LAST night, at the Film Ball in Ardmore Studios, the inaugural Guinness Award for Outstanding Young Actor went to the hottest young acting talent to emerge from Ireland in many years. The jury, of which I was a member, unanimously chose Jonathan Rhys Meyers, a 19-year-old actor from Cork who may not be very well known right now - beyond his crucial role as the young assassin at Beal na mBlath in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins - but give him a year.
The British style magazine The Face agrees and in its next issue showcases him as one of the faces of 1997. Since completing Jordan's film, Jonathan Rhys Meyers has starred in five international feature films - shot on locations from London to Madrid to Morocco to California - and the offers are pouring in. When we met in London recently, the young actor seemed utterly unfazed by the whirlwind.
Slim and five foot seven inches tall, he is not used to being interviewed and was nervous initially. "I'm still Johnny to all my family and friends," he said. "I'd hate that to change. And Cork will always be my home. I was born in Dublin in 1977, but I moved to Cork about a year later and lived there ever since. I don't want to change, even though I have changed quite a lot from what I was when I left Ireland. But that's only a natural change, part of growing up."
He left school when he was 16 - "I was kicked out of the Mon," he says. He was discovered by Hubbard Casting, which was talent-spotting for the David Puttnam production, War of the Buttons. "I was found in a poolhall," he says, "and asked to audition for the leading role in the film. I went through three days of auditions, until it was down to Gregg Fitzgerald and me for the lead. He got the part and did a wonderful job of it. I was crushed, so I said, "fuck this acting business and I went about my merry way of being a juvenile delinquent - and then this woman calls saying there's an audition and did I want to go to it."
This time he got the role - in a Knorr soup commercial which was shown extensively over the Christmas period. "That was very embarrassing because everyone saw it and I got this shameful ear-bashing from my friends," he says. He made his feature film debut soon afterwards, with a minor role in A Man Of No Importance, in which he is credited as First Young Man, before landing one of the two leading roles in Sue Clayton's quirky and likeable The Disappearance Of Finbar, co-written by Clayton and Dermot Bolger.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the eponymous Finbar, a cocky young Dublin soccer player who leaps off a flyover in Tallaght and re-surfaces in Stockholm, while his best friend (Luke Griffin) begins a Scandinavian odyssey to find him. "Jonathan is the absent centre of the film," says its producer, David Collins. "Once we met him, he was always going to be Finbar. He had this quality, this heady mixture of youth, passion and vulnerability."
The movie was shooting-in Lapland in late winter when a thaw started, the sets melted and the completion of shooting had to be postponed for six months. Returning home, Jonathan got a call saying Neil Jordan wanted to see him in connection with Michael Collins. "I went up to Dublin and met Neil at the Davenport hotel," he recalls. "I was sitting in the lobby waiting for the audition and I'll always remember the carpet, this beautiful royal blue carpet I was looking down at while I was waiting.
"There were two other guys waiting and talking away, and one of them had met Neil before. I just sat there saying nothing. They went in to meet Neil and when they came out talking and laughing, I thought, `that's it'. Auditions always make me nervous, anyway, and that made me feel even worse. But I went in and it was great. Neil didn't ask me to do anything for the role. He just sat down and talked to me. The next day he rang my agent and cast me.
However nervous he was, he managed to conceal it from Neil Jordan, who recounts the story of that audition in the diary that precedes his published screenplay of Michael Collins. His diary entry for Good Friday, 1995, concludes: "In the meantime, I have found someone to play Collins's killer. Jonathan Rees-Myers (sic), from County Cork apparently, who looks like a young Tom Cruise. Comes into the casting session with alarming certainty. Obviously gifted."
After completing his scenes in Michael Collins, a film of which he says he is very proud, Jonathan Rhys Meyers was cast in a Spanish movie, Killer Tongue, which, on the evidence of its lurid publicity at Cannes this year, looks fairly outrageous. "Yeah, it is outrageous, but it didn't really work," says Jonathan. "I played this 18-year-old American who was the toyboy of the leading actress. The director was being put under incredible pressure and it was not a pleasant situation for me. Shooting it was agony - it was a horrid movie to shoot. Some of the people weren't very nice."
He was 18 and lonely in Madrid for eight weeks. It was winter and snowing and he felt miserable "Every movie I've been in has been of emotional benefit to me, but not that one," he says. "It was a learning experience, I suppose, in that I grew up a hell of a lot on it."
Halfway through production, he was called back to Lapland for the completion of The Disappearance Of Fin bar. "It felt strange to go back to it, but I had to live with it. Anyhow, it wasn't that hard to get the old ball rolling again after all that time because acting's the easiest job in the world. Just say the lines." But isn't there much more to it than that? "I don't go into big emotional depth for a role, you know.
BACK home for Christmas last year, he had no notion of the amount of work that would come his way and keep him away from Cork for almost all of 1996. First came a casting call from Don't Look Now director Nicolas Roeg for Samson And Delilah. "He wanted to see me for the part of Yoram and he said I wasn't suitable for it," Jonathan says. "Then, just as I was about to leave, he asked me to take off my top. He asked the casting director to give me the script and I read for the role of the young Samson, and he cast me in the role the next day. It was only two scenes, but it meant going to Morocco for two weeks, so it was basically a holiday for me and I got to work with Nic Roeg."
The next stop was London where he joined Joely Richardson, Jeremy Northam and Anna Friel in the cast of Stephen Poliakoff's The Tribe. "That was fun," he says. "The tribe are this '90s cult who keep to themselves, who dress all in black and are really strange, and I played one of them." From there he went to California to star with Matthew Modine, Michael Madsen and Mary Louise Parker in The Maker, the new movie by River's Edge director Tim Hunter. "That was tough for me, because I'm a European boy and I had a week and a half to get an American accent for the part," says Jonathan, who plays a young man whose older brother (played by Modine) tries to draw him into crime.
Another American film followed directly afterwards - Guy Freland's Telling Lies In America, which was shot in Cleveland, Ohio, from a screenplay by Basic Instinct writer Joe Eszterhas. Jonathan plays the wealthy nemesis of a teenage boy played by Brad Renfro, and the film also features Kevin Bacon and Maximilian Schell. Then it was back to London to work for Il Postino director Mike Radford on B Monkey, based on the novel by Andrew Davies and featuring Asia Argento, Rupert Everett and Jared Harris.
"It's a love story," says Jonathan, "and I play the tragedy in the love story. It starts out as a menage a trois and then my character comes into it and it gets very difficult. I loved doing it. The cast are great and Mike Radford is an extremely talented man."
B Monkey finishes shooting next week, finally giving Jonathan a break from movies, though not for long. He's already signed to costar with Ewan McGregor in the next Todd Haynes movie, Velvet Goldmine, set in the glitter rock heyday of 1972 - five years before Jonathan was born, as he points out. He plays three characters in the movie, one of them a rock idol. "And I get to wear a mini-skirt and to snog a sailor," he adds.
Looking back over such a remarkably eventful year in his young life, Jonathan Rhys Meyers says it's been difficult, but amazing too I've never gone to acting school and I never will, so I'm learning about the business from the people who are in the business. It doesn't seem like I work at all. And the unknown is always exciting. Of course, it's a very precarious profession from an income point of view, but at 19 I'm not really worried about that."