WestKelowna.com - West Kelowna. Right Now!

Canwest News Service

NEW YORK – On the surface, Tudor tyrant Henry VIII and rock legend Elvis Presley would seem to have nothing in common.

Except for one thing – both have been portrayed by a guy from Ireland's County Cork.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers picked up a Golden Globe Award for his eerily authentic portrayal of Presley in the 2004 TV miniseries, Elvis. And he has received two Golden Globe nominations for his highly personal take on the despotic, womanizing King Henry VIII on the hit miniseries The Tudors, which launches its fourth and final season in April.

Meyers has also scored for his portrayal as a social-climbing killer in Woody Allen's Match Point, a sympathetic football coach in Bend It Like Beckham, a young assassin in Michael Collins, and a glittering David Bowie-type singer in The Velvet Goldmine.

There's a point to this calculated virtuosity, reflecting Rhys Meyers's determination to show his range – or, as he once put it, to allow audiences to see the "very many different layers of what I can do as an actor."

Now, with the current From Paris With Love, he's fulfilled another longtime yearning – to make a genuine action thriller and buddy movie. And he's hoping that he and co-star John Travolta provide a classic combination.

"I think what separates an action movie from a classic movie is the chemistry between the actors doing it," Rhys Meyers says. "If they're liking each other and they're liking the story, they're on. Why does Lethal Weapon work? Because Danny Glover and Mel Gibson worked with each other. You see the energy – they play off each other very well. You get some partnerships that just mean more."

He cites the definitive buddy movie – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "If that had been Robert Redford with Warren Beatty (instead of Paul Newman) would it have been the same movie? Who knows? It's the energy that carries it."

Which brings him back to From Paris With Love and his role as James Reece, an uptight but ambitious personal aide to U.S. Ambassador in Paris. Reece has a side job as a low-level CIA operative and his big ambition is to make the grade as a full-fledged spy and see some real action. He ends up getting more than he bargained for when he teams up with Travolta's profane, trigger-happy Charlie Wax, a special agent who is bound by no rules as he launches a furious assault on a terrorist ring. He's the sort of guy who will think nothing of leaning out of a careening vehicle and firing a bazooka in Paris traffic.

Rhys Meyers says that being paired with Travolta was a happy accident and he'll be eternally grateful to his co-star as well as producer Luc Besson and director Pierre Morel for making it possible.

"If I (didn't) have somebody like John there, I'm not sure if it would work for me. I had to have somebody I could play off."

Rhys Myers had a tight schedule with this one. He'd been working on The Tudors back in London on a Wednesday, and a day later was in Paris where he was immediately thrust into a pivotal scene with Travolta. In a sequence where an enraged Charlie Wax is on the verge of trashing a French customs and immigration office, Rhys Meyers didn't immediately recognize this ranting specimen with the shaved head and facial hair as the guy he once worshipped in Grease.

"The first time I and John really had face time with each other was in that scene where I have to go in and bust him out of the customs office," Rhys Meyers says. "I'd seen John in many films, but I hadn't seen John like that, you know. I didn't know what to expect."

But the 32-year-old actor says that he and Travolta immediately clicked.

"James Reece's character – my character – expects a sophisticated, elegant, worldly James Bond to turn up. And what he gets is a biker boy – minus the Harley-Davidson but with pretty much everything else. James has dreams of what a spy is going to be like. He dreams of what a sophisticated undercover life is. But the reality is that it's a dirty job. James doesn't have the cynicism that Wax has, but James has the naivete that Wax enjoys. Wax enjoys seeing him be confused. He enjoys seeing him get a punch. He enjoys seeing him being shocked at the shootings, because there's only one way to train somebody and that's to throw him into the deep end. It was great."

Rhys Meyers had one major problem with the film's action demands.

"I don't like heights," he says. "For example, I had to run up these steel stairs, and I'm not a good height guy."

One scene involved carrying a vase full of cocaine up those stairs, and much to his embarrassment, he dropped the vase.

"It was in the middle of the shot. John's still running – he's like three floors ahead of me, and I had to go all the way down again. It was just awful."

This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Breaking News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.