Click on each page for a larger view:
from Variety.com
Posted: Mon., Apr. 25, 2011, 3:55pm PT
Showtime renews ‘The Borgias’
Second season of 10 episodes to air in 2012
By Jon Weisman
Barely three weeks after its premiere, historical drama “The Borgias” has earned a 10-episode second season from Showtime.
Starring Jeremy Irons, “The Borgias” has outpaced the final season of Showtime ancestor “The Tudors” in viewership. Production will begin this summer on the second season of “Borgias,” with a 2012 premiere date targeted.
Neil Jordan will continue as exec produce as well as direct the first two episodes of season two. David Leland will also write several episodes and direct a pair.
Jeremy and The Borgias get mentioned in the April 11, 2011 issue of People Magazine.
Click for a larger image:
Read the full, original article at Parade.com, complete with a link back to the Kilcoe Castle page at jeremyirons.net!
Here’s how the article appears in Parade Magazine in newspapers: (Click for a much larger high-res image…)
If there’s a cad or a creep to be played, Jeremy Irons’s antennae shoot up. “Characters who live on the outer edge of acceptable behavior have always been to my taste,” says the Oscar winner, now starring as the power-mad patriarch of Showtime’s series The Borgias (Sundays, 10 p.m. ET/PT). Irons, 62, chats with Steve Daly about his affinity for sinners.
Why are scandalous families like the Borgias so fascinating?
Whether it be in The Borgias or Shakespeare or The Godfather, we love watching people doing what we don’t dare do. Murder and mayhem, from the safe position of our armchairs, can be delightful.
What will audiences make of Rodrigo Borgia, who became Pope Alexander VI in 1492 but kept multiple mistresses?
He wouldn’t see that as hypocritical. He wasn’t a god—he was a man, and man was born a sinner. He’s rather endearing, in a strange way. He’s as pathetic as all men are. They want everything, don’t they?
Will people be surprised at the brutal Vatican politics?
The Vatican at that time was nothing like it is now. In a way, it was a medieval West Wing—the center of power in the known world.
Sundays have changed since Borgia days. What do they mean for you?
I’m a bit sorry we have all the shops open. But we all have to be encouraged to buy, buy, buy, to keep society going, so I suppose one has to accept that. For me, it’s a day I can have a lie-in and a relaxed brunch. I think we need a down day. Otherwise we’d just go bananas.
Your 25-year-old son, Max, is co-starring in Red Riding Hood. What’s it been like watching him deal with the publicity?
Well, it fills me with concern. I’m very happy he’s doing what he loves. But my nightmare as a young actor was to be taken up too quickly. A plant needs to get its roots into the soil before it can withstand the wind and the ice and the cold. Nowadays, the business has a huge appetite for youth and tends, when it’s tired of it, to spit it out. But I think he’s got his head screwed on quite straight.
You’ve played some very dark roles. Which gave you the most pause before saying yes?
I think Reversal of Fortune, because the protagonists [Claus and Sunny von Bülow] were still alive—or partly alive, anyway. But Glenn Close persuaded me that if I didn’t do it, someone else would. And I knew Lolita would cause fireworks. I said to my agent, “You’d better get me a wage that will keep me the next three years, because I don’t think I’ll work much after this.” That was indeed what happened.
You’re skilled at sailing the ocean and riding horses and motorcycles fast—not the safest activities. Are you a daredevil?
Living on the edge, for me, has always been one of life’s great pleasures. It’s not really the speed; it’s the fact that you have to do it well in order to survive.
Ever pushed it too far?
Oh, I have. At any time, you can tumble, but that adds to the frisson. It reminds you there is an edge. And I think we need constant reminders: The edge is there. Don’t fall over it.
Acclaimed actor Jeremy Irons talks about the Irish castle he’s renovated. Plus, Irons gets passionate about the controversial ban on smoking in New York City.
On the 15th century castle in Ireland he owns and has renovated.
“Renovating scared the wits off me. I didn’t know what it was going to cost or how long it would take, or that I’d manage to do it. People were sort of surprised, ‘cause they think I’m an extremely wealthy actor. They thought, ‘You’ll get architects in, you’ll get builders, and they’ll do it.’ But I didn’t want to do it that way. I wanted to be as hands-on as I could.
“It was open to the sky, but structurally sound. The walls had stood for 500 years, despite people’s attempts to pull them down for the stone they contained. They’re 100 feet tall, 9 feet thick at the bottom and 4 feet thick at the top. All the fine carving around the windows had either been eroded or stolen. No heating, no plumbing, no electricity.
“When we were going flat-out on it, I had 40 guys working there every day. I was the main contractor, so my job was to make sure that those guys, who were getting paid by the hour, were fully occupied, that they had all the equipment and materials they needed.
“I didn’t put a lift [elevator] in. The purist inside me said, ‘You’ve got to earn that height. If you want to get up there, you’ve got to walk.’ I’m sort of glad about that, even though when I’m 80 I may be cursing that decision.”
On the unusual color the castle is painted.
