Background

Jonathan Rhys Meyers was born as Jonathan Michael Francis O’Keeffe on July 27, 1977, in Dublin, Ireland. He was born prematurely with a heart condition and was baptized quickly for fear he would not live long. He spent several months in the hospital. He survived his first weeks and grew up in the city of Cork. He belonged to a working-class family and during his growing-up years worked as a farmhand. His mother was a voluntary worker and his father was a musician.

His mother, Mary-Geraldine, had three more children with Rhys Meyers' father, but their marriage ended by the time their oldest son was three. Two of the children went to live with their father, while Rhys Meyers and his brother grew up in a council flat, or public housing, in Cork. Both parents gave their own versions of the family history to British tabloid newspapers once Rhys Meyers became famous, and each denied reports that social services removed the children from their mother's home at one point. The actor admitted that he often went hungry as a child and sometimes resorted to stealing food, noting there were times when his mother spent her available funds on liquor. He once stated: "I love my family very much but once you're born, you're in the world on your own and I accepted that when I was very young."

His childhood included a spell in an orphanage, but as a teen, he befriended Anglo-Irish farmer Christopher Crofts with whom he went to live and who he refers to as "my gay dad".

Education

Rhys Meyers attended North Monastery Christian Brothers School but was expelled for truancy at the age of 16. He then worked on the streets, swept floors at a pool hall and did other odd jobs for money and food, and one day asked a patron who was a successful dairy farmer if he had any work for him. The man, Christopher Croft, wound up taking the teenager in, and "it took about two weeks to figure out I was no farmer," Rhys Meyers recalled. His interest in acting was spurred when a talent agent came to the pool hall looking for an unknown teen to try out for a movie role; he failed to win the part but was intrigued enough to focus his energies in that direction.

Career

Rhys Meyers submitted to countless auditions, as many as three a week until he was finally hired for a bit part in a 1994 film called A Man of No Importance. It starred Albert Finney as a middle-aged, closeted gay man in the early 1960s Dublin.

The next job he landed was also a small role, but a pivotal one: acclaimed director Neil Jordan cast him as the assassin who killed Irish patriot-hero Michael Collins in the 1996 film of the same name. Later that year Rhys Meyers advanced to his first lead role with The Disappearance of Finbar, the story of two friends from a hardscrabble Irish village. His character vanishes one day after jumping off a bridge but phones his friend years later from Lapland, the northernmost part of Sweden. As Rhys Meyers recalled in the interview with Allen in the Times, he was a true novice when the movie was made. "I was very raw then. The first scene I shot in The Disappearance of Finbar was the first time I'd actually tried to act."

With no formal training, and barely out of his teens, Rhys Meyers endured a near-endless stream of rejections but remained selective about the parts he did take. He had a supporting role in Telling Lies in America along with a pre- Ally McBeal Calista Flock-hart and won the lead in a bleak teen-crime drama, also released in 1997, called The Maker. The following year, he appeared in four projects, beginning with B. Monkey, a jewel-thief tale that starred Asia Argento and Rupert Everett; a Victorian-era drama with Minnie Driver called The Governess; and a well-received television movie with Anna Friel, The Tribe.

But it was Rhys Meyers' turn in a much-hyped glam-rock story, Velvet Goldmine, that turned him into Britain's newest pin-up boy in 1998. He played Brian Slade, a fictional early 1970s rocker loosely based on David Bowie in his androgynous Ziggy Stardust era. The movie also starred Ewan McGregor as an Iggy Pop-like performer who woos the bisexual Slade away from his wife (Toni Collette), and Christian Bale as the journalist investigating the mystery of Slade's apparent death onstage some years later. Reviewing Velvet Goldmine for the New York Times, Janet Maslin commended Rhys Meyers for his portrayal of Slade "as a stunningly pretty, insolent, snake-hipped presence [who] embodies the provocative and mysterious heart of the film."

Rhys Meyers endured a rough patch after the hype surrounding Velvet Goldmine failed to translate into box-office cash or major stardom for him. He appeared in several projects in 1999, including the Shakespeare adaptation Titus with Anthony Hopkins; a little-seen American Civil War epic from director Ang Lee, Ride with the Devil, that paired him with a pre- Spider-Man Tobey Maguire; and a steamy Mike Figgis film, The Loss of Sexual Innocence , in which he played the teenaged version of Julian Sands' male lead. The following year, he made a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) miniseries, Gormenghast, and in 2001 appeared in two relatively obscure films and a third, Prozac Nation, that was never released in theaters.

