Fleetingly famous for hooking up with Sienna Miller, Welsh actor Rhys Ifans talks to Helen Barlow about his adventures with Nanny McPhee and Harry Potter.
Rhys Ifans' lanky frame is sprawled across the couch of his Berlin hotel. As our interview begins he looks me straight in the eye.
"Come on, let's get the juicy bits over with!" the 41-year-old demands. On past form, the juicy bits have often related to either his onscreen nudity or to his drinking, sometimes both at the same time.
So that in his new movie, Greenberg, the idea that this tipple-loving Welshman plays someone who doesn't drink, is fascinating.
"Really, it did stretch me I have to say," he responds. "I thought I needed a challenge as an actor, so went, 'Let's play a guy who needed to go to rehab'."
Has anyone ever suggested Ifans should go there?
"Oh God no!" he bellows.
Last seen a year ago drowning his sorrows in a London gutter, Ifans has recovered the best way any jilted man might. He has thrown himself into his work. But no, it wasn't being dumped by Sienna Miller that made him do it, he says. "I was working very hard before that. It's all a vague memory now," he notes of the relationship, which it seemed was about to finally make him settle down, and maybe even start a family.
"The last couple of years I've been doing diverse, crazy stuff. I'm just beyond myself with satisfaction, peace and happiness, which are three long words to have in your makeup."
If only all actors were as funny and as amenable as Ifans. Directors respond to him as well, but not because he is funny. Ifans is the kind of actor who bolsters a film.
"You have to take acting very seriously or it would be just awful," he says. "If you saw me on set I'm not running around opening bottles of wine and saying 'Let's have a party!' It's factory floor graft, intensely rewarding work and if you don't take it seriously it's not funny."
When he recently impressively played the sympathetic best friend of a dorky unhinged Ben Stiller in Greenberg, he said there was no time for fooling around. "On set it's not me or him, it's these two guys and you're totally committed to that." In Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, he is the dastardly roguish Uncle Phil we cannot help but love. Ifans is more than adept at physical comedy.
"I saw the film the other day and I thought it was [expletive] magnificent," he announces. "It made me cry. If it was shite, I'd tell you," he assures. "It's a kid's film and I think it's better than the first one. Well, I'm in it for a start," he pauses for effect. "But what I love about it is unlike so many kids' movies of the moment, it's not dependent on action and CGI. It's like pop-up Enid Blyton. It's a beautiful story with good values. And I love Emma Thompson and I'd work for her forever."
A big kid himself, Ifans loves working with "little whippersnappers" and he is happy he has finally made a film his godchildren can see.
"It's rare that I can take children to see my work because usually I'm ..." he hesitates, "butt naked."
Still, he loses his shirt in Nanny McPhee.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. They always try and get me naked. And I do it of course at the drop of a hat. If I was a girl I'd be huge."
He's with kids again in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as Xenophilius Lovegood, Luna Lovegood's father. "I'm fully clothed - they wouldn't let me get my wand out for that! It was just fantastic to do. If you're a British actor being in a Harry Potter film is a badge of honour."
The attention to detail on the Harry Potter set is legendary, to the extent that all the books in the enormous library are real.
"I was scared to touch the potions in case they actually worked," Ifans muses. "That's how meticulous it all is. They retain an Englishness to the whole operation which was brilliant. It wasn't like, 'Oh welcome on set', it was 'Oh, welcome to Hogwarts' [he adopts a ghostly English voice]. It just felt magical and you could see all these amazing English actors wandering around with wands and sticks. It's a kind of social event because you get on the set and I pretty much knew all the cast, like David Thewlis [Defence of the Dark Arts professor Remus Lupin]. We spent the first 10 minutes laughing at each other's costume and then got to work."
Ifans and Thewlis are also starring together in Anonymous directed by Roland Emmerich, and which has been a passion project for the Independence Day and 2012 director for over a decade. It explores the possibility that Shakespeare might not have written his plays.
"It's a brilliant kind of academic thriller," says Ifans.
"A film like that can only be made by a German director in Germany, because you need to be outside the English intelligentsia and academia, which are riddled with this jingoistic need for Shakespeare to have written all these things. Then the left-wing intelligentsia cannot bear the fact that a working-class boy didn't write it either. There's a social collision that cancels itself out. So hopefully it will cause a right old kerfuffle and I'll be right in the middle of it."
One of Ifans' many challenges is that he will have to ride a horse. "No, I've never done it. But I think the horse needs to be more concerned than I am."
In Greenberg he had to drive a car, and he couldn't do that either. "I get there and there's this huge American truck with a camera attached to it and I'm sitting there with Ben, who is far more valuable than the car itself. So I've decided to take lessons. At least you'll find out about it. Just buy your tabloids. See who's been run over!"
LOWDOWN
Who: Rhys Ifans
Past films: Notting Hill (1999), Human Nature (2001), The Shipping News (2001), Enduring Love (2004), Vanity Fair (2004), Hannibal Rising (2007), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), The Boat That Rocked (2009).
Latest: Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang out now; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I opens November; Greenberg undated.