“It’s a sort of orange terra cotta—the color of newly-born seaweed. It’s a color that’s found a lot around the castle, and also in strands of the [local] rock that has copper in it. I think it fits [the setting] quite well, but it did surprise everybody when we first took the scaffolding down. There was a sort of sharp intake of breath from those in the neighborhood. I once asked my direct neighbor, who’s a farmer, ‘What color would you have done it?’ He said, ‘I suppose grey.’ Because of course it had been grey for the last 400 years. However, he said, ‘It’s yours! You can paint it whatever color you like.’ And now they rather like it. The fishermen and the ferrymen use it as a landmark. And I have to say it looks stunning, especially in low morning or evening light.
See photos of Jeremy’s stunning castle in Ireland
On the public-area no-smoking regulations he hates.
“I think they’re appalling. It’s what I call bullying a minority. Because if you say, ‘I really think I should have the right to smoke in the street or in the park or at the beach,’ people will say, ‘You shouldn’t be smoking at all. It’s bad for you.’ Well, I think we can choose what’s bad for us. I mean, there are many other things in life that are bad for us. Being surrounded by boring people is very bad for us—it attacks the heart. And being surrounded by mass consumerism, as one is in most urban areas, is bad for you, making you believe that if you buy something, it’ll make you happy. But all those things people are allowed to get away with.”
Q + LA – Jeremy Irons – LA Times Magazine – Read original article here.
photo by ANDREW MACPHERSON
Of course Jeremy Irons makes his own cigarettes. He keeps in his pocket a two-sided leather pouch. One half holds the tobacco, the other those dark brown rolling papers favored by the Brits. He is unrepentant about what most everyone labels a vice. In March of 1987, despite her admonishments, he famously puffed away while sitting next to Princess Diana at a charity gala on the U.K.’s National No Smoking Day.
He’s chimney-esque. It’s why we’re sitting outside, mid February in New York City, when the forecast calls for rain. But Irons has the most exquisite vocal cords, and perhaps tar and nicotine are the elements of his phonetical magic. To beat a dead horse here: Up close and in person, his pipes are almost unnerving, having an effect not unlike the enveloping THX surround-sound promo that’s played before movies start.
Irons downplays his golden larynx with a proper Englishman’s manners, but everyone else has taken notice. He’s frequently called upon to narrate spoken-word recordings and documentaries, most recently The Last Lions from National Geographic, about the big cats in Botswana. (Familiar sonantal territory—who can forget his terrifying turn as Scar in The Lion King?) This month, that voice—and the body that houses it—stars in The Borgias, Showtime’s new drama series about a Spanish cardinal who ascended to the Papacy by decidedly Machiavellian means. Let’s hear it for the silver-tongued cads.
What drew you to The Borgias?
Neil Jordan, because he’s a director and writer I admire, and I was aware that a lot of the best writing and filming was happening on American television. [Also] the Borgias [1492–1503] is a very interesting period.
How far from history does the show veer?
Not that far. It’s difficult to get accurate historical information from that time, but there was a huge amount of wild stories about [Pope Alexander VI].
Are you anticipating flack from the Catholic Church?
Obviously they’re nervous, but I hope it’ll be rather like if Queen Elizabeth went to see a production of Richard III. She wouldn’t say, “This is absolutely disgraceful.” She’d think it was historical, and I hope the Pope and the Vatican hierarchy take that attitude. It’s partly about how all power corrupts. That hasn’t changed.
What age were you when you thought, I want to make acting my life’s work?
Very late. Something stirred in me when I saw Lawrence of Arabia and saw what Peter O’Toole did in that. I thought, I’d love to be involved in that sort of thing, but I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be.
So, you were born on an island off an island off an island?
The village where I was born wasn’t actually an island, but it was always known as the Isle of Geese, within a harbor on the Isle of Wight [off the southern coast of England]. I learned to sail when I was 10. I have a little boat of my own, and I did part of the round-the-world race—from New Zealand to Australia.
In Reversal of Fortune, we see your Claus von Bülow character on a boat. Do you ever run into him in London?
Sometimes, but I didn’t meet him until about four years after the movie. I knew he wouldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already instinctively know. I couldn’t ask whether he tried to kill his wife. I think I know the answer, and that’s how I played it in the film. He’s funny. We met at a cricket match at Paul Getty’s, who was a mutual friend.
Did you know ahead of time that he’d be there?
No, I arrived, and Paul said, “Claus is in the house looking around the library. I know you’ve never wanted to meet him, and so I won’t mind if you skedaddle off.” And I said, “Well, I’d quite like to meet him now.” I was sitting watching the cricket, and I heard this voice behind me saying, “You see—I’m not fat!” I turned round and said, “I never said you were fat. I used to do interviews, and I said you were bigger than me. Well, you’re a bigger man than me.” He said, “Do you hear from Alan Dershowitz?” and I said, “No, actually. Since the movie I haven’t heard from him.” And so [von Bülow said], “I understand he’s representing Michael Tyson and Leona Helmsley.” I said, “Yeah, I read about it.” [He replied,] “You haven’t been asked to play either of them, have you?” And I said, “I thought Mike Tyson might be beyond my range, but I’d have a crack at Leona.”.
I would think it’d be weird to be face-to-face with someone you’ve portrayed onscreen.
