Jeremy Irons As A Guy Named Joe (Kafka)
by Matt Wolf, The New York Times
December 1, 1991
For an actor who began his career playing quintessential Englishmen, Jeremy Irons these days is looking pretty chameleonic -- even metamorphic, you might say. Steven Soderbergh's "Kafka," Mr. Irons's first movie since winning the Oscar in March for "Reversal of Fortune," opens in New York on Wednesday for a one-week run so it can qualify for this year's Academy Awards.
For Mr. Soderbergh, "Kafka" represents the important Second Movie from a director who, two years ago, made one of the most widely heralded debut films in ages, "Sex, Lies and Videotape." Mr. Irons, in turn, sees the new film as part of a continuing desire to surprise. In it, he plays a quiet, intelligent clerk in what amounts to a cinematic riff on themes suggested by the author Franz Kafka.
"I tend to go for what's odd, mucky, strange," Mr. Irons, who is 43 years old, says in the lounge at Brown's Hotel, sipping tea and making his way through a pack of Silk Cuts. The dark-toned, wood-paneled tearoom couldn't seem more English, and neither could Mr. Irons. Tall, even gaunt, and dressed in shades of brown and beige that complement the room, he suggests the posh Briton par excellence -- lanky, casually assured, even a touch insouciant.
"I know I present a reasonable portrait," he says. "I'm tall and slim, and my hair is long and straight. But that's not the side of me I'm interested in."
Instead, the actor has been displaying a quiet virtuosity of late that is particularly impressive when set against the languorous, essentially passive performer who made his name first in the early 80's as Charles Ryder on television in "Brideshead Revisited" and then on screen squiring Meryl Streep in "The French Lieutenant's Woman." His recent transformations from role to role aren't De Niro-like physical mutations; Mr. Irons works more subliminally. With him, acting is not about gaining or losing weight to refashion the self. What he does is burrow into the character's mind and work his way out from there, imploding where other actors explode.
"I don't really have the desire to show what I can do, at least in any self-conscious way," says Mr. Irons about a range that encompasses a pair of murderous gynecologists (in "Dead Ringers," 1988); a Polish laborer displaced to London (in "Moonlighting," 1982), and, now, in "Kafka," a hapless clerk -- not the author himself -- enmeshed in the sort of nightmare Franz Kafka might have written. "I'm keen to get the story across best."
Accordingly, it's not surprising to hear him relate the appeal of "Kafka." "When the script arrived," Mr. Irons says, "I thought it was really offbeat -- not perfect, but something it would be worthwhile working with Steven on. I had seen 'Sex, Lies' and was very impressed with it. For me, making a film is always a trip into the unknown, anyway."
Why Mr. Soderbergh, out of all the offers coming Mr. Irons's way? "One of the things you cannot buy," Mr. Irons explains, "is appetite, freshness, and I think new directors have that. There are a few directors who, if they sent me almost anything, I would say yes. I say 'a few directors' because of the choices they themselves make. These are people who would be unlikely to send me 'Star Wars 8.' "
Mr. Irons admits to not being a devotee of Kafka, nor did he become one during filming in Prague last year. "When you fall in love with Kafka," he says, "if you do, it's during your adolescence, so I had missed the boat. I began to do my research, bought a lot of Kafka and was preparing to read it, but Steven said, 'Don't.' I said, 'But I'm playing Franz Kafka,' and he said, 'No. Wait a minute. You're playing Kafka.' So we never called him Kafka, and in my head he's Joe Kafka. I realized the character I was playing was more like Josef K.," the protagonist of Kafka's novel "The Trial," than he was like the tormented writer himself.
The film makes no biographical claims. It is the tale of a sad-eyed bureaucrat named Kafka who enters into a murderous intrigue taking him out of the black-and-white world of a Prague insurance office and into the full-color, sinister environment of Hradcany Castle atop the city. Shot mainly in Expressionist blacks, whites and grays by Walt Lloyd, the film co-stars Theresa Russell as Kafka's doomed co-worker, Alec Guinness as his boss, Joel Grey as a troublemaking colleague, Armin Mueller-Stahl as a police inspector and Ian Holm as Kafka's nemesis.
