JONNY LEE MILLER INTERVIEW


Lager louts in periwigs by STEPHANIE BUNBURY

It's difficult to eyeball the rather louche, rather glamorous Jonny Lee Miller across the table without thinking of Sick Boy, the junkie and ruthless seducer of Trainspotting. Odd how the image clings, though. In a short career, Miller has already transformed himself so many times - into a yuppie in Afterglow, a young soldier in Regeneration - that Sick Boy should be long forgotten. The real Jonny Lee Miller doesn't even have a blond crop.

The last hairstyle we saw him wearing, in fact, was a periwig. In his latest film, Jake Scott's Plunkett and Macleane, Miller plays the gentlemanly half of an 18th-century highway robbery duo, a fop in a frock-coat who finds himself down on his luck in debtors' prison. Fellow Trainspotter Robert Carlyle plays his rough new mate, guiding him with gusto down the road of criminality. Macleane still has social connections; Plunkett knows how to steal jewels if he can get near them. Together, they can make money.

Back in real life, the two have decided to start the day facing the press together in a jokey double-act. Carlyle thinks the first-time director, Jake Scott, wanted the two of them in Plunkett and Macleane because they already knew each other and could work in a sort of shorthand. "Yeah," says Miller. They laugh together, in a shorthandish way.

Jake Scott, 33, is the son of Ridley, as in Bladerunner. Like his father, he came to film through advertising and music videos and thus had little experience of directing actors. He needed stars he could rely on. Moreover, he was shooting in Prague, with all the lighting and set-dressing complications a period film brings, with a crew who mostly spoke no English and had a pre-glasnost work ethic.

"We blindfolded him and tied his hands behind his back as well," says Jonny, grinning.

Not tightly enough, perhaps. Plunkett and Macleane is a bit like a two-hour Adam Ant video. A swashbuckling romp hardly calls for sober historicism, but Scott goes right over the top with a pantechnicon of lights, driving dance music, bonking, swearing and E-gen slang. As for the daring duo, they come across like naughty lads pursuing an especially larkish rock'n'roll lifestyle. You half-expect them to get Newgate stomping with a smuggled stash of disco biscuits.

But the boys from Trainspotting liked those anachronisms. They liked the way the original script seemed to turn the polite BBC serial on its head and give it some class consciousness.

"It's in an old tradition," says Jonny Lee Miller, "but it's darker. And there was the fact that, essentially, the heroes of this piece are robbers."

Anyway, Carlyle points out, the historical adventures churned out by Hollywood in the '50s were just as chock-full of anachronisms.

"There was no basis in fact to them at all. They just threw in John Wayne in a toga, something like that. But these films were fun. And this film should be fun."

Fun, maybe, but there is a sense Plunkett and Macleane is not quite the film they expected to make. Carlyle says it originally struck him as subversive, then murmurs something about Americans. Do the four different script credits tell their own story? "Exactly," says Carlyle. "The nature of the game." Then he brightens. "And our names weren't on there either!" Jonny chips in: "Exactly! Should'a bin!"

Jonny Lee Miller had just finished one of those squeaky-clean, middle-class period films - Miramax's Mansfield Park, in which he plays Edmund to Australian actress Frances O'Connor's Fanny, and was poised to do Complicity, based on Iain Banks's novel.

Unless you choose for variety, he and Carlyle agree, you could find yourself playing the same part - Edinburgh junkies, whatever - for the rest of your life. So it comes as a surprise later when I meet Jonny Lee Miller on his own and he says he never plays anything too far from himself.

"I never try to completely do a character, if you know what I mean. I always feel like I'm just being me, but in the character's situation," he says.

"I think all the emotions, all the types of person, are in all of us. Your job as an actor is to bring out different bits that you don't normally, to behave in ways you don't normally behave."

We can all, he reasons, be obnoxious. Macleane is terribly vain; Miller says he hopes he isn't. "But I can see that and empathise with it and imagine myself doing that, do you know what I mean?"

Not that he has any time for people who take their characters home with them. "You get to exorcise those demons by pretending. You have to be grown-up about it. The idea of being horrible to people around you because you're playing a horrible character is just outrageous. You should be able to switch off. It's just a film."

He is not precious, either, about what it means to be a serious actor. He would take a Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, he says, if the part had something interesting about it, because Conair and The Rock are "just brilliant films of their kind". He won't knock Hollywood. "It's very easy to say, 'It's bad, bad, bad,' and it's not. Not totally."

He has had his own Hollywood experience. He went there for a while after marrying Angelina Jolie, Jon Voight's daughter and a dark princess of the rising Hollywood generation. He grew to hate it, but also had some of his best reviews for his brutal yuppie in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow.

He and Jolie met on the set of his first film, Iain Softley's Hackers, in 1995. They married the next year: she was 20, he 23. When he wanted to leave Los Angeles, her solution was to move to another new town, New York. Their split early this year was, apparently, long in coming, but he was too distraught to make it public. He has since been seen in a heady clinch with All Saint Natalie Appleton.

Perhaps this unhappy time has contributed to his reticence about things romantic in films. One reason he rates Plunkett and Macleane is because he had to deliver nothing more fiery than a peck on the cheek of Liv Tyler (looking very fetching in breeches).

"If I can avoid anything like that making a film, I will, you know what I mean? It's just very embarrassing."

Macleane goes the rounds with a couple of scrubbers, but keeps his waistcoat on and just thrusts theatrically. That's all right, says Carlyle. "Those scenes were funny. It wasn't supposed to be romantic. When you're trying to be serious and sexy, that's quite tough. Tough on you, anyway."

Jonny Lee Miller started acting at school, travelling to the Edinburgh Festival each year with the National Youth Theatre. Greasepaint ran in his blood. His father had been an actor in the '50s before turning to stage management; his grandfather, Bernard Lee, played M in the early Bond films; his great-grandfather was a music-hall entertainer.

"You're lucky when you're a kid and you know what you want to do, because there are so many kids running around who haven't a clue what they want to do with themselves, or even what they're good at," he says. "From the time I was six, I knew,really. I loved films and used to make my friends laugh."

He left school at 16 and became an usher in a West End theatre, doing the rounds of auditions between shifts. By the time he did Hackers, he had an impressive body of stage and television work.

Next up, he wants to make "a film with some friends". The friends, in fact, are Natural Nylon, the production company Miller formed with fellow actors Ewan McGregor, Jude Law, Sean Pertwee and Sadie Frost. The company co-produced David Cronenberg's latest film, eXistenZ, starring Jude Law.

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