Quite. Originally I didn’t want to do Reversal of Fortune. I thought it was a bit tasteless. [Sunny von Bülow] was in a coma, the kids were still about, and I thought, Why rake over these coals? It won’t be much fun for them. But Glenn [Close] persuaded me. She said, “If you don’t, someone else will.”
What makes you nervous?
I get slightly nervous when I don’t find work that really tests me or when I’m riding horses or I have to change my routine. It gets harder as you get older to learn lines, and sometimes I get nervous I’ll forget them. Not seriously so. A little adrenaline is good, but nerves tend to defeat what you’re trying to do.
When did you first set foot in Los Angeles, and what were your initial impressions?
I had just made The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I stayed at the Chateau [Marmont] and had a meeting with Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner about some project. It was all very nice. Of course, nothing came of anything. A lot of fat is chewed in L.A. I wasn’t seduced. I was a bit excited about meeting famous people for a while, and there are some nice people there, but I knew I never wanted to live over the shop.
Has anyone ever rendered you starstruck?
Yeah. I was doing The Real Thing at the Plymouth [on Broadway]. There was a knock, and a voice said, “Mr. Irons.” I looked, and it was Paul Newman. He blew me away.
When you won the Best Actor Oscar for Reversal of Fortune, you thanked your Dead Ringers director David Cronenberg and said, “Some of you may understand why.” Tell me what you meant by that.
I’d made that film the year before, which got a lot of feedback in Hollywood [with people] saying, “It’s outrageous that you’re not nominated.” I was playing twin gynecologists, and it was quite eye-catching but not Oscar subject matter. But without that movie…This is why I thanked David Cronenberg.
Did the twins of the movie really die together, both from barbiturate withdrawal?
I don’t know whether it was cold turkey or…The problem is if you’re doing cold turkey and you take more drugs, you’re in trouble. They were found naked in their flat, just wearing socks.
When you were walking up to accept your Oscar, you stopped and kissed Madonna, who was sitting front row with Michael Jackson during their famous 1991 Oscar date.
I would have stopped to kiss to anybody!
Are you two chummy?
No! But at that moment, I nearly kissed Michael Jackson.
Can you enjoy a Jeremy Irons film the way the rest of us can?
It takes me about 20 years. I saw The Mission about 20 years after I made it, and I was able to see it quite dispassionately and see the guy on the screen. I thought, He looks a bit like my son. Who’s that?
You’ve had the same people in your inner circle for decades.
I like longevity. You get to know people, their ups and their downs, their goods and their bads. I’ve always thought the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.
You’re known for having one of the greatest voices in the world. What is your favorite word to say?
Crepuscular. The crepuscular hour is when the sun dips. In movie terms, you call it the magic hour. I also like excellent. Excellent is a word I use because it’s very encouraging, and I learned long ago that when anybody came up with an idea I would say, “Excellent.”
But what if the person’s idea is actually horrible?
Well, you just don’t do it.
Stylist: Brandon Palas
Groomer: Helen Jeffers
Shirt: Ann Demeulemeester
Irons dissects complex character – Toronto Sun
Jeremy Irons on playing Pope Alexander VI as a regular dude – Montreal Gazette
Playing Jeremy Irons’ son was intriguing for actor – Sioux City Journal
Liz Smith: The Borgias Will Slay You
‘Borgias’: Showtime couldn’t make this stuff up – USA Today
Oh God, you Devil! – New York Post
Jeremy Irons on finding the good side of bad guys – Toronto Globe and Mail
Showtime takes on a scandalous Pope Alexander VI with The Borgias – L.A. Times
Review: Jeremy Irons Brings Charisma to ‘The Borgias’ – Maureen Ryan, TV Squad
Family values – ‘Borgias’: historical, incestuous, murderous fun – New York Post
The Borgias: We are family – from TV Soundoff
The Borgias: The Original Crime Family – from Pop Culture Passionistas
The Family That Sins Together – Toronto Star
Showtime’s sinister ‘Borgias’: Vile, corrupt, addictive – The Washington Post
Jeremy Irons stars in Showtime’s The Borgias – ABC News and Associated Press
Jeremy Irons has admitted acting doesn’t get any easier with age – from Yahoo News
“Borgias” doesn’t let facts get in way of sexy story – Los Angeles Times
Just Like You Imagined
Jeremy Irons plays himself very well.
Photo by Matt Carr/Getty Images
By Jada Yuan
Published Mar 27, 2011
Read the original article HERE
Jeremy Irons is laughing heartily outside Le Bilboquet on East 63rd Street, surrounded by attentive females. It’s a cold day, but he seems oblivious to the chill as he sips an afternoon Kir Royale and languidly smokes a hand-rolled cigarette. You approach and introduce yourself. He springs up, grabbing both your arms, and stands back to appraise you. At 62, he still possesses a liquid-eyed hotness. He cheek-kisses good-bye his coterie of women (publicists, managers, friends—it’s unclear), lays his hand on your shoulder, and gently guides you through the bistro door, all the while staring deeply into your eyes, so absorbed that he is halfway through the room before he realizes he forgot to put out his cigarette. With apologies, he takes his leave amid a chorus of dismay. “Are you kidding? He can smoke wherever he wants! He’s so cool!” says one entranced male diner, upon whom Irons bestows a two-palmed handshake before stepping outside to carefully deposit his cigarette butt in a trash bin.
