| "It
comes so naturally"
MARIANNE GRAY talks to a surprisingly shy, fully paid up
member of the Brit Pack, Jonny Lee Miller, who is keeping
rather good company these days
"One way or another, I've spent a lot of time in breeches
and boots lately," says Jonny Lee Miller, seen breeched up
in Plunkett & Macleane last year and Mansfield
Park this year. "I'm pretty sick of hanging round in frilly
shirts. It makes you long to get back into your jeans! Love,
Honour, and Obey came at the right time."
Love, Honour, and Obey is a comedy about a group
of North London gangsters with a passion for karaoke and gangster
action. Lee Miller plays a dead-end courier who manages to
pull a string or two and get into the toughest gang north
of the Thames. He also gets to sing an old Tony Christie number
from the sixties, In the Avenues and Alleyways.
The film, directed by Dominic Anciano and Ray Burdis, who
last year brought us Final Cut, stars much of Britain's
current Hot Lot (Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke, Denise van Outen,
and Rhys Ifans) as well as Lee Miller's fellow members of
Natural Nylon - Sadie Frost, Jude Law, Sean Pertwee - a London-based
production company started by Ewan McGregor and Law, Frost,
Pertwee, and Lee Miller. (The company recently produced David
Cronenberg's eXistenZ and Nora, the Nora Carbunkle
and James Joyce story starring McGregor and Susan Lynch, to
be released in May.)
"Being part of Natural Nylon is a great way to have an influence
on the films that get out there," he says. "I love films and
it gives me an input. You're always looking for good scripts
and when they're not always forthcoming you go mad. The whole
point of being an actor is to get satisfaction out of a role
- unless you're just vain about celebrity. You're always looking
for the one thing that will surprise you.
"If you're serious about what you're doing, you've got to
keep your head and follow your instinct. Maybe you won't reach
the same dizzy heights as others, but you will get something
back. I'd go anywhere to work, so long as it's worth it.
"We were all sitting around having these ideas and then
Jude decided to do something about it. We all support each
other and there's room for everyone when it comes to getting
the right film roles. We have lots of projects going on and
some of us are in them."
Miller, 27, real name Jonathan Miller ("I couldn't have
Jonathan Miller as a professional name as there's already
the TV personality, psychiatrist, and opera producer Dr Jonathan
Miller, so I decided to go for the country and western feel
of Jonny Lee"), is an extremely polite bloke with a classic
profile and a collection of tattoos from all over the world.
"I have a rat and a snake on my arm," he says, flashing
me a provocative glimpse of the snake. "I guess it says a
lot about me but I was young and crazy at the time I had them
done! They can be a problem on screen but at the time the
tattoos seemed more important. Once you get one, it's kind
of addictive."
To interview, Lee Miller is diffident to the point of shyness.
He has great looks (a real classic profile), gorgeous, deep-hazel
eyes (often hidden behind a pair of specs), and a quiet charm,
but is shaking with nerves not passion. His co-star from the
eighteenth-century highwayman jolly, Plunkett and Macleane,
Bobby Carlyle, calls him Jonny Leave Me Alone - in jest, of
course - because he is so hard to get hold of. (Somebody must
have his number, though, as he's been out with Kate Moss and
Natalie Appleton.)
Clearly not happy to be grilled, he's almost apologetic
to be so unforthcoming, but underneath, something is simmering
away, just waiting.
Miller comes from a theatrical family. Born in London, he
comments that his childhood was spent either in TV studios
or in theatres. His grandfather on his mother's side was the
late Bernard Lee, who played M in the old James Bond films
and who made more than 100 movies. His great-grandfather was
a variety performer. His father and mother are in film production.
His love of acting was first fuelled while at school - the
Tiffin School in Kingston-Upon-Thames - under the expert guidance
of drama teacher Frank Whately, brother of actor Kevin Whately.
"I've had an agent since I was a kid and started acting
at nine in BBC dramas with parts for nine-year-olds. I left
school at 17 to act full time, although I had thought that
I'd wait a couple of years and then go to drama school, but
I got bit parts in series and I haven't got there yet."
The series spanned from EastEnders to Prime Suspect
3. Then, in 1955, came Hackers, in which he played
an American rollerblading hacker whose internet skills were
light years ahead of his time, and Trainspotting, as the startling
platinum-haired junkie, Sick Boy.
Since then, he has veered from becoming another Brit Pack
boyo and opted for a lower profile, a quieter career, appearing
in only a handful of films - good films. Like Regeneration,
the extraordinary story of four men during the First World
War, in which he was widely-praised as Billy Prior, an officer
rendered mute from unendurable experiences on the front lines.
Any thought of him as a lightweight evaporated.
He has done his time for the Brit Pack, working abroad in
America, in Afterglow, as Julie Christie's younger
man ("she is intimidating, because she is still so beautiful"),
and a prequel mini-series to Lonesome Dove called
Dead Man's Walk. A real western made in Texas, he plays
an 1840s cowboy.
The American part of his life started when he was making
Hackers in New York. There he met and later married
his co-star, actress Angelina Jolie, the wild, beautiful daughter
of Jon Voight.
The tales that came out of that union - they divorced in
February last year, but remain friends - were not the sort
of stuff that suits the Lee Miller low profile. We love the
one about the blushing bride, clad in black rubber trousers
and a white shirt, using her blood to scrawl Miller's name
on to her shirt. We quite like the one that she got her first
tattoo with Jonny and is now also fairly covered with them.
"I was lucky enough to go to America and do what I'd always
wanted to do since I was little; work with interesting directors
on good films. I really enjoyed living in Los Angeles and
New York. There's a great underbelly and a lot of good culture
there. But I've also found there is a lot of excellent work
back home in Britain."
Lee Miller lives in Primrose Hill, where all good Brit Packers
- and most of Natural Nylon - live. He likes skydiving and
boxing, and admits to running being his only addiction. He
can be seen running on Primrose Hill and, while making Mansfield
Park, ran eight miles a day in Northampton while in training
for the London Marathon, where he ran for Whizz-Kidz, a charity
that specialises in kitting children out with tailor-made
wheelchairs.
"I try to run when I'm shooting, for at least an hour every
morning before filming starts. When you're filming on location,
you usually get one day off a week, on which I will generally
do a big run, about 20 or 22 miles. Running clears my head
completely. You get as much aggression out of you as you do
when boxing. Once I have my rhythm going, something just clicks
and I get a real buzz of energy from it."
See him next, back in Scotland, in Glasgow where he shot
Trainspotting and Regeneration, playing local
newspaper journalist in the film of Iain Banks's novel, Complicity,
directed by Gavin Millar. "It's a dark psychological thriller,
an intriguing story of murder and conspiracy. My character
is one of those journos who like to set the world right, but
gets framed in one of his own stories.
"It was great to be in Glasgow again. It is such a beautiful
place to live. For the same price as just an ordinary place
in London you can live like a king in Glasgow and the countryaside
is just a few miles away. The place really does feel like
my second home now."
- April 6 |
