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March 2004 A Miller's tale By Daniel Rosenthal, Metro Life
Has it really been eight years since a grinning, peroxide-blond
Jonny Lee Miller pointed at us from billboards and bus stops
across London in the classic poster campaign for Trainspotting?
The actor himself can't believe it's been that long. 'It'll
be nine years this summer since we made it,' he says. 'Amazing.'
Between that breakthrough performance as Sick Boy opposite
Ewan McGregor in the coolest Brit pic of the Nineties and
this month's starring role at the Almeida Theatre in a new
adaptation of another cinematic landmark, the Danish Dogme
hit Festen, 31-year-old Lee Miller has had more than his fair
share of professional peaks and troughs and tabloid attention.
The son of actor-turned-TV producer Alan Miller and grandson
of Bernard Lee (hence the extra middle name), who was M in
11 James Bond films, he had performance in his blood, made
his first TV appearance aged 11 and left his Kingston-upon-Thames
school at 17 to pursue his acting career. After the inevitable
spells of unemployment and temporary jobs (porter at the Hard
Rock Cafe, usher at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), he turned
up in several episodes of EastEnders and had his first significant
film role in the 1995 cyber thriller
Hackers, falling in love with his co-star, the then little-known
Angelina Jolie.
Within a year of Trainspotting's release, he had married
Jolie, given a subtly moving performance as shell-shocked
First World War soldier Billy Prior in Gillies MacKinnon's
Regeneration, and won praise from Julie Christie as 'one of
the best' actors around when they worked on the adultery drama,
Afterglow.
By 1999 his marriage had ended - very amicably (he and Jolie
remain 'very good friends' who still go travelling together)
- and he was dating former All Saints singer Natalie Appleton
and hitting the London party circuit. He quickly tired of
the attention and, today, currently single, he is relieved
to be out of the celebrity spotlight that shines so fiercely
on his close friend Jude Law.
Intrusive coverage of Law and his children, the eldest of
whom is Lee Miller's godson, infuriates him. 'To say that
people deserve it because they're famous is just absolutely
ridiculous,' he says during his lunch break at the Almeida's
rehearsal rooms, the nervous energy of an intense morning's
work on Festen still evident in his restless body language.
'Being photographed outside a nightclub doesn't bother me.
But when people buy pictures from photographers who are outside
your house all day, which really messes up your kids, it's
kind of
sad, really, and pointless.'
He and Appleton were still an item when his career hit the
buffers. His double act with Robert Carlyle in Plunkett &
Macleane was meant to deliver hip-hop highwaymen action, but
critics scoffed and audiences steered clear, Mansfield Park
was overshadowed by earlier, better Jane Austen adaptations,
and his lead role as a corrupt
Scottish hack in the leaden adaptation of Iain Banks's novel,
Complicity, never reached cinemas south of the border. Worse
was to come.
Dracula 2000 was a bloodless flop and The Escapist, an inept
revenge thriller, deservedly went straight to video. The London
gangster 'comedy' Love, Honour And Obey, starring Lee Miller,
Law, Sadie Frost and the other acting members of their overhyped
production company, Natural Nylon, was hugely disappointing.
'I was really into The Escapist script, but it changed a
lot while we were making it,' he says by way of defence. 'That's
beyond my power. Frankly, all I can do is my job. The same
happened with Dracula 2000, which stinks as a movie, but the
script I signed up to was brilliant.' He is stoical about
these stinkers 'because you'd go nuts otherwise', and has
no desire to follow the actor-producer route that would give
him control over rewrites, not least because of his experience
on the one Natural Nylon project for which he did assume that
dual role - a
biopic about legendary British war photographer Don McCullin.
'We had Don on board and a really good script, with me playing
Don, but we just couldn't raise the finance. 'I found that
very disappointing, and thought, "I don't want to play
this game."'
Last year, the prolonged losing streak finally ended with
the closure of Natural Nylon and two superb performances in
BBC dramas as 'a really nasty piece of work' in The Pardoner's
Tale, one of the modernised Canterbury Tales, and in the title
role of the two-part costume drama Byron, which rescued the
poet from the 'mad, bad and dangerous to know' cliche.
Like Regeneration, it showed that Lee Miller excels playing
thoughtful men of obvious charm who are uncomfortable with
their lot. This gift explains why Festen director Rufus Norris
chose him to play Christian, the restaurateur who decides
to disrupt his father's 60th birthday dinner with shocking
revelations of childhood abuse.
Lee Miller hadn't seen Thomas Vinterberg's award-winning
1998 movie when he read the adaptation by David Eldridge,
the 30-year-old author of such fine plays as Summer Begins
and Serving It Up. 'I just read it as an incredibly powerful
and very upsetting and disturbing story. I didn't watch the
film because I wanted to do a couple of weeks' rehearsals
and not have that influence. Then I watched it and it's absolutely
fantastic. But David's take on it is very different, more
intimate.'
He expects that the Almeida production 'will be slagged off
by people who say, "Oh this bit's not like the film",'
and returns to the line: 'All I can do is my job as an actor,
and that's the way I like it.' He's not in danger of taking
himself too seriously.
As he heads back to rehearsals, I ask who he plays in the
next Woody Allen film, Melinda And Melinda. 'An obnoxious
out-of-work actor. Something of which I have experience and
may have experience of again,' he replies, chuckling. 'The
irony is not lost on me.'
Festen, previewing from Thur 18 Mar, first night Thur 25
Mar, Almeida
Theatre, Almeida Street, N1 (020-7359 4404).
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