Jeremy Irons is just so Jeremy Irons—that is to say, the man of flesh is very much the man of your fantasies. He doesn’t so much occupy space as consume it. Eyes follow him, then stare, rapt. And Irons, something of an attention hog, plays to his audience. He chooses the corner that allows him to face out and survey the room as it surveys him right back.
Irons calls out for a round of “Château Bloomberg” (a.k.a. tap water), “straight from the East River!” He has, he declares, “turned vigorously against the mayor because of the new law [banning] smoking in parks or on the beach, which I think is ludicrous and a terrible bullying of a minority that cannot speak back.” Irons, his teeth a testament to a life of indulgences, believes smokers ought to be protected like “handicapped people and children.” Though he clearly relishes declamation, he is getting notably heated over a law that is very briefly touching his life. The actor spends most of his time in an Oxfordshire village or at Kilcoe, an actual fifteenth-century castle (“You’d call it a keep,” he clarifies) on a bay in Ireland. Kilcoe’s hundred-foot, lovingly restored towers help to explain a spate of early-aughts parts in “sub–Lord of the Rings stuff” like Dungeons & Dragons. “It’s the shit you do,” he says, to “pay for another six months.”
Irons is in New York to reprise a guest role as a sex addict turned sex therapist on Law & Order: SVU (airing March 30) and to publicize his new Showtime show The Borgias (debuting April 3), a part he took at the behest of his friend Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), who wrote the series and directed the first two episodes. Irons plays Pope Alexander VI, despite having zero resemblance to the real man—an enormous, hook-nosed Spaniard with an insatiable appetite for corruption, food, women, and murdering his enemies. “I Googled Rodrigo Borgia, and he’s a voluptuary,” says the actor. “And I said, ‘I think I’m a bit of an ascetic, really, for that.’ And Neil said, ‘No, no, no. Because it’s all about power and what power does to you and how you deal with it. And you can play all that.’ ”
Yes, powerful and dark, Irons can do. He broke out as a heartthrob in the BBC series Brideshead Revisited, then romanced Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman. But by his forties, he was playing against his good looks, choosing dangerous, even creepy characters—like the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune, for which he won his Oscar.
In his Borgias role, an outsider beset by a Roman aristocracy bent on destroying him, Irons sees parallels with Barack Obama. “Just look at the gossip about your current president being from Africa or being a Muslim,” he says. “Alexander was getting all of that.” On the other hand, Irons thinks Alexander had it easier than another of our presidents. “The medievalists would see the reaction to Clinton, for instance, and the cigars, as being deeply prohibitive. He’s a man! We ought to forgive and say, ‘Yeah, he’s got a lot of testosterone, and he’s great at what he does, and he loves a bit of lady, and there you go.’ We see all these marriages breaking because they’re under intolerable strains, because we expect to get all our happiness from our husband or our wife. Impossible! How can you get that from one other person? I don’t want a saint to be my leader. And maybe his wife after fifteen years won’t be able to provide everything he needs. That’s fine. That’s life.”
Irons’s wife of 33 years, the actress Sinéad Cusack, is apparently fine with this; no doubt she’s used to her husband’s decrees—including his disdain for organized religion (she is a practicing Catholic): “I don’t really approve of religion … I’m not quite sure the relevance Christianity has.” Their son Max, 25 (brother to Sam, 32), is currently starring in Red Riding Hood. Irons hasn’t seen the film, but he did catch the Jimmy Kimmel appearance in which Max talked about his eternal embarrassment over his dad’s driving around in a horse and buggy in the town where he grew up. Irons smiles indulgently. The father is resigned to letting the son find his own way. “I hope he never gets out of touch with theater, and I hope he doesn’t get too seduced by the money and all that,” says Irons. “I wish him well. But it’s always, for any parent, a slightly heart-in-the-mouth situation when you see your child climbing a rock face.”
Should The Borgias come back after the first season, the actor is committed to the series for five months out of the year, perhaps for three or four years. He is aware of and on guard against the lusty tendencies of cable TV’s costume dramas: “I know there are some series where there is a bit of history and a bit of fucking and a bit of history and a bit of fucking,” he says. “I think [Showtime] would have liked to have made it even more about that, but I wouldn’t want to be involved in something that’s just as obviously … You know, if you want fucking, there’s a lot of other channels.” (For the record, there is still quite a lot of fucking in The Borgias.)
As he’s telling me about his desire to play King Lear (“The next fifteen years, I’ll be right for it. And the next ten, I’ll be able to remember my lines”), a man approaches to ask if Irons would mind posing with his giggling female companion. The actor lets out an exasperated sigh. It is the first indication that being Jeremy Irons might be a bit of work. Then it’s gone, the Irons of your imagination returns, and it’s impossible to tell if his annoyance was real or feigned. He looks up at the woman, leaning awkwardly over him, and wraps his arm around her waist: “You’re falling over. Come and sit down. Just don’t show it to my wife. Ha. Ha. Pleasure. My pleasure.”