"Kafka" is full of references to other movies -- Mr. Irons names "The Wizard of Oz" and "His Girl Friday," among others -- and hums with the vision of a director who, says his leading man, "knows about film and delights in it." But Mr. Irons goes on to point out that "Kafka" may in its own way reveal just as much about Mr. Soderbergh as "Sex, Lies and Videotape."
"This film is all about Steven," says the actor. "At its center, there's a sort of what's-going-on that is Kafka's, which in a way reflects where Steven is at the moment. He made this one picture, and he had the whole world saying, 'Please, come do our film,' and it's interesting that he was attracted to a picture about a man who doesn't really know where he is or what he should be doing."
Mr. Soderbergh explains his film in uncomplicated terms. "The script attracted me for two reasons," he says. "First, I'm a big fan of mystery films and, second, I liked the way this one gradually peeled away the layers to get at the truth."
And what of Franz Kafka? "I'd read Kafka and liked his writing," the director adds. "The script seemed to encompass all the interesting elements of his life. It was the best of everything wrapped around a mystery story."
There is, he says, one strong reference to another film. "It would be hard not to make a mystery in black and white set in Eastern Europe and not think about 'The Third Man.' That was the standard. And Jeremy has the perfect amount of intelligence and intensity the role needs."
Mr. Irons says he picks projects on instinct, and he has done well so far gathering awards en route. His Oscar followed a New York Film Critics Circle award for best actor for "Dead Ringers" as well as, in 1984, a Tony Award for his Broadway debut opposite Glenn Close in Tom Stoppard's "Real Thing." "You just go on your gut," he says. "I mean, I've done films which aren't good, which really aren't good, and I tend to forget about them." For every "Dead Ringers," he says, there's an "Australia," a 1988 Belgian flop he made with Fanny Ardant.
His reluctance to repeat himself has led to varied locations and mediums. In 1986, fresh from filming Roland Joffe's "Mission" in Latin America, he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon to appear in "The Winter's Tale," "Richard II" and Aphra Behn's Restoration romp, "The Rover." Now, inundated with post-Oscar offers, Mr. Irons is acting for relative pennies in a BBC television adaptation of Christopher Hampton's 1983 play "Tales From Hollywood," directed by Howard Davies and co-starring Charles Durning, Elizabeth McGovern and Sinead Cusack, Mr. Irons's wife.
In February, Mr. Irons is expected to star in "Damage," Louis Malle's screen adaptation of the much-discussed 1991 Josephine Hart novel about sexual jealousy and competition between a father and son. Mr. Irons may then reunite with his "Dead Ringers" director, David Cronenberg, for the film version of the Tony Award-winning play "M. Butterfly" -- "The script should be arriving any day," says Mr. Irons. He is also contemplating a film with Mike Nichols following their successful collaboration on Broadway in "The Real Thing." The two are working on a film of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day," adapted by Harold Pinter. Next year will see the release of "Waterland," based on the Graham Swift novel and directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal.
Of the effect of the Oscar, Mr. Irons says, "It is very good for your self-confidence, and self-confidence is good for your work. It hasn't hurt my desire to risk, and it hasn't stopped me not worrying about falling on my rear."
But speaking as an accountant's son who recalls becoming an actor "in a rather arbitrary fashion," Mr. Irons remembers a moment long before the Oscar when he knew he would be all right. It was nine months into his West End debut in 1972, playing John the Baptist in "Godspell," and Mr. Irons had an actor's epiphany. "I was sitting on the stage thinking, 'These shoes fit. This routine suits me. Maybe I have something worth giving.'
"I still gave myself until I was 30," he goes on, "and thought if I'm not successful, I can change, but by then I was doing 'Brideshead.' All I knew was I didn't want to be a failure."