The holy father of twelve
AS THE Borgias TV series was about to be unleashed on US viewers in April, the headlines screamed: “Sex. Power. Murder. Amen.”
Who better to embody all four elements as Rodrigo Borgia, aka Pope Alexander VI, than Jeremy Irons, an actor adept at making us love bad guys? He has a natural authority because of his height, stature and that distinctive melodious, raspy voice.
Shot in Hungary, the nine-part series of hour-long episodes was written, produced and initially directed by Neil Jordan, and was a big success in the US. The show is colourful and raunchy in its historical telling, like its earlier Showtime stablemate, The Tudors.
We first meet Borgia (born Roderic Borja in Spain) as a cardinal in the Vatican. He has taken an Italian name to get ahead and has become extremely wealthy. Using a kind of motto of ‘By any means necessary’, he toppled all rivals to become Pope in 1492. He was never the popular choice — and even if he would leave the mother of his four illegitimate children for a woman of aristocratic background, he would always fiercely protect and help the advancement of his family.
While many of the facts about his life remain unclear, Alexander VI had the reputation of behaving more like a corrupt king than a pope and it’s no surprise that he and his family were the subject of The Godfather author Mario Puzo’s final novel, The Family.
Since Irons has always been an actor who likes to inhabit the grey areas of the human psyche, rather than to play an outright hero or a moustache-twirling villain, the project suited him well.
“I don’t think in terms of good and bad,” the 64-year-old part-time west Cork resident admits. “I don’t think you can. You play someone who is what he is. Sometimes I think it’s slightly sloppy thinking because most people in their lives behave badly sometimes, but they are not really bad people. It’s all part of life; it’s about learning.
“When I read about the Borgia pope, it was extraordinary to see the list of adjectives that contemporary writers used to describe him. They run the whole gamut, with some saying he was a wonderful man, a re-organiser of the Church, a politician, fascinating company and that he had a great appetite for life. A Spaniard from the Barcelona region, he possessed the pugnaciousness you need to succeed with all those big old Roman families. And yet he was ruthless, as many people were then in Rome.
“When he arrived there, there were 13 murders a day in the streets and life was very cheap. Poisonings were a usual way of getting rid of people. The medieval world was a very different world. It was a world coming out of chaos and his desire was to try to pull Italy together, to try to get Naples (which was close to half of Italy) on his side, and to strengthen the Roman states, the Vatican states. He was a man of great sensual appetites, for which a lot of people would criticise him. He was also a man of God.”
Although we don’t see them in the first series, Irons says Pope Alexander had 12 children and many mistresses. He dismisses the rumours that Alexander had a child with his daughter, Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger), or that Lucrezia was intimate with her brother Cesare (François Arnaud).
“Certainly, Cesare and Lecrezia were very close, but I think only their greatest enemies would put about that they had a consummated relationship. The Pope adored his daughter, as many fathers do, but the child she had was almost certainly by somebody who worked in the household of her first husband.”
Like Borgia, Irons has a huge appetite for life and is a devoted parent to Sam, 32, and Max, 25, his sons with his Irish wife of 33 years, Sinéad Cusack. This year, Max, a model and actor, made a splash in Vanity Fair magazine when he had a supporting role in Red Riding Hood. His dad acknowledges he likes being around youthful energy in general.
“I still feel 22 in my head. I just ache a bit more if I have been abusing myself.”
But he doesn’t stop doing it? “No, no! I just find I get jetlag a little worse now and the days seem to be getting shorter. I think that is always a sign of getting older. You seem to get less done.”
Irons is not a great drinker and looks after his health. “If I am not careful I can suffer from monumental hangovers and I eat less meat now. I am worried about what we put into it, so where I live I buy from a butcher who buys from a certain farm and I know where it comes from. We grow a lot of our own vegetables and that is great.”
While he reportedly has seven residences around the globe, Irons’ principal dwellings are in the small town of Watlington, Oxfordshire, and Kilcoe Castle in Ballydehob, Co Cork. “I have my boat and my horses and I just love it and the people there,” he says of his Irish retreat. “I have great friends. We sing, we play violin and have a good talk and so it’s a wonderful place to be. It is great to go there after a period of hard work. One of the huge luxuries of my job is that I can take two months off and stop.”
Probably what fires Irons up most in our interview is when the talk turns to motorcycles. “I have an old BMW RT100, which I have had for 22 years,” he remarks proudly. “I ride other bikes but I always ride BMWs.” Whenever he can he takes off on long trips, most famously with the all-star Guggenheim Motorcycle Club, which began informally in 1999.
“We used to call it the Guggenheim Angels,” he says of the gang whose members include actors Laurence Fishburne and Lauren Hutton, as well as 82-year-old architect Frank Gehry (“He doesn’t drive, he just sits on the back”).
What do they do? “We ride hard, we party hard, we see art and we laugh a lot,” Irons responds, drawing out his words while dragging on a cigarette. He tells of a night out in Bilbao with Fishburne and the late Dennis Hopper.
“We were walking through a pretty empty Bilbao from a bar to a restaurant and we were laughing heartily. It’s wonderful when you meet people who, even though they work in a fairly high pressure business, are able to just be totally natural and fun and ordinary.
“Dennis was like that, although he was a mad man. But an interesting artist and an interesting mind. A man who had abused himself badly in his life and had come through it with a sort of wisdom. Very sad when he went, but it was expected.”
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