Read the full original article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/arts/television/the-borgias-a-showtime-mini-series-starring-jeremy-irons.html
March 25, 2011
Plum Role: History’s Ultimate Godfather
By CHARLES McGRATH
ALTHOUGH they lived in the 15th and 16th centuries, the Borgias, the subject of a new nine-part Showtime mini-series that begins next Sunday, were a family made for TV. The Borgias were rich, ruthless, scheming and corrupt, and so sexually voracious that, if you believe the rumors, they slept with everyone, including one another. Mario Puzo, who worked on a novel about them, called the Borgias the Corleones of the Renaissance. They also resemble “The Sopranos” a little. Imagine if Tony, instead of running a garbage hauling business, had bought himself the papacy.
“The Borgias,” which cost $45 million to make, was created, written and produced by the film director Neil Jordan, who also directed several episodes. It is Showtime’s latest entry in what is becoming a high-stakes game on cable TV now that it’s no longer enough merely to show Hollywood movies or the odd sporting event. If you want to sell cable subscriptions these days, you need not just original programming but a long-running, franchise-defining series like “The Tudors,” Showtime’s recent hit.
A bankable star doesn’t hurt either, and in the new series the Borgia paterfamilias, Rodrigo, who became Pope Alexander VI, is played by Jeremy Irons, not exactly typecast. To judge from his famous portrait by Cristofano dell’Altissimo, the historical Rodrigo, corpulent and hatchet nosed, looked as if he had been inflated with a tire pump. At the time of his death, or so the legend goes, he was so bloated and debauched that when his body was inserted into the coffin, someone had to jump on the lid to get it shut.
“When we first talked about the part, Jeremy was worried that he didn’t have that bulbous weight,” Mr. Jordan said recently, speaking by phone from his house in Ireland. “I told him that if we can get this guy properly situated, torn between God and politics, the weight wouldn’t matter.” He added: “I wanted someone who would understand the kind of history here. ‘The Borgias’ isn’t just a saga of poisoning and nubile women, like a Ken Russell movie. Well, we do have all that, but we also put this figure in historical context.”
Mr. Irons, still elegantly handsome at 62, doesn’t look much like Pope Alexander. He nevertheless has, both on screen and in person, a slightly detached, regal quality, a darting, glinting intelligence, and occasionally an air of weary melancholy, all very useful papal attributes. He also has a long history of playing characters who are morally ambiguous if not outright villainous: Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”; the deranged twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”; the accused wife poisoner Claus von Bülow in “Reversal of Fortune” (for which he won an Academy Award); even Scar in “The Lion King.” And with that deep, rumbling voice, like an organ echoing in a cathedral, he sounds the way a Renaissance pope should sound: the sibilant S’s, the luxurious drawn-out vowels suggesting knowledge acquired outside the seminary.
Mr. Irons speaks this way in real life too, and in New York recently, draped over a chair in his suite at the Lowell hotel, he employed that same voice to say, “We don’t talk about my voice.” He doesn’t like to be made conscious of it, he explained, recalling a conversation he had years ago with the actor John Hurt. “You know all these young actors coming up, 18, 19, 20 — rather good, aren’t they?” Mr. Hurt said. “You know what I do? I go up and say, ‘You’re a great actor, with such a fantastic voice. Have you ever listened to it?’ ”
And then they’re finished, Mr. Hurt said gleefully.
Mr. Irons was a late bloomer. He grew up well to do, on the Isle of Wight in England and went to Sherborne, a midlevel boys’ boarding school, where he was a good athlete but such an indifferent student that the headmaster predicted he would wind up as a paratrooper. He tried being a social worker before becoming an actor and then had such trouble finding parts that for a while he supported himself as a home remodeler. His breakthrough didn’t come along until 1981, when he was cast as the earnest, proper Charles Ryder in the 11-part television adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.”
“We had just come through the ‘Look Back in Anger’ phase, and actors like Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney were sort of fashionable — what I call the kitchen-sink actors, actors with local accents,” he said. “It was ‘Brideshead’ that made it acceptable to have someone who was tall and English and spoke properly as a hero.”
Nevertheless he mostly sees his archetypal Englishness as a liability rather than a strength. “The American version of the Englishman is rather like the English version of the American — sort of one-dimensional and not very attractive,” he said. “I’ve tried not to capitalize on my Englishness. If I had the charm of David Niven or Hugh Grant, then maybe I would, but I don’t. I’m dirtier and more odd.”
The roles of characters who are strange or morally enigmatic have come to him, he went on, partly by accident, or because he has a reputation for playing them, and partly because he has sought them out. “Certainly they attract me,” he said. “I’m always interested in good and evil, who’s a good person, who’s a bad person, believing, really, that we’re all rather gray.”
No one is grayer than Rodrigo Borgia, who bought the papacy in a rigged election, had numerous mistresses and fathered four children yet was also a skilled diplomat and renowned patron of the arts. Mr. Jordan said he thought the whole family has suffered from bad press: “A lot of the history was written by Rodrigo’s successors, especially by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere, who became Pope Julius II. There was no Gibbon or Niall Ferguson to write about the Borgias, and so they become a little demonized.”