In 2002, Rhys Meyers had a supporting role as a relatively likable character - one of his first - as the women's soccer-team coach in the hit indie film Bend It Like Beckham. But with his tenth anniversary, as an actor nearing, he seemed no closer to stardom than he had while auditioning in Dublin every week. Credits for 2003 included a Bangkok-set thriller, The Tesseract; a horror film with Mischa Barton called Octane, and I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, a noir drama that had Rhys Meyers as the brutally murdered brother of a reformed gangster played by Clive Owen. He went on to appear in two major Hollywood studio efforts in 2004, both of which tanked at the box office: Vanity Fair, with Reese Wither-spoon, and Alexander, with fellow Irishman Colin Farrell in the title role. Rhys Meyers was somewhat amused when Alexander director Oliver Stone hired him for the latter job, for he had auditioned for Stone years earlier for a project that was never made. Back then, Rhys Meyers had told Stone that the script was terrible, and Stone's producer called him later to say, "Jonathan Rhys Meyers will never appear in an Oliver Stone film," the actor recalled in the Sunday Times interview.

Rhys Meyers was not happy on Stone's Alexander set and felt his character was merely window-dressing in some scenes and asked to be excluded from them. He had little chance of similar editorial control when he starred in Elvis, a 2005 CBS miniseries that scored great ratings but was roundly dismissed by most critics. Entertainment Weekly writer Gillian Flynn faulted it as "a stolid cautionary tale about The Price of Fame," but conceded that "Rhys Meyers has made an admirable study of Presley: His pelvic twitches are just so, his Mississippi-to-Memphis drawl 86 percent solid, and, with that cupid's bow mouth, he looks so much like Presley it's occasionally disorienting." Rhys Meyers won his first major award for the role, a Golden Globe from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Film Made for Television.

A greater triumph followed later in 2005, however, when Rhys Meyers took a star turn in a highly anticipated Woody Allen film, Match Point. It was Allen's first film to be set in London, and its story of ambition that veers toward criminality centered on Rhys Meyers' character, Chris Wilton. Chris is a tennis pro at a posh London sports club, and when he strikes up a friendship with Tom Hewett, one of his students, it nets him an evening at the opera with the Hewett family followed, in turn, by a country-house weekend, job offer at the Hewett corporation, romance with Tom's meek but adoring sister, Chloe (Emily Mortimer), and well-heeled married life complete with spectacular Thames-side penthouse apartment. But Chris also tangles furtively with Nola (Scarlett Johansson), the American fiancée of Tom (Matthew Goode from Chasing Liberty ). Tom breaks it off with Nola, but Rhys Meyers' character continues to see her on the sly, and as career prospects for Johansson's struggling thespian fade, she becomes increasingly adamant that Chris should leave Chloe for her.

Both Match Point and Rhys Meyers' performance earned strong critical praise Stateside, with Vanity Fair hailing it as "the best Woody Allen movie in ages," and in which Rhys Meyers "slipped effortlessly into a great part." Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly 's film critic, asserted that "Rhys Meyers makes Chris a sympathetic slime, giving him a dozen shades of yearning, sweat, and deceit. When he takes drastic action, we're divided between pure horror at what he does and a desire to see him get away with it." British reviewers were more unforgiving, exemplified by Peter Bradshaw's critique in the Guardian, which faulted the movie's reliance on "upscale touristy locations" and "dialogue… composed in a kind of Posh English that Allen seems to have learned from a Berlitz handbook." Bradshaw did note that "Rhys Meyers plays Chris in a very opaque way, which is arguably just how this calculating character should be played, but it is difficult to tell how intentional it is."

Rhys Meyers' next projects were impressive ones: he appeared with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III in 2006, and in Adina, a philosophical horror tale from cult-film director Nic Roeg. He was also cast as the Bronte sisters' brother in Bronte, slated for 2007 release. For Showtime, the American cable channel, he was to play the history-making English monarch Henry VIII in The Tudors. The planned three-year project would return him to a film set in his native Ireland for once, where he has a house in Country Cork. He remains close to the Croft family, who were early champions of his plan to become an actor, and thanked them in his Golden Globe acceptance speech. After the carousing that took place during the arduous location shoots for Alexander, Rhys Meyers gave up drinking in favor of two hours a day at the gym. "My favorite actors - [Peter] O'Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton - they never fulfilled their potential," he told in Esquire. "You'd see absolute brilliance, but they burned the candle at both ends."

In the 2007 music drama August Rush, he performed on-screen as singer-songwriter Louis Connelly and is credited for four songs on the soundtrack - Break, Moondance, Something Inside and This Time. Of the four, This Time and Break were considered in the Best Original Song category of the 80th Academy Awards. This Time was not released as a single but peaked at number 84 in the Canadian Hot 100.

Besides acting, Rhys Meyers has also modeled for several clothing companies. He modeled for Club Monaco in 2001 and was chosen as the face for the Versace men's collection of Autumn/Winter 2006 and Spring 2007, and he was the face of the Hugo Boss men's fragrance range from 2006 until he was replaced with Jared Leto in 2011. He is signed to Independent Models in London.

