Entertainment

MOVIES: Underdog role in 'Match Point' appealed to actor

07:04 AM CST on Monday, January 9, 2006

By PHILIP WUNTCH / The Dallas Morning News

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers sounds like a cheerful bloke. And he should.

While much of the buzz surrounding Woody Allen's critically cheered Match Point (which opened locally Friday) surrounds Scarlett Johansson's performance as a sensuous American actress, Mr. Rhys-Meyers' portrayal of an ambitious Irish tennis pro breaking into London society carries the movie.

His character of Chris Wilton is torn between two women: sweet British aristocrat Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and earthy American actress Nola (Ms. Johansson). Chris makes morally dubious decisions in dealing with the two women in his life.

"Playing Chris, I have to believe in his essentially decent nature," the actor said in a recent phone conversation. "He's a normal guy with the normal amount of decency. He's just extremely ambitious. He finds himself in a bad situation and makes choices that are morally wrong. A part of you wants him to get away with what he did and then feel guilty for having that thought."

Mr. Rhys-Meyers laughs at some critics' perceptions that Chris' relationship with Chloe and Nola somehow reflects Mr. Allen's relationship with former companion Mia Farrow and current wife Soon-Yi Previn.

"There is no way in the world Woody would entertain such a notion," he says. "I do think some writers just invent things to have something to write about."

But he does confirm that on the set Mr. Allen is not a micromanager.

"He's a completely hands-off director. He chooses his actors carefully and expects them to be able to do the part. He's not going to analyze each line of dialogue or each psychological motivation. That would bore him. And, frankly, it would bore me, too. So we complemented each other."

The eccentric filmmaker also gives his cast only the pages of the screenplay that contain their individual characters. But with Chris being at the center of the film, Mr. Rhys-Meyers caught a break.

"I was lucky," he says. "Chris is in every scene but two, so I got a complete script. But I couldn't talk about the script with the other actors. Funny, I just finished Mission: Impossible III, and I had the same situation there. All of us were under contract not to talk about the movie. But I can tell you it will be full of surprises."

The actor believes Mr. Allen chose him as Chris because "Woody wanted an underdog. I've been an underdog all my life. Always, always an underdog. Always, always an outsider. He also wanted Chris to have a sense of ambition, and, like most outsiders, I'm very ambitious."

Being expelled from his high school in Ireland might have contributed to his outsider self-image, but he professes no regrets.

"I didn't think they were teaching anything that might be helpful in life. I hated being there, and I let them know it. They hated my being there, and they let me know it."

But he laughs when told that his biography on IMDb.com, the Internet movie Web site, states that some of his youth was spent in an orphanage.

"Not at all true. I grew up with my mother and my brothers. Whoever started that story has been reading too many Dickens novels."

High-school diploma or not, he knows his literary classics.

E-mail pwuntch@dallasnews.com