He added that what he found interesting in writing the script was that once Rodrigo was put in the context of his family, he remained attractive no matter how evil he became. Oddly, the villain of “The Borgias” is Rodrigo’s rival, della Rovere (played by Colm Feore), a model of probity and holiness.
Mr. Irons said that in researching the part he made a list of all the qualities attributed to Rodrigo Borgia. “It was like a rainbow,” he said. “The list goes all the way from ‘generous man,’ ‘wonderful company,’ ‘a great organizer’ to ‘poisoner,’ ‘cruel’ and ‘despotic,’ all the worst adjectives you can think of. I thought: ‘That’s very interesting. Maybe it’s all true. Maybe from different vantage points all those adjectives could be seen to be the truth.’ Film is always a kind of patchwork anyway, and my hope is that Rodrigo will emerge as a man of many different colors and many different behaviors. He’s completely different when he’s being persuaded by his daughter or bullied by the mother of his children or negotiating with the Spanish ambassador. I never judge. That’s not my job. I just try to link all those attributes.”
Mr. Jordan said: “Jeremy does manage to humanize the monster, doesn’t he? I loved him as Claus von Bülow. You had absolutely no idea what that character was thinking.”
About playing the pope, a character who is always being deferred to while being lugged around on a throne or gliding through his palace in robes, Mr. Irons said, “It’s daft, really, but someone’s got to do it.” Then he became serious and went on, “I hope the Vatican doesn’t go down the obvious path of creating a great controversy over this, though I’m sure Showtime would love that.”
He added: “I think the great strength of Neil’s script is that because he’s a very bright man and a historian who reads very widely, he’s found something possibly nearer the truth about the Borgias, though God knows what the truth really is. I’m hoping that the audience will be totally confused about whether to root for this man. It’s a bit like von Bülow, you know. Did he do it or not?”
The Wall Street Journal
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
MARCH 25, 2011
Feeling Wrong for the Role, at First
By AMY CHOZICK
Read the original article here – Wall Street Journal Online
Thirty years after he played Charles Ryder in the British miniseries “Brideshead Revisited,” actor Jeremy Irons takes on another TV role that involves Catholicism, opulence and distrust: Rodrigo Borgia, the scheming patriarch and corrupt Pope Alexander VI in Showtime’s “The Borgias,” premiering April 3.
Watch a scene from Showtime’s new drama ‘The Borgias.’ The series stars Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI. Courtesy Showtime.
Mr. Irons, 62, is perhaps best known for film roles including Claus von Bülow in “Reversal of Fortune,” for which he won an Oscar, and Humbert Humbert in “Lolita.” He also starred in TV miniseries like the 2009 Lifetime biopic “Georgia O’Keeffe” with Joan Allen and “Elizabeth I,” with Helen Mirren.
His deep, languid voice is currently in theaters as the narrator of wildlife documentary “The Last Lions.” (He voiced the villain Scar in “The Lion King.”) In “Margin Call,” an upcoming film about the financial crisis, Mr. Irons plays an embattled Wall Street CEO based on Lehman Brothers’ Richard Fuld.
Mr. Irons was reluctant to commit to an ongoing TV series, but the nine-episode cable run and the fact that Irish director Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game”) would write and direct “The Borgias,” convinced him.
The Wall Street Journal: Why is “The Borgias” being touted as a kind of medieval version of “The Godfather”?
Mr. Irons: There’s an element in common in that Don Corleone was an Italian in America. Rodrigo is a Spaniard in Rome. Yes, that element of the manipulator and the immigrant trying to find power and how to hold onto it and influence people as the head of the family. But those parallels don’t run very deep. I think it’s sort of a marketing idea Showtime had. [Mario] Puzo wrote a novel [“The Family”] about the Borgias, of course.
You’ve said you don’t think you’re right for the role of Rodrigo. Why not?
Neil [Jordan] said “Do you want to play Rodrigo Borgia?” I got home and Googled him and I told him “Christ, you don’t want me. You need James Gandolfini.” I could think of four or five actors who would physically be right for the role. I said “I can’t play that guy.” I have an aesthetic quality that is expected from a pope, whereas this guy was a big, sweaty Spaniard with a big appetite—a lot of food, a lot of women.
So why did you change your mind?
Neil said “No, it’s all about power and how power corrupts you and how you manipulate it. No one knows what he really looked like.” So he convinced me.
Even though Rodrigo is an evil megalomaniac, there’s some humor in him. Did you bring that to it?
I think it’s all in Neil’s writing. There’s sort of a natural amusingness about the situation which one doesn’t have to play. You just do what you do and it brushes off on somebody and there’s a smile there.
Speaking of humor, why wasn’t the 1997 film version of “Lolita” you starred in funnier? The book is very funny.
That book is full of irony. I think we were so nervous about the subject when we were making it that we were walking on egg shells. We could have used a lot more irony. The Kubrick version had more irony but it missed a lot of other things.
In addition to “The Borgias,” you’ve recently done a couple of episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” How did that come about?
