The last time I met Jonathan Rhys Myers in Hollywood was at the Golden Globes in January, where he was nominated for a Globe for Best Actor in the Tudors. He was very far from relaxed the whole evening and ended the night seemingly plastered in a dingy tourist bar on the Sunset Strip.

There has been a lot of concern expressed about his well-being since then, after he failed to show up at two different events where he was due to receive awards for his work and it was reported that he had gone into rehab in late February.

When I met him in Beverly Hills last week, he looked tanned and healthy, dressed in a mustard coloured leather jacket and white shirt. He let it be known pretty quickly that his disposition towards the Irish media these days is far from friendly.

“ I haven’t had a drink in years, not a drop”, he says inhaling deeply on a Marlboro light.
So where has he been for the past few months and how did the rehab go? The question irks him.

“ I was in Middlesex for the whole period, in the countryside. I did not go into rehab, no, no, no,” he says swigging from a large glass of orange juice. “I was staying in the countryside in Middlesex with my councillor, but we are actually really good friends, so it wasn’t a rehab. I wasn’t doing treatment for alcoholism, I’d done that already. I don’t drink at all.”

We are off to such a tense start, I decide there is no point in avoiding the questions that everyone would like answered. If he doesn’t drink, how come he was photographed coming out of an off-license in London last month and also was photographed being held up on the street in LA by Jim Sheridan in January.

“ Someone said there were photos of me alright, so I went and looked on the internet and that photo was from six or seven months previously,” he says, arms now folded defensively across his chest. “If I’m not at something, they’ll just print an old photo of me. I go out for a night out once a year or something like that and it just ends up in the newspaper because you’re a celebrity. It’s very hard for the media with actors like me, because I don’t date other actresses and I don’t hang out with movie stars.

“ It’s very hard to find stories about me, because I live an incredibly low key life. I think people would like to think I’m a hell of a lot naughtier than I am actually. I am actually quite a boring guy. I spent the last week and a half playing bloody golf. Me, Jonathan Rhys Myers! If anyone saw me in those stupid golf clothes on the golf course, there would have been a different story written!”

Since filming of the third season of the Tudors ended last summer, Rhys Myers has been on hiatus, working on a movie, but enjoying a lot of time off. Filming of the fourth season will begin soon and in the meantime, he is enjoying spending time in LA with his three brothers, one of whom also lives here and the others who are visiting from Spain and London. All are musicians who play together in a band called “Suzy’s Field”.

“ All actors are frustrated musicians,” laughs the actor who played such a sweet “Elvis” in the CBS series a few years ago, for which he was nominated for a Grammy and a Golden Globe.

“ I just felt I needed time off and I didn’t need to go to awards ceremonies,” he says of his non-attendance at the IFTA awards and the Oscar Wilde event in February.

“You can get slightly waylaid as an actor doing that sort of thing and I’m never that comfortable at them anyway. But you know what Irish newspapers are like, there are always going to be more aspects on your personal life than your professional life, because you’re an Irish person so they tend to make up or embellish whichever story, trying to sell newspapers.”

He refuses to give an example of what he believes was falsely reported about him in the Irish papers, but he quickly makes a parallel with what he says is a co-dependant relationship between the British royal family and British press.

“ Royalty is almost exclusively an English art at this point. I mean the money, the revenue that they make, just think of the magazine columns! Prince William or Prince Harry and whatever strumpet they have on their arms that day, millions and millions of pounds.”

So how attractive is it for him to be playing an English monarch, as Henry VIII in The Tudors?

“ I think the reasons royals are so attractive is, what actor doesn’t want to play the guy sitting on the throne, with everybody looking at them, with those amazing costumes and all those lines,” he laughs, warming up a little. “Actor-royal, royal-acting!”

Rhys Myers talent and range have propelled him straight onto the Hollywood A List, alongside Tom Cruise, Scarlett Johannson and Reese Witherspoon. Not yet 32 years old, he has already been in 36 movies and three tv series. Not bad for someone who appears to be battling his private demons and lost who his mother, Geraldine suddenly two years ago, and to whom he had been very close.

“ I believe that everything I’ve done up to now has been an apprenticeship. The first phase was where I was allowed to play roles, have successes, have failures, all of this by the time I was 31. That’s the apprenticeship. What I do from 31 to 50 is probably my career, so I probably haven’t even started yet.”

What kind of friendship or mentorship has he received from other Irish stars, like Colin Farrell, who’ve made it big and have also struggled with addiction?

“ I think a lot of artists understand it, because it’s part of the artistic thing. For me, it’s like various phases, like any young fella would go through in his 20’s when you’ve suddenly got a ton of money and a lot of downtime.

“ But it’s grand. You just kind of put it in the past. You make your choices and you trust the people you trust and if you trust yourself, then it all works out.”
These days, he says he plays a lot of sports, like skiing and golf and he writes a lot. Who does he share his life with?

“ Several people, I suppose, several people who are close to me. It’s extraordinary but I live my life much more Spartan than people would imagine I would. I don’t have many things. I don’t accumulate possessions. I am not into money, apart from the essential of what you need to live on. But I do require peace and quiet and I require tidiness.

“ On Sunday mornings I clean my house. It’s the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s my ritual. It’s fantastic. I don’t have a cleaner. I am not very good with my hands but I think if I was good with my fingers I think something like origami would be very good for me; something that’s very sort of neat and tidy.

“ I think it’s probably a little sort of actor OCD but I constantly have to have everything spotless and in mint condition before I read, especially. I have to have the whole room almost feng shui, before I read. It’s just one of those weird actor things, but it’s just another fragment to throw into the other part.”