Die Hard As Mainstream As Irons Gets
by Jamie Portman, The Gazette (Montreal)
July 8, 1995
Jeremy Irons doesn't do mainstream films.
He does offbeat assignments, many of them involving controversial roles which other actors would not touch with a 10-foot pole.
For example, the MP who lusts after his son's girlfriend in Damage, or the diplomat in lustful thrall of an Oriental transvestite in M. Butterfly, or the tormented twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers.
Even his Oscar-winning performance as the sardonic Claus von Bulow isn't the sort of thing a Kevin Costner or Tom Hanks would ever take on.
Yet, Irons suavely insists he does not end up in ventures such as these by design. All he ever wants, he maintains, is an interesting story.
"I read a script and if it interests me, I want to make it," he explains in that trademark dulcet baritone.
"I never think in terms of, 'Does my public want to see this,' or 'Will it be good for my career?' "
Instead, he asks himself a more fundamental set of questions:
"Is this a story I want to tell? Is this a character I want to play? Is this a director I want to work with?
"As I'm sure someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger will tell you, there's no telling what the public wants to go and see. So I don't want to chase that mythical rainbow in the hopes that maybe I'll get very famous and very rich.
"Instead, I basically ask: 'Will I have a good time making it?' "
That's the criterion Irons applied to Dead Ringers and Damage. It's also the criterion he applied to the opportunity to play the villain in Die Hard With a Vengeance which - unlike the others - is about as mainstream as you get.
If Irons had felt he wouldn't enjoy making this film, he wouldn't have done it. But he does admit, with a chuckle, that the role of Simon, a witty criminal who torments Bruce Willis with clues framed as verbal riddles, marks a new departure for him.
"It is a change of pace to do something I've never done before - to say to these guys in Hollywood that I'm actually not just a serious English actor, but that I actually can do and enjoy other things in order to get a wider audience."
This is Irons's second Hollywood villain in as many years. Last year, he supplied the voice of the evil Scar in Disney's The Lion King. He figures that Scar is by far the viler of the two: "He kills a lot more people."
Irons loved the experience of working on a Disney animated feature with James Earl Jones (who supplied the voice of the Lion King's doomed father) and other prominent actors. But he has one complaint.
"I was always disappointed they made me look so skinny and mangy while James Earl Jones really looked great!"
Even though he's in a major Hollywood hit, Irons still doesn't fit into the conventional Hollywood mold. For example, he'll happily tell tales out of school - on this occasion confiding that there were problems with the script for the latest Die Hard movie.
Irons reveals director John McTiernan shot a second ending in which Willis pursues Simon back to Europe with a Chinese rocket launcher and starts punishing HIM with riddles.
"We didn't shoot it with great confidence. It was a bit too talky and we couldn't really make it work."
Irons knows the Die Hard films get attacked in some quarters for their political incorrectness. The current one features a sequence in which Willis is planted in black Harlem wearing a racially insulting sandwich board.
Irons has no patience for this kind of talk.
"I have an instinctive hatred for political correctness. I believe it is the job of the arts and the artist to be the jester, to be constantly questioning our standards and our values.
"To me, political correctness is behaving so you don't stand out from the herd."
Even so, there are times when Irons's own social and political passions surge to the surface.
Die Hard With a Vengeance may be earning him a lot of money, but the project closest to his heart these days is a 50-minute play called Mirad - A Boy From Bosnia, which he and his actress wife, Sinead Cusack, first did in Oxford and are set to repeat at London's Young Vic this summer.
"It's partly about Bosnia and partly about refugees everywhere. It's a wonderful piece of theatrical writing - to me, the clearest example of what theatre should be, which is the cutting edge of inquiry. It's extraordinary, and very moving to an audience."
Irons will be doing the play for a teachers' group meeting in London, using his immense personal prestige to sell them on the importance of a coming three-company tour of the play which will start hitting schools in Britain in the autumn.
"It raises many questions about a problem we'll be facing for the next hundred years: What do you do when entire populations want to move from one country to another because of war or famine or whatever?
"I'm not getting paid for doing it. When I read this piece of material, I was wiped out by it. I knew it had to be done immediately - not on radio or film or television, all of which put up a screen of unreality. It had to be done in a theatre, with an audience."
This is a cue for Irons to take a swipe at mainstream Hollywood - and in particular, at the most popular movie of 1994.
"The play has already been seen in Europe by more people than saw Forrest Gump.
"That's one good thing about it because its values are less sinister than Forrest Gump, which seems to teach that all we have to be is uneducated and not do anything - and then everything will come to us.
"And isn't THAT an interesting message for our children!"