to do with comedy — and Woody Allen does not appear in it.”

He adds: “Woody is a master of working within himself. Woody knows what he is. Woody Allen really comes on set and if it doesn’t work that day, well it’s either his fault, the camera’s fault — whoever’s fault it is, it’s not working that day. With Oliver Stone it’s all on Oliver. He takes everything on. And that’s the difference, I suppose. Woody’s learnt to let things go, Oliver hasn’t. Oliver’s just like a tempestuous boy.”

Part of Rhys Meyers’s fascination is the way he never stops acting. He is always on, always performing and can shuttle through several personae in the course of a sentence. If acting is the expression of some primal need to please, it is easy to see why he is an actor, and easy to understand why he is so dismissive of celebrity.

“I do the work that I can do, but I don’t really care what people like,” he says. “I’m not keeping my pulse on what people are going to the cinema to see because the audience, they’re fickle.”

Earlier in his career Rhys Meyers used to complain that the movie world was, in his parlance, doing his head in. He had endured a difficult upbringing in Dublin and Cork, and the film business only seemed to offer more instability. Now he insists he is more grounded and makes an effort to sound more cynical.

“It’s not strange, it’s not new. If you want to work, if you want to be successful, you have to struggle, you have to travel,” he says. “You have to forgo relationships because they don’t work, which I’ve learnt to my detriment. You have to forgo friends.”

Rhys Meyers’s relationship with his homeland remains problematic. “Ireland’s too difficult, there’s just too many issues,” he says enigmatically, without further elucidation, though he identifies the moribund state of the film industry as a particular problem for someone in his occupation.

“I’m meant to do a film here with Gerry Stembridge, called Alarm, but I don’t think Ireland has a film industry any more. Irish people have not only priced themselves out of the film market, they’ve priced themselves out of the market completely. Now we’re hiring plumbers, carpenters, electricians, welders, farmers, feeders, cattle herders — everything from Poland. We get them cheaper and they work harder. And they haven’t taken to the drink like we have.”

As Rhys Meyers talks, his accent shifts register, beginning with a Dublin rumble then sliding into Corkonian. It’s tempting to think this is the actor’s original voice, but quite possibly he doesn’t have one. He has been a chameleon all his life and only now is he learning to focus his talent.

His next challenge promises to be among his most interesting: giving it some Deep South bubba to play Presley. “I can’t ask Elvis how he did Elvis, I can only perceive how Elvis became Elvis. I’m trying to do my interpretation of how Elvis is. The more raw I can make it the better it’ll be.”

He lets the idea wash over him, as though for the first time. “I’m playing Elvis — from Cork. Can you imagine? They’re paying me a fortune. Jaysus Christ, imagine if I turned them down.”

Not that he’s about to. Rhys Meyers knows that his time has come: time to leave behind the quirky roles and androgynous weirdos, time to show what a chameleon can really do. Time to play the King.

Alexander is on general release

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