Jeremy Irons on “Being Julia”
What do you like about this role?
It’s not a very stretching role; I haven’t played that sort of man on screen before, I’ve worked in other areas of human nature. It’s nice to it was a joy to watch Annette create her performance. It was a challenge for her, 1930’s stage star, I think her accent is faultless and the strength of the range of emotion is tremendous, it is a truly glittering performance. She has a great energy and brightness.
What kind of direction did you receive?
He pretty much just followed my lead. The great thing about Istvan (Szabo) directing this is that it’s completely outside his cultural knowledge, this time. I think it’s wonderful to have a director come into something fresh. I think of Nabakov coming to America and starting to write in English and suddenly loving this language that he was loving, Tom Stoppard was a Jewish Czech and he starts working this language in a way that I think if you were born into it I don’t think you’d see it so clearly. In England we tend to communicate beneath language. It ‘s not what we are saying that is necessarily what we are saying. There’s a scene where my character comes into his wife’s dressing room and she is obviously in emotional turmoil and he as her husband recognizes this and says to her I think you ought to go away and sort yourself out and when you are sorted out, you
can come back and start work on something else. He says it in a tough way but a kind way, not rubbing in her face that she has been screwed by a young boy who was a bit of a social climber and she has made a fool of herself and should go away. He doesn’t say that, he may feel that but he doesn’t because he loves her and cares for her and because he is English of that particular class and time.
Do you think things have changed from the stiffness of 1930’s Britain?
I think we’ve lost our manners to a certain extent. A class-less society is a myth. If we live in a big society we need to make little invisible clubs to say we are this type of person, we wear a tie, we wear a shirt that is ironed, that we tuck in and we speak in a certain way. Those classes are still there in England. I believe that because of a vastly increased and far more intrusive media, both print and visual, we have lost our respect for our leaders in England and lost our respect for almost everybody. I think we are a society in great trouble and I don’t think we have faced up to it yet. The rise in teenage mental health problems since 1956 is 70 % rise, so you can see that the kids are finding it much harder to get from being a child to being an adult. Suicide, depression, behavioral problems and anorexia are all more prevalent; along with a large number of single parent families. If you look back at history, no healthy society has ever been grown and burgeoned with single parent families. When families begin to break down, society begins to break down and I think we are beginning to see is the beginning of a break down in our society. You know if you hold a frog over a pan of boiling water, it will do anything in it’s physical power not to be dropped into that water, but if you put a frog in a pan of cold water and apply the heat, the frog will stay till it boils to death and I think what we are doing is slowly boiling to death. If we could be held above our society and see it, we would do anything we could not to boil into it.
When was the last time you were competitive for a role?
I think “The Real Thing” was the last thing that I called my agent with and said if you want to keep your job, get me that part. It was a Tom Stoppard play with Glenn Close on Broadway. I think everything else, I’ve just been asked to do, some things I’ve fought not to do.