Jonathan Rhys Meyers is best known for his role as Henry VIII in the Showtime series The Tudors. Henry VIII was of course a rotund drunken womanizer while Meyers is a very thin, pretty drunken Irishman whose womanizing status is up to question. (He has a longterm girlfriend and we don’t hear much about him picking up women.)
Meyers has a new interview with Parade in light of the fourth and final season of The Tudors, which starts airing April 11. He says he’s ready for the next chapter in his life but that he loved the role and his work on the show. He also comes across as vain and completely unapologetic about it. Meyers wasn’t about to sacrifice those razor sharp features and tight abs for a role and says he couldn’t be bothered to gain weight in order to portray Henry VII later in his life.
On not gaining weight to portray Henry VII
“He was a lot heavier and taller than I am, but so what? I think I’d have been stupid to put on a fat suit and I wasn’t about to gain a lot weight. But I think Henry was better looking than he was portrayed in the classic portrait by Hans Holbein. I think he would have hated it. It may be great art, but it’s not a good picture. I’ve seen fat, ugly pictures of Brad Pitt because some paparazzi got him from a bad angle on a bad morning. So how would he feel if that were the sole image of him that would be seen by future generations? He’d be going, ‘What the hell? I was a great looking guy.'”…
As for getting passionate on the set.
“Actually, it’s not unpleasant to get it on with beautiful actresses and you don’t have any nasty repercussions afterward. To make it work, you have to experience a little sexual chemistry. But it can be a bit taxing when you’re doing sex scenes in front of a crew of like a hundred people under hot lights with cameras poking into all sorts of private areas.”
Go ahead and call him a hot hunk.
“I’d rather people think I’m sexy than not. Let’s be honest. Physicality is going to have a bearing on the parts you get. And if you think differently, you’re in the wrong business.”
[From Parade]
I love how Meyers justifies not gaining weight for a role by saying that a portrait artist just got Henry VII at a bad angle! The guy was obese as an older man, but Meyers didn’t even want to wear a fat suit to portray him. He just can’t not look pretty. He does do that exceptionally well, you have to give that to him. As much as Meyers was criticized for not physically embodying the legend of Henry VII, he was also praised for making the monarch so damn sexy. One journalist even called him “lickable.”
It looks like there’s plenty of male eye candy on this show. I just discovered another actor that’s arguably more attractive than Meyers – a guy named Henry Cavill who plays Henry VII’s brother in law Charles Brandon. That Brandon guy also looked nothing like the beefcake Cavill, below. Who really cares, though, when you get to stare at hotties like these?
Photos courtesy of Showtime via Facebook
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