JONNY LEE MILLER IN PLUNKETT & MACLEANE

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Official Plunkett & Macleane site

The REAL Gentleman highwayman...

As fanciful as it may seem, the tale of the gentleman highwayman Macleane and his working class partner in crime plunkett is largly based on fact; only the spellings have been changed to protect the gulity. The real James Macleane was born in 1742, the youngest of a scottish presbyterian minister in the north of ireland. Educated for a career as a merchant, Maclaine (his real name) took his fathers inheritance to dublin where, aged 18, he blew the lot of foppish clothing, gambling and whores. Shunned by his family, he moved to england, married and inkeeper's daughter and set up store as a grocer. When his gambling ruined the buisness and his wife died, he struck up the famed criminal pertnership with bankrupt apotheracy owner Plunkett. with stolen pistols and horses, and their faces hidden by venetian masks, the pair had a short but highly succesful carrer as highwayman Despite rickity beginnings (maclaine fled from their first robbery), the pair commited around 20 hold-ups durinf 6 months, often in the wilds of Hyde park. The robberys were always conducted in a restrained and courtess fashion, earning maclaine the gentleman highwayman tag and giving him enough money to finally live the society lifestyle he'd always craved. Maclaine was eventually arrested when he tried to pawn lord Elington's distinctive coat (ripped off during a hold-up on hounslow heath) such was his position among the fashionable glitterati that his trial at the old baily court was a social occasion, while he reputedly recieved nearly 3,000 guests during his imprisonment in newgate prison. at his hanging in tyburn on 3rd october the 36 year old simply said may god forgive my enemies and recieve my soul. His accomplice plunkett was never heard from again.

Plunkett & Macleane

Based-on-a-true-story, Plunkett and Macleane are a couple of Highwaymen who lived in eighteenth century London. The story makes a beautiful period drama with a twist: it's also a modern style action film with the requisite love interest.

We start in 1748, and Macleane the fallen aristocrat (Jonny Lee Miller) is drunk and in debtor's prison. Suddenly destiny arrives in the form of a stray carriage wheel which violently bursts down his door. In the ensuing confusion, he witnesses a botched hold up and the death of one of the Highwaymen, who has been shot in the scuffle. In his dying moments he swallows his booty, a large red ruby.

After his escape, Macleane follows the body to the graveyard, where he digs it up. Waiting for him is Plunkett (Robert Carlyle) who wants his dead partner's prize but doesn't have to get his hands dirty now that Macleane is here and proves rather co-operative with a gun pointed at his head.

After retrieving the gory piece (necessitating a second swallowing of the blood soaked jewel), the two are arrested and find their way to jail, where class conscious London dictates different treatment awaits. Macleane's life here is more pleasant than Plunkett's but he agrees to combine their skills to get both of them out, using the ruby as bribe.

On the outside the two agree to continue the partnership as Highwaymen so that Macleane can afford his opulent lifestyle and Plunkett can fund his trip to the New World. They use Plunkett's spoils to set up as Master and Servant living the high life in fashionable society; Macleane gleaning information which the two use to their advantage by robbing their unsuspecting acquaintances on the way home.

They hit the jackpot on their first robbery when they stop the Lord Chief Justice and his beautiful but rebellious niece, Lady Rebecca Gibson (Liv Tyler). The first instigates a major man-hunt (and the beginnings of the Police Force) while the second, well, love starts to bloom between the two pretty young things.

The two leads do quite well in their roles, Jonny Lee Miller in particular taking obvious pleasure sending himself up. Robert Carlyle is getting very proficient at doing grotty working class and Liv Tyler is just gorgeous. She makes a rather sad looking beauty, which is exactly as it should be for her role. You never do get to see her in the tight pants she wears on the poster but her Georgian frocks are most becoming, although a little too out of period for my liking. Licence has also been taken with her hair and makeup: when you have a lead as striking as Tyler you don't need to go to extremes to make sure she stands out.

Most of the entertainment value comes from Alan Cumming playing a very camp (and very modern) Lord Rochester, friend to Macleane. He gets to wear the best costumes and has lots of fun with some wickedly risque dialogue. He proves a worthy foil to Macleane, and flirts playfully with his "rough trade" Plunkett.