In 2013, Meyers was cast as Dracula in NBC's television series Dracula alongside Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jessica De Gouw. It was also announced in May 2013 that Jonathan was to participate in the recording of his brothers' album entitled Blossom, which was released on 21 April 2014.

Meyers played the lead in the spy thriller Damascus Cover, based on the novel by Howard Kaplan. It premiered on September 23, 2017, at the Boston Film Festival.

Meyers portrayed Patrick Pearse, a political activist and one of the leaders of the bloody 1916 Irish Easter Rising, in the centennial commemoration biopic film The Rising, written and produced by Kevin McCann.

In August 2019, Rhys Meyers will appear in an action thriller Wake Up. The movie is about a man, who wakes in a hospital bed with no recollection of who he is, and learns that he's wanted by the police for committing a series of murders.

Achievements

• Having worked with actors the likes of Ewan McGregor, Glenn Close, Anthony Hopkins, Christopher Lee, James Cromwell, Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, and Jessica Lange, Jonathan has established his own unique mark on the world of movie-making without any formal acting training. He received numerous awards and nominations. In 2005 Rhys Meyers won a Golden Globe Award for portraying Elvis Presley in the TV miniseries Elvis.
  
  In 1998 he was chosen by Cosmopolitan Magazine at #34 of the 100 Most Sexiest Men in the World. On 23 October 2014, he received The Irish Post Legend Award at the London Hilton on Park Lane in recognition of his remarkable achievements in Film & Television over the previous 20 years.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • Prozac Nation

    (Award winners Christina Ricci and Jessica Lange star in t...)

    2001
  • Mortal Instruments, The: City of Bones

    (Clary's life is turned upside down when her mother is kid...)

    2013
  • Disappearance of Finbar

    (Sue Clayton's off-beat, whimsical directorial debut cente...)

    1996
  • Ride With the Devil

    (Oscar winner Ang Lee directs Tobey Maguire, Jeffrey Wrigh...)

    1999
  • 6 Souls

    (Julianne Moore stars in this haunting thriller about a ps...)

    2013
  • Another Me

    (A gripping psychological thriller about a teenage girl wh...)

    2014
  • Alexander

    (Oliver Stone re-creates the towering, true story of Alexa...)

    2004
  • Holy Lands

    (A Jewish American doctor leaves everything behind to beco...)

    2018
  • Stonewall

    (Passions and politics make a volatile mix in this dynamic...)

    2015
  • Black Butterfly

    (Antonio Banderas, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, and Piper Perabo ...)

    2017
  • The Governess

    (In this sensuous romance, Minnie Driver stars as a govern...)

    1998
  • The Children Of Huang Shi

    (Experience the true story of British journalist George Ho...)

    2008
  • London Town

    (Set in '70s London, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers stars in film ab...)

    2016
  • August Rush

    (Separated by events they could not control but bound by l...)

    2007
  • Damascus Cover

    (Ari Ben-Zion (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), haunted by the death...)

    2017
  • Mission: Impossible III

    (Ethan Hunt comes face to face with a dangerous and sadist...)

    2003
  • Vanity Fair

    (Starring Reese Witherspoon as an ambitious social climber...)

    2004
  • Telling Lies in America

    (Karchy Jonas was born in Hungary and immigrated to Clevel...)

    1997
  • Albert Nobbs

    (Based on the short story by Irish author George Moore and...)

    2011
  • The Maker

    (Josh (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, "Match Point") is basically a...)

    1997
  • Velvet Goldmine

    (It's been 10 years since glam-rock superstar Brian Slade ...)

    1998
  • I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

    (Will Graham thought he had gained back his soul by leavin...)

    2003
  • Bend It Like Beckham

    (Two ambitious girls, despite their parents' wishes, have ...)

    2002
  • The 12th Man

    (Nazis hunt for a lone surviving saboteur in this edge-of-...)

    2017
  • Belle Du Seigneur

    (A love affair between a high-ranking Jewish official and ...)

    2012
  • The Aspern Papers

    (Morton Vint is fascinated by poet Jeffrey Aspern's short ...)

    2018
  • Match Point

    (Chris Wilton is a former tennis pro, looking to find work...)

    2005
  • The Emperors Wife

    (An Empress has seven years to provide her Emperor with an...)

    2003
  • A Man of No Importance

    (Alfie Byrne is a middle-aged bus conductor in Dublin in 1...)

    1994
  • Michael Collins

    (Michael Collins, the man and the movie, stands tall. The ...)

    1996
  • From Paris with Love

    (While working in the Paris office of the U.S. ambassador ...)

    2010
  • The Shadow Effect

    (Dr. Reese explores the psyche of Gabriel, a young man who...)

    2017

• music

  • August Rush 2007

• TV series

  • Elvis

    (Jonathan Rhys Meyers delivers a definitive performance in...)

  • Roots

    ("Roots" is a historical portrait of one family's journey ...)