Well, “SVU” is a different kettle of fish. I was in Budapest finishing “The Borgias” and they asked and I said I don’t know the show. They sent me an episode with Robin Williams and one with Isabelle Huppert. I said “This is good, it’s fine. It is what it is.” For an actor it feels a little like you’ve just finished reading Proust and you think “I’m going to read a Dick Francis novel and it will take me a day and be great.”
“The Tudors” did very well for Showtime but it got criticism for being soft porn in costumes. Will “The Borgias” have as much sex and nudity?
No. There are a lot of channels doing that. I think we can do better than that. This adaptation, for example, and there have been loads, doesn’t fall into the trap of writing all these stories about incest. In those days whole families used to sleep in the same bed. It’s better to get inside characters, who they are and why they do what they do than to make it sensationalist.
You seem to regularly go from film to TV to theater. Which do you prefer?
It’s just the material. They all have good things about them and they all have bad things about them. Theater is great because you can really stay in one place and work on the character in depth over a long period. It doesn’t pay as much as movies, but is often better written. The problem with TV is people are watching soccer at the same time. I’m really lucky to hop around. I’m a jobbing actor.
How is developing a character for TV different from one for film?
The huge luxury is time. A two-hour movie—and, if you’re lucky, it’s two hours—you can tell a story but it’s hard to develop the inconsistencies of a character and have time to bring all those inconsistencies together.
Are you Catholic?
My wife is. My children are. I don’t belong to clubs.
It may shock a lot of Catholics to see a Pope who behaves like Rodrigo Borgia.
Well, the medieval mind would’ve had no problem with a pope who has a mistress. Why do you expect him to be a God? He’s not a God. He’s a man, with all the weaknesses and failures. [Today] we expect our leaders to be squeaky clean and when they turn out to be normal people with normal desires, we say this person shouldn’t be our leader. Man is just doing his best.
Have you discussed a second season with Showtime?
We have a little. Neil has talked to me about some ideas. It’s hard to get the Pope out of the Vatican. I’m very grateful Showtime was hands-off when we were shooting. They left us alone. I hope that will continue because I don’t think you can make movies or TV series by committee.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D5
Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Sex, violence and the Church: On set with The Borgias.
ETYEK, Hungary — Pope Alexander VI, the most notorious man to head the Vatican due to his enthusiasm for sex orgies, bribery, murder and military conquest, has just placed a magnificent jewelled crown on the head of French King Charles VIII and declared him king of Naples.
Alexander’s powerful, haunting voice, backed, as he says, by “the authority of the almighty God,” echoes through the jam-packed St. Peter’s Basilica. He declares that Charles will “reign forever with Jesus Christ.”
“Cut!” shouts the floor director, a signal to the young Hungarian boys lip-synching a Latin hymn that they can stop popping open their mouths every few seconds like blowfish.
Oscar-winning British actor Jeremy Irons is playing the scheming, manipulative, and sexually incontinent pope — who reigned from 1492 to 1503 and was the inspiration for Mario Puzo’s The Godfather — in this new $45-million Canadian-Irish-Hungarian production called The Borgias.
The nine-part series, potentially controversial, given the Vatican’s ongoing woes over the sex-abuse scandal, will premiere on April 3 on Bravo! and on Showtime in the U.S.
Irons’ performance in the scene as Alexander — formerly known as Rodrigo Borgia, before he bribed his way into the Catholic Church’s top job — appears flawless. But Irons is a noted perfectionist.
He bolts to the nearby curtained-off monitors and leans over the shoulder of Jeremy Podeswa, the Canadian director of the final three episodes of the series.
Podeswa, in a casual shirt and blue jeans, and Irons, wearing heavy, flowing red vestments and a towering papal cap, watch replays on a monitor and ponder possible changes, while $50-a-day Hungarian extras — outfitted as cardinals, French and Vatican generals, Swiss Guards, soldiers, local nobles, friars, nuns and commoners — relax, head out for a smoke, or reach for their mobile phones.
As Irons leaves, he passes Zoltan Rihmer, a young Hungarian academic hired to be the production’s “papal and Latin adviser.”
Irons wants to make sure he hasn’t committed any liturgical gaffes at the altar.
“Happy?” Irons deadpans.
“Absolutely,” replies a beaming Rihmer. “It’s fabulous.”
The producers are hoping audiences and critics will be just as glowing about The Borgias, a creation of Irish writer-director Neil Jordan, who won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1992 film The Crying Game.
Showtime picked up The Borgias to fill the gap left by The Tudors, an Irish-Canadian co-production loosely based on the reign of England’s Henry VIII in the early 1500s. The Tudors ran for four seasons on Showtime before its finale last spring, and built steadily larger audiences.
Jordan, who recruited a third Oscar winner (Gabriella Pescucci, the costume designer, who won an Oscar for Age of Innocence) to the production, will bring a big-screen feel to viewers’ living rooms, according to the production team.
“Neil thinks cinematically,” Podeswa told Postmedia News during a brief break in shooting at a massive studio on the outskirts of Budapest.