The film features a mainly modern soundtrack, designed no doubt to appeal to the younger set, but I found the combination of meticulous elegant period detail with synthesizers rather unsettling. On the whole it's an entertaining and enjoyable film and the climax in particular is done well, but don't look too closely at the plot for holes you will see.

For example, did Plunkett really need Macleane's help in bribing their way out of jail? After all, he did have a large ruby at his disposal. And if Plunkett had all that money stashed away, surely he already had enough to leave old Blighty? It costs plenty to set up and support a gentleman, especially when he's a lousy gambler like Macleane. And what exactly was Macleane going to do once he'd dug up that body if he wasn't going to plunge his hands into the gizzards to retrieve the ruby? Even bigger questions arrive with the Lady Rebecca, but I'll leave those for you to enjoy.

 Nicky Jenkins

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Did you know who Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller were before you went into the film?

Oh, yeah. I saw Trainspotting and absolutely loved it; didn't have any problem with the Scottish accents at all. They were great to be with, because they have this fantastic dynamic together; it's kind of a weird, unspoken dialogue. And it's not just a cliché, it really is there. They trust each other completely. In the scene when Bobby headbutts Jonny, he really headbutts him. I don't know... maybe it's a Scottish thing.

A time of hangings, highwaymen and candyfloss hairdos. Flour-faced toffs pick their way through shuffling peasants (all consumption complexion and bad posture). Fetid food, foul teeth, rough justice; the filthy rich get richer while the poor paddle about in their own filth.

 What's a nice costume drama doing in a place like this?

 Plunkett And Macleane is an almighty exercise in anachronistic irreverence and purist nose-thumbing. It's Baz Luhrmann meets Blackadder; more concerned with shaking down the period setting for interesting treasures (decadence, revenge, lust, murder, humour) than with historically precise costume renderings. On paper, there's a whiff of self-consciousness. On screen, it's an inspired mess.

 As is contractually obliged with all British-funded films, there's a class angle: Will Plunkett (Robert Carlyle) despises the upper orders and turns to the not-so noble art of highwaymanry, hoping to fund a one-way trip to the New World (America). But here, inevitably, lies the rub: in order to procure the necessary information on the comings and goings of the cash-bloated aristos, he's forced to hook up with wayward posho James Macleane (Jonny Lee Miller). At first - naturally - they share a mutual mistrust, until the bond builds: prissy Macleane grows to relish the slumming and anonymity, while spunky Plunkett takes perverse pleasure in the snooping and notoriety.

 Complications emerge in the form of The Girl (the Lord Chief Justice's slinky niece Lady Rebecca, played by Liv Tyler) and The Bad Guy (the sadistic, tongue-extracting Thief-Taker General, Chance, played by Ken Stott). Macleane falls for Rebecca, while Plunkett has a score to settle with Chance...

As producer Eric Fellner recalls, the script first surfaced in 1991, via a certain Working Title executive producer: "Gary Oldman started acting out some of the scenes he had read in a script about a highwayman who behaved in a very contemporary way in a period film. It wasn't your usual mannered period piece, but a rumbustious, action-orientated script. We wanted the film to be quite distinct from anything that had been made before, and, coming from a music video background, we knew Jake Scott would be ideal to create an exciting visual film which deliberately flouted the rules of historical accuracy."

 Which is exactly what he did. Scott spurned the historical texts and instead obsessed over 18th-century music, journals, anecdotes and paintings (particularly Hogarth's doomy moralising). For "financial and creative reasons", he shot the film mostly in Prague and the Czech Republic, where it was also much easier to fiddle with the scenery for the sake of a credible period atmosphere.

 The music could have gone two very bad ways: The Over-Literal Music Video Approach (pull up a crop of painfully contemporary bands and carefully match the lyrics to the action, including - of course - Let Me Entertain You for the ironic montage bit where the highwaymen are robbing lots of people and really enjoying it); or The Way Of The Tinkling Harpsichord (broody chamber music to emphasise the clever use of large skirts).

 Happily, Scott recruited ex-Suede and Massive Attack ally Craig Armstrong to add contemporary beef to the Georgian grunge and chintz, his shuddering dub 'n' bass stealing through the sleaze at a perfect, complementary pitch.