    2016
  • Dracula

    (Golden Globe winner Jonathan Rhys Meyers (The Tudors) sta...)

    2013
  • The Tudors

    (The Tudors presents the rarely dramatized, tumultuous ear...)

    2007

Religion

Jonathan Rhys Meyers was born in a Roman Catholic family. He was baptized immediately after his birth due to his heart condition. As a kid, Jonathan even wanted to be a priest.

In an interview Rhys Meyers confirmed that he is non-religious: "I was Catholic for a really long time, and I really loved God and then I stopped when other things started to become more important, like girls. When I was 10 and 11 years old, I used to sit there praying, praying for change. And now I don’t pray as much. Do I have a religion? I wouldn’t say I have a particular religion. That’s a really easy way of getting out of the question. I mean, no, I don’t have a religion but I think about religion a lot. Religion is about belief. I want that kind of belief you have in yourself. I find it very hard to believe in myself, so how can I have a belief in a fundamental way of thinking? I find it hard to believe in myself because I’m constantly in a fight. If I were truly religious I’d be like, “No, you take the part if it makes you feel better.”

Politics

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is not vocal about his political views.

Views

Jonathan Rhys Meyers is a Barretstown ambassador. Barretstown’s mission is to rebuild the lives of children affected by serious illness and their families, through a life-changing Therapeutic Recreation Programmes in a safe, fun and supported environment. He is also became a celebrity ambassador for the Hope Foundation in 2008.

Quotations: "There will be ups and downs, but it's important to remember you're on your own beautiful journey and once you're on it you have to see it through to its conclusion and try to never be afraid to do anything because what is the worse that can happen?"

"A lot of men are very uptight, but I don't distinguish between male and female beauty. Beauty is beauty."

"I think it is important to stay close to your roots and be true to yourself, be honest. I don't want to play games in Hollywood and pretend to be someone else. I still suffer from insecurity and that situation would make it worse."

"I've never gone to acting school and I never will, so I'm learning about the business from the people who are in the business. It doesn't seem like I work at all. And the unknown is always exciting."

"I don't have many friends that are actors. It's a very faux environment. I don't call people up after films."

"When somebody looks at the body of work that I've done and they put Bend It like Beckham, Match Point, August Rush, The Tudor's and Elvis next to each other they can see very many different layers of what I can do as an actor. That's why I do different roles so people can see your range."

Personality

Early on in his acting career, Jonathan said many times that he didn’t love acting but was doing it because it kept him off the streets and out of jail. However, he has grown quite passionate about acting and hopes he is accomplishing something with his diverse roles.

Rhys Meyers was notorious for his violent nature and his alcoholism. In 2007, Meyers’ representative, Meredith O’Sullivan, confirmed that: “After a non-stop succession of filming, Jonathan Rhys Meyers has entered an alcohol treatment program.”

In 2009, Rhys Meyers was detained in Paris by French police because he allegedly assaulted an airport lounge employee while drunk. In November 2011, Meyers was ordered by a French court to pay restitution of €1,000 and was given a judgment of a suspended sentence for public intoxication 24 months earlier.

In 2010, Rhys Meyers made headlines when at John F. Kennedy International Airport he abused the staff and an official, who had refused him access to the boarding area, by calling them "nigger". Allegedly, he had gotten drunk on vodka while waiting in the first-class lounge at approximately 7 am. On 9 September 2017, an intoxicated Rhys Meyers was ejected from Dublin airport.

Physical Characteristics: Rhys Meyers has an athletic build, a height of 5 ft 9¾ in or 177 cm, and a weight of 72 kg or 159 pounds. He also has dark brown hair and bright blue eyes. He has several tattoos. On his left arm are two decorative bands along with a series of dots. On the inside of his right arm is the phrase “no mud, no lotus”, which is related to symbolism. Mud is a symbol of suffering.

Interests

• horses, playing the guitar, shopping

• Writers

  The Blood Meridian, Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Hunter Stockton Thompson

• Artists

  Akira Kurosawa

• Sport & Clubs

  soccer, Arsenal, football, basketball

• Music & Bands

  Led Zeppelin, Elvis Presley, roken Social Scene, Kings of Leon, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

Connections

Rhys Meyers and Mara Lane married in 2016. The couple has a son, Wolf Rhys Meyers, who was born in December 2016. Lane said that in September 2017 she had miscarried a second child.

Jonathan currently resides in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and dog Toca. He still visits Ireland, spending time with friends and family whenever he has a break from filming.

Mother:

Mary Geraldine Meyers

Spouse:

Mara Lane

colleague:

Laurence Fishburne III

Son:

Wolf Rhys Meyers

colleague:

Kevin Bacon

colleague:

Angelina Jolie

colleague:

Lena Headey

colleague:

Sophie Turner

Friend:

Cillian Murphy