“This is the first television show Neil’s done, and it will have a more cinematic esthetic — a broad canvas,” he said, paraphrasing Jordan’s directive: “‘You don’t have to think small screen, you don’t have to always be close, you can do things in a less obvious way.'”
While the script takes some liberties with history, those decisions were driven primarily by the need to build a flowing narrative, rather than to dramatize.
The history of the Borgia family, in fact, needs no embellishment.
“(Alexander’s) morals were widely held to be deeply corrupt,” wrote the late British historian Christopher Hibbert in his 2009 book, The House of Borgia.
The book recounts one incident when 50 prostitutes were brought to a party at his Vatican apartment to dance naked before him, his adult children, and other guests. The evening culminated with prizes for those who had the most sex with the prostitutes.
Perhaps more notorious was Alexander’s son Cesare, a cardinal and one of the inspirations for Italian bureaucrat-philosopher Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Cesare used violence, war and deception to keep his father in power. He was also a hot-tempered sadist who would assemble prisoners outside his Vatican balcony to shoot for fun, according to Hibbert.
One man arrested for insulting Cesare had his hand cut off and his tongue ripped out and attached to the finger of the severed hand.
“The whole grisly ensemble was hung out of the prison window for all to see,” he wrote.
Francois Arnaud, the handsome young Montrealer playing Cesare in The Borgias, is one of the actors brought in to give the series some sex appeal. So while he’s at times ruthless and manipulative, his character is intended to be rather more sympathetic than the psychopath from history.
The Cesare character in The Borgias “does horrible things, but he always finds a way to justify them, at least to himself,” Arnaud said in his cluttered private studio room, adorned with half-eaten food and dumbbells on the floor.
“I kill people to protect my family, to protect my sister, to remain in a position of power. It’s kill or be killed. I don’t take pleasure in killing people.”
In some areas, Jordan only hints at some of the more outrageous claims about the Borgia family, including unsubstantiated rumours that the pope and Cesare both had incestuous liaisons with Lucrezia.
“They (Cesare and Lucrezia) are very close and very tactile with each other, and a lot of people will watch that and think, ‘Oh, what a lovely brother and sister, look how close they are,'” said Holliday Grainger, the pretty blond British actress who plays Lucrezia.
“But there are a few scenes where you can very easily read in something more, if you want to.”
Producer James Flynn said the TV series will bear a closer resemblance to The Sopranos than The Tudors.
“This is the original crime family,” Flynn said in his office at a massive studio on the outskirts of Budapest.
The TV series juxtaposes the violence, sexual escapades and scheming with intense family love and devotion between Alexander and his children.
“This is clearly The Godfather, in the sense that it’s all about family,” said Canadian actor Colm Feore, who plays Alexander’s archrival, Cardinal Giuliano Della Rovere.
“But it’s also about the Renaissance, explosions of greed, power, art, desires, and how they all fit within the context of the Catholic Church.”
The producers say there is no deliberate attempt to exploit the Catholic Church’s ongoing child sex scandal, noting that Jordan first conceived the idea more than a decade ago.
But they acknowledge that the heightened public of, and interest in, the Vatican could draw more viewers curious about the pre-Reformation Vatican.
What viewers will quickly discover is that the Vatican of today, which represents the world’s smallest state, is vastly different from the institution that ruled over Italy’s papal states and headed a powerful army.
“In those days, the pope was not only the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church; he was a secular ruler, as well,” said the academic adviser, Zoltan Rihmer.
“This led him into Italian and world politics of the day, and that was a very turbulent period. He had to fight his way through the nobility of Rome and of these papal states.”
The series premiere begins with Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, working with his 18-year-old Cesare to bribe and scheme their way to victory in the papal conclave. A Spaniard viewed with suspicion by Rome’s elite, Borgia is able to afford the hefty bribes, due to the considerable wealth he accumulated as a senior Vatican administrator.
But it’s clear, after his victory, that the new pope’s rivals, including Della Rovere, will not take defeat easily. Cesare, in a Machiavellian twist, uses an assassination attempt against his father to the family’s advantage.
The series naturally focuses on Alexander’s ruthlessness and his personal and moral flaws, though historians say the more sensational accounts of the Borgia dynasty are one-sided.
“It could be noted that there were positive sides to Alexander’s rule,” noted University of Glasgow historian Christopher Black.
“Besides administrative and financial reforms, he made moves to reform the monastic orders, and was a respected patron of artists and humanist scholars, who respected him.”
Feore said the complexity of Alexander’s character, and the context in which he ruled, can’t be ignored. The pope was in many ways like a warlord, but his goal was to sustain the Catholic Church — and what he hoped would be a family dynasty — in a hostile environment.
“In this world, you have to promise things you’re not going to deliver on, you have to keep your friends close and your enemies closer, you have to understand that people are corruptible, venal, horrible, maniacal, and self-centred. If you can recognize that and use it to your advantage, then you might be doing God’s work,” Feore told Postmedia News.
“Now, if that circular kind of thinking works for you, boy, have we got a show for you.”
The Borgias’ two-hour premiere airs Sunday, April 3 on Bravo! at 10 ET/ 7 PT.
poneil@postmedia.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
jeremyirons.net
jeremyirons.net 
You must be logged in to post a comment.