Carlyle and Lee Miller complete the picture: familiar, likeable, thoroughly modern misters with lashings of pre-heated chemistry. "Jonny and I got on well on Trainspotting," says Carlyle. "It's a happy coincidence that we ended up on this film together. There's already a lot of trust between us, which is very important when you consider how physical the action is. Macleane ends up pinned against the wall with Plunkett slapping him about on numerous occasions, so it helps if you trust your fellow actor."

And there's another irresistible Begbie/Trainspotting connection... Carlyle: "The style is very unusual for a period piece, as is the language. But I've always felt that people from the past would have spoken in a pretty similar way to the working man today and this script reflects that. We were completely naturalistic in the way our characters said things - there's a lot of swearing, which seems perfectly natural in the context of the film."

Tyler sums up: "It's funny and very human. It's a film you can smell - after all, hygiene was almost non-existent. Beauty spots were not about beauty; they were used to cover up the pox. Hogarth's work embodies the period: drunkenness, prostitution and murder were rife. People of that time swore like troopers. This film is beautiful, dirty and sexy."

Stand and deliver

Two of Britain's newest heart-throbs team up and hit the highway as a pair of honest-to-goodness bad guys, MARIANNE GRAY chats to both of them

Trainspotting co-stars Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller have teamed up again for something completely different.

Plunkett & Macleane, set in 1748, is based on the exploits of two real-life highwaymen, Will Plunkett, the scourge of the Thief Taker General, and Captain James Macleane, a destitute, amoral aristocrat. "We could have switched roles," says Carlyle, 38, who plays Plunkett, and is probably best remembered by South African movie fans from The Full Monty. "I think the choice and the balance works well. I personally enjoy playing the bad guy. Plunkett is basically driven by his hatred of the English class system and his dream is to travel to classless America. But for that he needs a lot of money. Basically this film has me swearing and stealing from the start!" Of his role as the "highway gentleman" Macleane, Jonny Lee Miller, 26, last seen in Afterglow and next to be seen in Mansfield Park, a film adaptation of Jane Austen's novel, says: "It fits me to be Macleane. His love of the good life drives him as much as money drives Plunkett. He's a totally selfish bloke who just wants to have a good time. These two are not what you could call heroes. "I don't imagine people will compare us to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid somehow, but Bobby and I have worked together before (as Begbie and Sick Boy respectively in Trainspotting) and have a code of something between us now."

Together, Bobby, and I, we made quite a jolly gang of gigglers with Liv Tyler who plays the English Rose of the piece, Lady Rebecca Gibson, niece of Chief Justice Gibson."With his clothes on, Robert Carlyle is not much like THAT Full Monty poster which got groins twitching from London to Lagos. There's no delicious smirk, no chest filling one with impure thoughts, no crumpled blue shirt. In fact, when we met in London, there was hardly a square inch of him on show. Just a wee man with round brown eyes and hair and the aura of newfound fame hovering restlessly around his shoulders.

We both knew that the old dreaded question about going totally full-frontal starkers in front of 300 drooling females for the last scene in The Full Monty had to be asked. I set about getting it over and done with quickly and cleanly. "Yes, it was a very scary sensation which I counteracted marginally by getting very drunk," Carlyle says with a skewed smile. "I can assure you I didn't think about looking to see if it had shrivelled up out of embarrassment.

"I don't do anything like that in Plunkett & Macleane which is all carousing in mid-18th-century costumes and roaring around on horseback. It was the first costume drama I'd ever done, but I must have done it okay as I've done another two since."

Carlyle seems to have quite a clinical approach to interviews, getting his point across with a succinct turn of phrase (if you can glean it through the Glaswegian accent), but basically saying nothing much about Carlyle the man. In the nicest sense of the word, he is, as someone once described him, a bit of a tight-lipped sod.

The way he sees it, nothing's going to change chez Carlyle now that he's become Scotland's hottest toddy since Ewan McGregor."You can't say that my life has to change," he protests. "Life only changes if you want it to. People's perceptions might change but not necessarily the actual person on the other end.

"I still live two miles from where I was born in Glasgow (with his wife, make-up artist Anastasia Shirley) and still have friends that I knew even before I was acting, so I feel fundamentally the same person, even though so much has happened to me in my life up to this point."I have to admit that it's now difficult for me to talk about social issues and things that really do matter and are close to my heart, because I am now in a privileged position and I lead a privileged life, so how the hell can I comment on it? It's something I struggle with."

