Jonny Lee Miller on habit, Angelina Jolie, and why he didn’t go after Harvey Weinstein: ‘I remember feeling fury’

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It was the spring of 1996, and Jonny Lee Miller had gone to Hollywood. Trainspotting was about to anoint him the peroxide prince of Cool Britannia, and the box-office calamity of the earlier yr’s Hackers, his ghastly-slash-masterful cyber-thriller co-starring a younger Angelina Jolie, had been comfortably weathered. By this level, he’d additionally married Jolie in a ramshackle ceremony involving blood and leather-based, and had discovered himself one night at a celebration, some trade affair crammed with carnivorous energy gamers promising large issues. One such man, a studio government with costly shades and a number of concepts, cornered him by the hors d’oeuvre.

“He told me he was gonna make me an action star, and asked me how that sounded,” Miller recollects. “I was like, ‘I don’t think so.’ Then he asked me, ‘How does $20m sound?’ I remember just saying, ‘Who the f*** is this guy?’” Miller lets out a giant, lairy chuckle. “I could have been a little more gracious, but I think it’s a good indication of me just not understanding the game back then. Or that I thought I was Al Pacino, you know?” We’re sitting within the freezing basement of a London church – palm bushes and desk service a distant reminiscence – the place Miller is rehearsing for the West End run of A Mirror, Sam Holcroft’s thought-provoking play about theatre beneath a politically repressive regime. Back in LA, although, “Lo and behold,” the 51-year-old grimaces, “my phone didn’t start ringing off the hook.”

I say it’s completely acceptable to suppose you’re Al Pacino once you’re a 22-year-old film star. “Yeah, but I was a nightmare!” he shoots again. “I got sent on all these meetings and auditions, and I was just not good at any of it.” He wraps his arm round himself in a hug. “God, I had a very embarrassing audition for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. I didn’t get that I was supposed to be, like, prepared about Shakespeare.” He laughs once more, earlier than composing himself. “It still makes me cringe. It’s just the way it went down. But here we are. F*** it! It’s whatever, man.”

For Miller, a number of issues are no matter, man. It’s his conversational go-to, a surfer-dude nod to the nation he’s referred to as dwelling for many of his grownup life – his sentences finish with a slight American twang, by the way in which – and a dependable reply to the profession questions he’ll inevitably get requested. We know Ewan McGregor performed with lightsabers after Trainspotting. We know Robert Carlyle stripped off to Hot Chocolate. Miller – good-looking, good actor, nice hair – appeared to flail round a little bit. Even he in all probability can’t remember which member of All Saints he dated.

“I was young and foolish,” he shrugs. “I suppose I had a certain amount of arrogance, where I was like… ‘This is bulls***!’ So I ran away from my life and hid in LA for a couple of years, not taking advantage of career opportunities. But that’s just how life is sometimes. I wasn’t really smart about stuff.”

What’s attention-grabbing, although, is that he all the time appeared to have a robust ethical spine – even when he was being arsey to studio executives or being twentysomething and chaotic. In 2021, Jolie – with whom he’s remained pleasant since their cut up in 1997 – talked about him in an interview with The Guardian, praising him for his response to her alleged assault by the intercourse offender and now former film mogul Harvey Weinstein. “I had to escape [Weinstein],” Jolie stated. “I stayed away and warned people about him. I remember telling Jonny, my first husband, who was great about it, to spread the word to other guys – don’t let girls go alone with him.”

I inform Miller that the quote caught with me as a result of well-known males have tended to not be talked about within the testimonials of Weinstein’s victims. Men generally orbited, conscious of what was occurring, however not often appeared to get themselves concerned. Miller at the least tried to do one thing about it.

