Love game

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who turns in his most complex performance to date in Woody Allen's latest film, tells Belinda McKeon about 'legally cheating' with Scarlett Johansson

Jonathan Rhys Meyers surveys his kingdom. A plush hotel suite, generic American rock on the stereo, an abandoned bacon breakfast by the door, and an army of urgent-faced publicists clicking their stiletto heels for his every need. Outside lies the city which for so long was so essential to the imagination of the director who sits in another suite in this hotel, talking about Rhys Meyers's turn in his newest film.

The island of Manhattan, with its cast of millions and its tendency - especially here on the Upper East Side - to look and sound as though the lights of a Woody Allen crew must be somewhere nearby, as though the cameras must be picking up every crank, every oddball, every overbearing mother and over-anxious son. But Rhys Meyers, who in Allen's new release, Match Point, plays a man without family and without, it might seem, the fixations that go with family, sits well away from the window, his back to the city, pouting with all the determined disinterest of someone who has decided they can get on well enough without this town.

Of course, in this, Rhys Meyers is merely toeing the party line. After all, he's not the only one involved with this film to look askance at Manhattan. Match Point, set and filmed entirely in and around London, comes as the first concrete manifestation of Allen's growing disaffection with the United States and its film industry.

The film was originally to have been made, in the Allen tradition, in New York, but an offer of major European funding far outweighed that available in the US, where Allen's films have done steadily worse business since 1992, the year when he was revealed to be in a relationship with the adopted daughter of his long-time companion, Mia Farrow. His downward American spiral culminated three years ago in a savage drubbing on the front page of the New York Times. And so, despite his emotional and artistic ties to New York, Allen moved Match Point to the UK without hesitation and cast the film from an almost entirely British pool, infused with a shot of Hollywood glamour in the sultry shape of Allen's new ingénue, Lost in Translation's Scarlett Johansson. And, of course, there's Allen's male lead, Rhys Meyers, playing opposite Johansson as the tennis instructor who stumbles, via one of his rich students, into the gilt-edged world of London high society and a dangerous involvement with two very different women.

Born John O'Keefe in Dublin 28 years ago, Rhys Meyers doesn't come from that British pool of actors who so pleased Allen when he arrived to shoot Match Point. But then Rhys Meyers doesn't sound like a Dublin boy. Nor does he sound like someone who grew up on a council estate in Cork, where his parents relocated him and his three brothers when he was a toddler. Rather, his accent is as cut-glass as his cheekbones; while he can slip, chameleon-like, into Dublinese when he feels it suits his point, he is most often careful and even haughty in his enunciation, seeming to style himself, rather, as the son and heir of a rambling country estate.

Which, in truth, is not a million miles from the reality of Rhys Meyers's unconventional adolescence. Expelled from school at the age of 14, and with some hardship at home (his father left soon after the move to Cork), he took to spending his time in pool halls and amusement arcades, and in one such place Rhys Meyers met Christopher Crofts, the older man who would take him under his wing and into his home, an honest-to-goodness relic of the landed gentry, an Anglo-Irish manor on 650 acres of farmland.

Crofts is gay, but he has stated openly that the relationship with Rhys Meyers is of the father-son variety. He has two sons and a daughter, whom Rhys Meyers regards as siblings, and the Co Cork manor is still the place he calls home when he is in Ireland.

ALL OF THIS, and the mannerisms that Rhys Meyers retains from his time in the Big House (even though he has recently described his role there as that of a farmhand), may go some way to explaining why Allen had no idea, at casting time, that he had chosen an Irishman for the role of Chris Wilton, the tennis pro turned coach who charms his way into the lives of an upper-crust English family, complete with opera box and country mansion.

"When Woody found out that I was Irish, he said 'make Chris Irish'," says Rhys Meyers. "Which was kind of the in-joke for me, because I've never in my life heard of an Irish tennis player. They don't exist. And Chris didn't have to be Irish, there was nothing that particularly lent him to that, but I think Woody just found it attractive that I was Irish in England. He found just that underdogness to be quite appealing."

In truth, Chris's Irishness in Match Point is a marginal detail; references to his background are thin on the ground, and largely - indeed, irritatingly - of the "hasn't he done well?" variety. Nationality aside, the character is finely drawn, and Rhys Meyers's interpretation intelligent and powerful. While Chris could be viewed as the Allen character, the one likely, had this film been made 20 or even 10 years ago, to have been played by Allen himself, Rhys Meyers says he had "no interest" in playing that character. "There's only one person who can really play Woody Allen, and that's Woody Allen," he says. "Everyone else just looks like an eejit. If Woody had asked me to play a younger version of him, I wouldn't have done it."

But Rhys Meyers had a clear idea of what he wanted to do with his character in Match Point, and what he appreciated most about working with Allen was that the director allowed him to forge ahead in this way.

"He let me go do what I knew how to do," he says. "And he didn't try to mould me into something . . . there's no ego with Woody. He knows he's good. It's much better than working with a younger director who's out there to prove he's good and shove his balls around, you know?"