Carlyle has spent a career out of making psychos human (Trainspotting, Cracker as Albie, and the upcoming Ravenous as a man with a taste for human flesh), and immersing himself in roles that a lesser man would lose altogether: the bus-driving politico in Ken Loach's Carla's Song, the building site idealist in Loach's Riff-Raff, Linus Roache's ignored gay lover in Antonia Bird's Priest, and the dope-smoking copper in the hit TV series Hamish Macbeth.

He seems to have the intelligence and craft to choose carefully as he goes, an asset that recently earned him an OBE (Order of the British Empire)."When I first heard I was going to receive an OBE I had a good laugh because it's not something I'd expect," Carlyle says. "It's generally later in life that you get medals and things like that."

Acting got him late. He left school with zero qualifications at 16 to follow his father into his painting and decorating business. He had grown up on a rough Glasgow estate and moved around hippy colonies with his dad after his mother, who worked for the Glasgow Bus Company, walked out on her husband when Bobby was four.The acting came after five years up a ladder (plus evening classes in English, art and history), when he was spending his 21st birthday book tokens and came across a R7,50 paperback of Arthur Miller's play of witchcraft and Mccarthyism, The Crucible. He bought it, took it home and read it. Something clicked. A friend recommended acting classes at the Glasgow Arts Centre.

"I must have done something right because they gave me a grant to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 1983. But I hated all that stuff they taught me while thumping out the rawness and energy I had."

Carlyle's in Ireland at present shooting Angela's Ashes with Emily Watson, and soon he'll play the baddie in the new 007 film."After I got the part there were a few Bond films on TV over Christmas and I was looking at Christopher Walken and Robert Shaw thinking 'f***ing hell, there's quite a tradition of heavyweight actors that have been Bond baddies'. So obviously I am taking it quite seriously."

The less known but as talented Jonny Lee Miller has been taking acting seriously since he was a kid. Born in London, he says his childhood was spent either in TV studios or theatres. His grandfather on his mother's side, who died when Lee Miller was 11, played M in the old James Bond movies and made more than 100 films. His great-grandfather was a variety performer. His parents are both in film production and at 17 he left school to act full time. Lee Miller has had an agent since he started acting at nine "in BBC dramas with parts for nine-year-olds".

"I thought at first that I'd wait a couple of years and then go to drama school but in those two years I got a few parts, so I thought, 'Why not use this time to get a few steps ahead of my contemporaries?'"Which he did in bit parts all over primetime TV from East Enders to Prime Suspect. Then there were Trainspotting, Hackers and the wonderful World War One drama Regeneration, in which he played Billy Prior, an officer rendered mute from unendurable experiences on the front line.

Lee Miller's real name is 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," he explains, "so I decided to go for the Country and Western feel of Jonny Lee. I can always do what Laurence Fishburne did and change it back."

Lee Miller is extremely polite with a classic profile and deep hazel eyes. His one quirk seems to be tattoos and he has a collection of them from all over the world.

"They can be a problem on screen but at the time the tattoos seem more important. Once you get one it's kind of addictive."He has done his time for the Brit Pack, and also lived in Los Angeles with his ex-wife, Angelina Jolie, and New York. Still friends, he and Jolie, the wild and beautiful daughter of Jon Voight, met in New York making Hackers."The great thing about America," says Lee Miller, "is that I can get to work with great directors like Alan Rudolph (Afterglow). I have an agent there. I've done a western, a prequel to Lonesome Dove, called Dead Man's Walk. It's great just doing what I've wanted to do since I was little. Not many people get to do that.

"I don't get that celebrity stuff, no women hurling themselves at me or kids queuing up for signatures. There's a great underbelly and a lot of good culture there.

"My best buddy is (English actor) Jude Law and we have formed our own production company, Natural Nylon, with his wife Sadie Frost, Ewan McGregor and others. Our company just produced David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. We all support each other and there's room for everyone when it comes to getting the right film roles. We're all different."Lee Miller is working in Scotland now making a film called Complicity. "It's an intriguing story of murder and conspiracy, adapted from Iain Banks's best-selling novel. In it I play a local newspaper journalist who likes to set the world to rights but gets framed in one of his own stories.

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