HERE IS THE INFAMOUS INTERVIEW ITSELF AGAIN: for your pleasure.
Please note the Rasputin connection in this interview.
HomeDramaBad Press - THE SUNDAY TIMES
Bad Press - THE SUNDAY TIMES
As a boyfriend to Anna Friel, he couldn’t be more dutiful. As an interview subject, Rhys Ifans is a walking disaster
I’m not sure where it started to go wrong with Rhys Ifans. A truly awful interview can catch you like a cloudburst in August. How quickly his answers escalated through disdain to disgust then mad-eyed vibrating hostility until he announced “I am bored with you” and stalked out, leaving his publicist hand-wringing and ashen.
I was barely back home before her e-mails began. Rhys’s slurred and ranting delivery at 11.30am was due to him taking “antibiotics”. He had lost his temper because he was coming to terms with bad news he’d received a few weeks ago in Wales. He’d really enjoyed our conversation but one of my questions had upset him (she would not tell me which). Finally came the flowers with the noncommittal message in the florist’s hand: “Best wishes, Rhys”. (“No, I’m not saying I’m fucking sorry,” I can imagine him railing.) Actors are not my favourite interviewees. The game is you listen politely while they plug their film, bang on about their “method”, the brilliance of their co-stars and directors etc. Then in return you hope they will offer up — without you having to prod and pester like some celebrity stalker — the tiniest nugget of anecdote, a shard of light upon their real selves. Because they hate the game too, and particularly since it is mainly conducted in hotel suites, you feel as if you’re engaged in an odd form of prostitution, one where it remains unclear who is the hooker and who the john.
With Rhys Ifans I decided upon a different tack. His drama, Gifted, for Sky Arts 1, in which he plays a man who appears germ-phobic but in fact has a magical power, is well told but unremarkable. But previous interviews suggest he’s a thoughtful man in the boozing, carousing actor school of Richard Burton or Peter O’Toole. So I thought then I’d ask him about important issues of the day. Why does Wales (he is a Welsh-speaker, born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire) not seek independence like Scotland?
What does he think — as someone long-pursued by the paparazzi — about press regulation?
With hindsight, I ignored warning signs. There was his publicist’s strongly worded e-mail that I must not under any circumstances mention his ex-girlfriend, Sienna Miller, who dumped him in 2008. Or the report of him slapping a guest at a pre-Bafta party last year. Or the declaration by his current girlfriend, Anna Friel, that she is thinking of freezing her eggs until Ifans is ready for fatherhood. (He is 45 years old.) I suppose I expected him to be as good-natured and bouncy as his most-loved role, Hugh Grant’s grubby-underpanted flatmate Spike in Notting Hill, but obviously far brighter .
“I’m going out for a fag and a piss." he grunts as he greets me. “Sorry to be crude.” Gangly, somewhat stooped, he has a red-eyed pallor and feathery blond hair, which he ruffles up into sweaty hackles as his anger towards me grows.
He wears black jeans, leather jacket, cowboy boots, biker jewellery, a skull and cross-bones ring, has multiple tattoos including the swallow on his right wrist that apparently matches Sienna Miller’s. Clearly, he is a regular shopper at La Boutique de Russell Brand.
He returns in a cloud of nicotine and throws himself on a sofa. Those antibiotics must be kicking in because his sentences are fractured and he has a habit of repeating a single syllable.
We start talking about Gifted, whose director Marc Evans is “a fellow Welshman, whose career I’ve followed avidly”. Which leads me to ask about how his sense of national identity has changed after decades living in England. “Well, there is a word in Welsh, ‘hiraeth’, which is untranslatable unfortunately. Do you speak any other languages?” Some French, I reply. “Right,” he says airily. “So you’re a monoglot. I, I, I, I, I’m bilingual. So if I could explain it to a monoglot, ‘hiraeth’ is very prevalent in the Welsh experience. I am going to have to use a plethora of English words . . .” He explains at some length that “hiraeth” means a sense of remaining umbilically attached to your mother country.
I ask how often he returns to Wales and he takes instant affront. “There’s a pornographication [sic],” he says, “culturally, when I’m interviewed. You’re so obsessed by my Welshness as opposed to what I am.” But I’m from Yorkshire, I say, that informs my identity: I was just respectfully asking about your roots. “But you don’t sound like you’re from Yorkshire.” Well, I left when I was 18. “But I sound like I’m from Wales, don’t I?” Yes. “So hopefully I’ve answered the question for you.”
We are only ten minutes into the allotted hour but the tone is set. Each of my friendly questions is picked apart with disdain. He wants to make it absolutely clear to me that I am his intellectual inferior. When I try to clarify, he just talks over me until I am silent. So I brace myself to ask about his “hell-raiser” image.