“My memory is a bit hazy, but I remember feeling fury,” he says. “I actually wanted to be more proactive about it, but it was 100 per cent her decision and you have to swallow your male bulls***. I was gonna hire someone to f***ing…” He trails off. “But I didn’t. I had some connections.” I chuckle, nervously. Miller doesn’t. And Jolie informed him to not? “Yeah. Because it would mean it becomes about you, right? And you wanting to prove how much you care – ‘No one’s going to f***ing do that to my people.’ But what you need to do is listen to your partner.” He smiles, warmly now. “Amazingly, that was the one thing I was able to get right. You know, I was raised by women. I have three sisters. And [Jolie] is a very smart lady. She knows what’s best for her.”

After his self-imposed exile in LA, Miller kicked across the American movie and tv trade, most notably spending seven years as a recent Sherlock Holmes on the crime drama Elementary. He’s additionally labored with the likes of Tim Burton, Neil Jordan and Guy Ritchie, and in 2022 he performed John Major in The Crown, maybe a tad too attractively. And now he’s come again dwelling, for the West End run of a trippy, fourth-wall-breaking play about artwork, censorship and the political psyche.

It’s why we’re assembly in an previous church turned rehearsal area, our dialog serenaded by a distracting radio station enjoying nothing however Noughties pop. Miller is heat, earnest, and pleasingly odd, wearing black sweats embellished with shimmering skulls. I’ll miss the ice-blond mop from Trainspotting, however Miller additionally pulls off the shaven-headed look – it appears to intensify the sharpness of his options.

A Mirror, which is transferring to the Trafalgar Theatre in Whitehall after a profitable run on the Almeida on the finish of final summer time, marks Miller’s first foray onto the London stage since 2011, when he led Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein alongside Benedict Cumberbatch. It was a phenomenon, partly as a result of it arrived smack in the course of Elementary mania. Miller and Cumberbatch swapped components every night time – one performed Frankenstein, the opposite his monster – and whichever of them was enjoying the monster needed to slither bare out of a gooey cocoon in entrance of some both very happy or very upset Cumberbitches (remember them?).

Much has been made lately of actors being illicitly photographed on stage whereas performing nude – most not too long ago James Norton within the West End manufacturing of A Little Life. Did Miller or Cumberbatch ever expertise that?

“I don’t think so, but social media was nowhere near as big then,” he says. “I know there were worries about it because we were rolling around butt naked – Ben had brought that up. But I didn’t care, to be honest. People taking pictures, it’s one of those things that’s not in your control. You’ve really gotta focus on your job and doing that. The other s*** – whatever, man.”

A Mirror takes place in a near-future dystopia, the place all artwork is vetted by the Ministry of Culture, embodied by Miller’s sinister state censor Čelik. Works of creativity should be “hopeful” and “inspiring”, Čelik insists to a younger playwright (Samuel Adewunmi). “If the audience wanted reality, they could sit on their own stairwells and listen to their neighbours,” he sneers. What unfolds is a genre-bending piece of theatre that constantly experiments with type and expectation – performs inside performs inside performs.

Ask Miller about A Mirror’s themes – how a lot the state ought to intervene within the arts, say – and he blanches. He rubs his temples, stumbles over his sentences, and takes large glugs of water from a glass. “There appears to be a broad theme of censorship,” he says, “but really it becomes more about artistic expression, and truth or fiction and, um, the importance of either one.” He apologises. “It’s very hard for me to explain or talk about it because I sound like I don’t know what it’s about, do you know what I mean?” I do, I inform him. “OK, good. All the play asks is for you to come out of it asking yourself a few questions, and…” He pauses once more. “I think the play does that really nicely.”

He appears out of breath. Does he like speaking about… “No,” he interrupts, then laughs. “Honestly, I’m not the most eloquent individual in the world. The more I sit here wangin’ on about stuff, the more I feel like ‘How is this gonna help?’ But then, you really need to get people to come and see the play…” He trails off. Then apologises once more. “I worry. I don’t find these things very comfortable, but I’m also like, cool – let’s do it, this helps.”