In conversation, Rhys Meyers never seems entirely certain who he has decided to be today; the actor in him is never at rest. One minute he's Ralph Fiennes, earnest and elegant; the next he's Daniel Day-Lewis, wary and intense. Within seconds, he'll be peppering the air with expletives as if in parody of his peer and rival, Colin Farrell (a good friend, says Rhys Meyers, as is Cillian Murphy, who makes up the triad of sultry young Irish males in Hollywood).

He gives perhaps the closest picture of himself when he talks about the lighter moments of shooting, about the practical jokes he played on Allen (wearing, for one photo-shoot, the glasses for which the 70-year-old had been loudly searching for half an hour beforehand), and when he imitates the timid whine of Allen's voice with perfect - and genuinely funny - pitch. Rhys Meyers had little sense of Allen's work, he admits.

"When you mention Woody Allen to most actors, they all kind of quiver and start sweating . . . but I wasn't a huge Woody Allen fan, which made it easier for me to work with him, to be objective," he says.

ON SCREEN, THIS independence of spirit shows. Matters are helped by his dark beauty - and it is beauty, though growing less ethereal with age - which has in its sharpness more than a hint of menace. It has served him well recently, having rendered him a chilling Steerpike (Gormenghast), an insolent Brian Slade (Velvet Goldmine) and a callow George Osborne (Vanity Fair). Match Point's Chris, however, is a more complex character than any of these - and much more complex than the other sports coach Rhys Meyers is best known for playing, the affable Joe in Bend It Like Beckham.

In fact, as an Allen lead, he's something of a first, blending not just selfishness and desperation but charisma, ambition, ruthlessness and searing remorse - he's Hamlet and Hitchcock with Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Bowen's The Last September thrown in for good measure. The encounter that changes his life is with Tom Hewitt, the spoiled but sociable son of a wealthy family, who invites Chris to spend time at his parents' estate. There, Chris meets the two women in Tom's life, to both of whom he will lay claim: the sweet sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and the bombshell American fiancée, Nola (Scarlett Johansson). Marriage to Chloe puts him on a path to wealth and success beyond his wildest dreams, but sex with Nola is impossible to resist, and destruction beckons.

Match Point is at times cloying in its obvious adoration for the trappings of upper-class English life, but Allen's spin on Chris's seemingly inevitable downfall is slick and unexpected, imparting the film with the kick it needs. If the sex scenes - astonishingly raunchy for an Allen film - aren't kicking enough for the viewers, that is.

Allen raved about Johansson both during and after the shooting of Match Point and has cast her opposite himself in his next film, which will also be London-based.

"She was just touched by God," he told the Guardian last year. In Match Point, touching of a less pious nature comes courtesy of Rhys Meyers, who gets acquainted with Johansson's character amid shirt-ripping, oil-rubbing, blindfold tying and wet meadow romping. There's not so much as a twinge of neurosis, a twitch of Jewish guilt, and everybody concerned - including, one can only assume, Allen - seems to be having quite the time. But it was all strictly business, insists Rhys Meyers.

Or at least, he starts out insisting. Get him talking about Johansson for a couple of minutes, however, and something in between smugness and sheer disbelief at his good fortune creeps unmistakably into his tone.

"I have two very different relationships with two women in the film," he begins. "With Emily I was very laid-back, very comfortable. Emily's a married mother, so there was a different relationship. But Scarlett is this single, blonde, starlet bombshell, so there was a huge sexual tension there, you know?" Indeed. "And even in the sex scenes, which are incredibly sexy . . . they weren't sexy at all to film." Really? "It was the opposite of sexiness. I mean, it was like nine o'clock on a Monday morning and we were shooting those scenes."

With Woody looking on? True, not the most erotic of prospects.

"Yeah, well, Woody talks a lot about sex in his films and he never shows it. And the one time he shows anything sexual it is incredibly f***ing good."

Hold on. Which was it, business as usual or the beach scene in From Here to Eternity?

RHYS MEYERS'S TEENAGE girlfriend, Reena Hammer, certainly had difficulty seeing the distinction.

"We were in Cannes, looking at the movie," says Rhys Meyers. "And I'm sitting in the front row with Scarlett and Woody, and she's sitting behind me, and she looked at the sex scene, and next thing I got a clip on the back of my ear." (It wouldn't be the first time he received, or indeed imparted, such a clip, by the way. Last January, both he and Hammer were arrested and charged with assault on one another after a row broke out at their London flat following the premiere of Alexander - but a knock on the door from the publicist at the mention of Rhys Meyers's girlfriend suggests that questions on the matter will not be welcome.)

"I said, after the movie: 'Did they [the sex scenes] bother you?' And she said: 'I couldn't watch them. Because it is very difficult to see your boyfriend up there on screen getting up to no good with a very beautiful girl . . . because you know they're doing it . . . and is snogging Scarlett Johansson enjoyable?' F**k yeah, why not? It's like the one thing an actor sort of has going for them that they can almost legally cheat."

Revved up to a high pitch now, he suddenly checks himself.

"But not. It's a very, very strange grey area, because you have to do things on film. If I go and do Nine and a Half Weeks with Angelina Jolie or someone like that, I'd have to do it, and I'd have to perform it, I'd have to put myself into it."

And very worried at the prospect he looks, too.

Match Point opens on Jan 6