“You’ve sat with me for ten minutes. What do you think? Do I come over as a hell-raiser?” Well, it’s not even noon.
“I have been, on occasion, but, you know, I’m, I’m, er, I, I, I work hard.
Hmm. So, so, I fuckin' love a good time but I earn my good time. But I’m too old to play hard now. So the work is my salvation and always will be.”
We discuss the spare, tight script of Gifted and I ask Ifans if he writes. “Yes, I do,” he says. “Screenplays, short stories, poetry, songs. I draw, I paint. What about you?” Clearly I’m not as creative as you. “Probably not.” Yes, I’m only a journalist. “Exactly. But don’t beat yourself up about it. God. You know, everyone needs news.” He sniggers to himself. And now I understand why he’s so condescending: Ifans is one of those actors who believes that he’s an “artist”.
Since he clearly has a low opinion of journalists, I ask if he supports Lord Justice Leveson’s call for statutory underpinning of press regulation.
“Can I talk about that?” he shouts over to his publicist who is staring at her mobile phone. She shakes her head.
“I do think the, er, press should be at liberty to, erm, pursue the truth, but they should also be curtailed when they fucking lie.”
Has he ever taken the media to the Press Complaints Commission? “Why should I tell you that?” Why not?
“I mean I would love to talk about it, but at the moment, because of certain proceedings, I can’t.”
(Later, looking through the Leveson sessions, I note that Ifans is mentioned as one of the celebrities whose medical records were leaked to a newspaper from a plastic surgery clinic.) Our conversation has reached such a level of hostility now that my most innocuous question is lobbed back at me with the intention of making me feel a tabloid-headed idiot. All the while, he glares fiercely into my eyes.
Every topic seems to irritate him more. On whether Hollywood, where he has often worked, has a body-fascist culture he says: “It is an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, which means England and America. I fucking love bodies. Fat, skinny, fucking limbless, black, white.
I don’t give a shit!” I ask whether, with many acclaimed roles behind him — he won a Bafta in 2005 for his portrayal of Peter Cook in Not Only But Always — he feels at 45 he has less to prove. “What I find”, he says gnomically, “is I am breathing in a lot deeper than I breathe out. I am taking my time.”
Does he feel more settled and domesticated these days, living with Friel and her daughter? “What do you want to know? Do I worm the cat?” Well do you? “I worm the cat and I fucking wash up and I mow the lawn.” Really? He gives me a poisonous glare. “No, I worm the lawn and I mow the cat.”
Finally, I deploy my emergency question, the one guaranteed to flatter and distract conceited or angry interviewees: I ask what he is reading at present. Ifans relaxes visibly. “A book about Rasputin; it’s a conspiracy theory that he was possibly eradicated by the English secret services.”
I say that I just visited St Petersburg where Rasputin’s legendary penis is displayed pickled in a jar, although there is dispute whether this member once belonged to a horse. And I wonder why anyone would bother to do that.
“But then can you imagine someone slaughtering a lamb and putting it in kebabs?” he cries. Is he a vegetarian? “No! I fucking love meat. Especially horse cunt. My favourite.”
Ifans says he’d like to play Rasputin and I can see him in the role. “Because I’ve got a cunt the size of a horse?” he asks. No, I think to myself, because you are as bonkers as the mad monk.
After this our conversation spirals downhill. Ifans becomes more incoherent and sweary, ranting about child abuse, how prosecutions such as those in Rochdale and Oxford against Pakistani Muslim sex rings are racist. “Look, they shouldn’t focus on them, when you’ve got Jimmy fucking Savile.” Then we segue into his views on UKIP and his pleasure in party leader Nigel Farage getting a “proper send-off” in Edinburgh. What would have happened if he’d gone to Wales? “Hopefully, a hiding?” Ifans says.
What does he think of the current Government? “I dunno, there’s two, isn’t there?” he says.
Yes, I say wearily, the coalition.
“Yeah,” he sneers. “Is that what it’s called?” Yes, I sneer back, that’s the English word.
“Is it really?” he says and looks so angry I half-expect him to leap across the table. “What’s the Welsh word then?”
You tell me.
“Fuck off then,” he says and I hear his publicist laugh nervously behind us. Then. “I wanna end this interview now. I’m bored with you. Bored. Bored.”
I am still trembling when I emerge onto Charlotte Street and come across Ifans, wild-eyed, reeking of his latest fag, heading back into the hotel. “I was just bored,” he says again, charging by.
It was a horrible, almost menacing encounter, and I feel like reaching for the antibiotics myself. Yet I also find myself admiring his magnificent refusal to play this awful PR game. But if I were Anna Friel, I’d keep those eggs on ice