It’s truthful to say that Miller has all the time had an erratic relationship with fame. As a toddler, he bought a kick out of it, profitable a spot on the National Youth Theatre and doing the rounds of basic British TV (The Bill, EastEnders and Casualty all pop up on his early CV). Leaving college at 16, he spent a couple of years bouncing between auditions earlier than shifting right into a flat above a chip store in London’s Kentish Town with one other aspiring actor, a child referred to as Jude Law.

He says he was the messier of the 2 – he remembers Law being an early “nester”, somebody fashionable and resourceful, whereas he was extra scatterbrained. When Miller bought Hackers and the pair moved to nicer digs in Primrose Hill, it was Law who rigorously boxed up all of his belongings for him whereas he was abroad filming.

Miller was the primary amongst his friends to turn out to be profitable – you’ll be able to in all probability sketch the Trainspotting poster from reminiscence – however he says immediately that he’s by no means felt significantly artistic. “I’m imaginative, but I’m not creative,” he insists. “My sisters are creative. They can draw and paint. But I don’t, and can’t, and don’t have a desire to. Acting is more observational, I suppose. You’re fulfilling someone else’s vision, so you’re just a small part of it.”

But there should have been instances when he did really feel like he needed to be an even bigger a part of it – didn’t he and Law have a manufacturing firm at one level? “Oh, we didn’t know what we were doing,” he laughs. I counsel he’s placing himself down an excessive amount of. Especially for issues he did when he was only a child. “I wasn’t that young,” he says. “Maybe 22 or 23?” That’s a child, I inform him. “Well, I think I was a bit of an extra baby.”

These days, he has a son of his personal, 15-year-old Buster. We speak about how he co-parents together with his ex-wife, the actor Michele Hicks. “Again, it comes back to swallowing your pride,” he says. “You’ve got to remember who the most important person in any given situation is.” He’s relieved that his son seems to have completely little interest in appearing. “I think that might be quite healthy. I feel like wanting to express yourself when you’re little might be to do with things not being great at home. You’re wanting to be heard. And mine and Michele’s whole f***ing vibe is that he’s heard.”

He says he tries to not discuss an excessive amount of about his household, all the time weighing up how a lot of his non-public life he ought to publicise. It’s partly why he stored quiet for years about his struggles with habit. “It’s been over 12 years since I was intoxicated,” he wrote on his Instagram final September. “I discovered more about myself in those 12 years than my entire life beforehand. I remember every day what the struggle was like, and if you are struggling, I want you to know that there is help nearby and a life beyond your dreams.”

During a podcast look in December, he stated he had spent a lot of the aftermath of Trainspotting in a haze: he was hooked on heroin for a number of years, earlier than changing it with alcohol and cocaine. In 2012, he bought sober. “I’d never talked about it for a number of reasons, partly out of worry about getting insured for work,” he says. “But f*** that, you know? You never know who needs to hear a positive story.” He tells me he’s reluctant to go into an excessive amount of element about his struggles immediately, having already “spilled his guts” on the aforementioned podcast. “But getting sober was the best thing I’ve ever done.”

I ask if it was ever troublesome when his private life and his skilled life grew to become blurred: in Trainspotting and its belated 2017 sequel, after all, however even his Sherlock on Elementary was in restoration from heroin habit. “Oddly,” he says, “Elementary came along when I’d been sober for about six months. And honestly it was a gift.” He says his sobriety wasn’t a secret on the present’s set, and that he and the present’s creator, Robert Doherty, would collaborate on the accuracy of Sherlock’s personal restoration. “Rob was so receptive to my input, and to making that story feel real. It was a real joint effort, and we were able to bring that to this f***ing cop show, which I think is amazing.”

Acting out scenes of inebriation or relapses by no means bothered him, both. “You have more of a problem walking home from set down Second Avenue, you know? Just going past bars. That’s harder than making a piece of telly.”

It’s a typical Miller response. Unaffected. Practical. Whatever, man.

‘A Mirror’ is operating at London’s Trafalgar Theatre till 20 April