IRONS IN THE FIRE
by Carole Agus, Newsday
May 14, 1995
WHAT'S THE MASTER OF BRITISH RESERVE DOING AMID EXPLOSIONS IN THE NEW 'DIE HARD'? LOOKING FOR A WIDER AUDIENCE
IT DOESN'T MATTER, when Jeremy Irons enters a room, whether there is a contingent with him or not. When Jeremy Irons enters a room, there is only Jeremy Irons, as if a spotlight were always on him, casting everyone else in darkness.
Stage presence. Star quality. Charisma. All that and a lightness of being, an easy charm, an analytical turn of mind and an accent to die for. He ambles about the hotel suite, graceful as a panther, while a reporter shambles after him. Suddenly he lurches backward, looking taller than his 6-foot-1 and very oddly decorated in his razor-cut and dyed-for-the-film blonde hair.
"Are you going to spend the day following me around the room?" To general laughter, he takes a seat, orders cappuccino. When he says "cappuccino," it somehow sounds as special as champagne. He makes a Saturday morning feel like Saturday night.
He's here, at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, doing interviews, because he's playing the villain in a "Die Hard" movie, "Die Hard With a Vengeance," the third in a series, opening Friday.
Jeremy Irons in a "Die Hard" movie?
Why him? Why this? Why now?
He answers with a question: "How would you describe the films that I normally do?"
Elegant, subtle, intellectual. This is the man who gave us Charles Ryder in "Brideshead Revisited," Jerry in "Betrayal," Dr. Stephen Fleming in "Damage," men of aristocratic elegance. He even gave aristocratic elegance to a lion as the voice of Scar in "The Lion King." True, Scar was the villain. True, Claus Von Bulow was the villain in "Reversal of Fortune."
But a Bruce Willis movie? What is he doing playing Simon, a bad guy with a bad blonde razor cut and a German accent who blows up subways?
"I'm very pleased to have done this film," he says. "I want to introduce myself to an audience who don't normally see my films. And hope for a crossover."
It's a pretty good bet that Jeremy Irons fans aren't the same ones standing in line to see exploding helicopters, which is what Irons is counting on. He expects "Die Hard" to grab new audiences the way the British try to in repertory theater: "You'll do a series of plays you know the audience wants, then you will slip in a Pinter or Ionesco, hoping the audience who'd come to see the three others will like this one. So you broaden your audience."
Isn't that broadening the audience upward, not downward? Not to put too fine a point on it, one film industry executive wondered if Irons' role in Die Hard was "slumming"?
Not to Irons, it isn't.
"Like some guy in the Midwest who saw Jeremy Irons in 'Die Hard' will maybe see another film that will broaden him. Not upwards. It isn't an up or a down. It's a widening. I'd like to lessen the gap between art movies and popular movies and hope more people come to see the films that I do.
"If I can broaden, I can do the films I want to make. I will be better box office," he adds.
Ah, box office, there's the rub. He's not at the popularity level, as they say in the film business, where he can "open a film." That is, have such drawing power that his name alone guarantees an audience. Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks. They can open a film.
They, therefore, get first crack at the best roles. Irons doesn't. Not that he has hungered for action/ adventure films, but he would have liked to have played Robert Redford's role in "Out of Africa," Daniel Day-Lewis' in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" or John Malkovich's in "Dangerous Liaisons."
Would things have been more to his liking if he had made a crucial decision differently? Several years ago, he said, Albert (Cubby) Broccoli offered him the James Bond role if he would play 007 in three films. Three would have constricted and typed him, he decided, turning the offer down.
Now, at 46, he seems tired of being paid in prestige. Sure, he's won the Best Actor Oscar for "Reversal of Fortune," but even that wasn't a blockbuster. Sure, he was named Best Actor by the New York Film Critics Circle for "Dead Ringers," in which he played identical twin deviant gynecologists, but it had a limited run. Sure, he won a Tony Award for Tom Stoppard's play "The Real Thing." And he's been a Shakespearean actor at Stratford-on-Avon and been declared brilliant for his roles in "The French Lieutenant's Woman," "Betrayal" "Moonlighting" and many others of even narrower distribution, like "Australia."
He's been typecast in cerebral pictures, the kind Hollywood likes to dismiss as "talky," because that is the stuff of British film. "In England, we're word-based," he says. "Even in film we dress the dialogue with the picture. We're serving the dialogue, because we're literary-based. Certainly in a picture like 'Die Hard,' with its effects telling the story, dialogue is of much more secondary importance. When we were shooting I'd look through the camera, and I'd see an image that had great dynamic to it."
Part of him is drawn to this. "I sail, I climb, I fly, I ride. I'm a very physical person." He even roller blades through Central Park. "I'd like to play a character that uses that. I've wanted to play the passionate, the vulgar, the wild. But they tend not to come to me first. I have a reputation for the head stuff."
If he wanted to showcase a tough-guy Jeremy Irons, a "Die Hard" movie would seem the perfect vehicle. Just his luck that this particular "Die Hard," which is nothing if not formulaic, breaks its own formulas - at Irons expense, it would seem. For one thing, Irons doesn't even appear for the first hour of the film. Only his voice is heard on the phone, mostly spouting nursery rhymes and riddles.
For another - perhaps of more consequence - this particular bad guy doesn't inspire the requisite hate that is supposed to come with bad-guy territory. In a preview showing, Simon's death did not draw applause - an almost unheard-of reaction in the world of Willis - because it lacked what viewers expected to see: a mano-a-mano fight to the death. IRONS' REACTION to this is, well, cerebral. "I'm not sure John [McTiernan, the director] is finished cutting that sequence. Also, I know he is very undecided about the good and evil situation, it goes back to making the guy a little offbeat." Simon, it turns out, is supposed to be a bad guy with nuance. A bad guy with wit, though a lot of Simon's witty lines have been cut, Irons said, and the character suffers for it. Simon is a bad guy with scruples, one gathers. He doesn't kill civilians, for instance, only blows up subway cars in which civilians don't happen to get killed.
"We didn't want the audience to hate Simon . . . He [the director] feels life is more complicated than that, such as when Simon says, 'I'm a soldier, not a murderer.' "
But the lack of applause when the bad guy dies? "It may, indeed, be a problem. Audiences do want that old good man-bad man."
Bad guys interest Irons more than heroes do. His favorite role so far was in the poorly received "The House of the Spirits," in which he played Esteban Trueba, an authoritarian, slave-owning South American landowner whose cruelty alienates him from the wife he loves, played by Meryl Streep. His least-favorite role was Dr. Stephen Fleming, the British official who falls blindly in love with his son's fiancee and wrecks the lives around him in Louis Malle's "Damage." The tension on the set was so intense it was public.
"The casting didn't work," said Irons, who shared his feelings with Malle, who wasn't grateful. Irons thought Juliet Binoche was miscast as his lover, that the role should have gone to an older actress, preferably Isabelle Adjani - who was offered the role but turned it down.
If Irons wants to share in the decision-making, he's more than willing to take the blame. For the failure of "The House of the Spirits," he is brutal in his criticism of the way he looked, of his makeup and the way he allowed cosmetic devices, like teeth, to be used on him. He spares all others from blame, even the director. He rejects any matinee-idol vision of himself. He thinks his look is "unconventional" and the idea that he's a sex symbol farfetched.
He's comfortable in the role of bad guy and sees villains everywhere. As proof, he pointed to a small crowd of people near the hotel suite door, "Look around you, villains all of them, given half a chance."