| 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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