“I’m Jeremy Irons, and if you don’t know me, send me your address and I’ll come and beat you up, because you should have.”
Jeremy Irons is a serious actor who doesn’t take himself too seriously, if you couldn’t tell from his new Shortlist intro. , which you can watch in the playlist above. And he’s not wrong: you do know him. And after nearly 40 years in the spotlight, he knows you know him, too.
Those of us in the States were first struck with Irons in 1981, for his work in the hit PBS miniseries, Brideshead Revisited. (A bit like the Downton Abbey of its day, in an era well before cable TV or streaming movies.) There’s a good pretty good chance you know him from 1990’s Reversal of Fortune, for which he won an Academy Award, or as Scar in 1994's The Lion King, or more recently as Rodrigo Borgia in Showtime’s The Borgias. For a seemingly nice man, he’s played a great many memorable villains.
For his new Shortlist, “Stories We Tell,” Irons selected a comedy, a romance and a political tragedy. The three films vary in genre, but each sweeps viewers up in the lead characters’ all-consuming desires, be they for money, for power, for love, or for all three.
Ian McKellen, Irons notes, “is one of our greatest Shakespearian actors.” In Richard III, “he knows how to make every word count and everything make sense.”
In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, “Steve Martin and Michael Cain are intrinsically opposite,” Caine as posh Londoner and Martin as wild, uncouth America. “Neither cliché, of course, is true—but used to good effect in this story.”
Of his own film, the postmodern romance The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Irons admits, “I choose it, I suppose, selfishly because it was a film I have very happy memories about.” It was his first lead role in a feature film, and Irons counts himself fortunate to have had Meryl Streep as his first leading lady. “She taught me a lot about what was important.”
Watch all of Irons’ Shortlist intros in the playlist above, then head over to Tribeca Shortlist to stream all three films. Bonus video: in the web-exclusive interview below, Irons answers our Quickfire questions, including what film he’s seen the most, his preferred movie-watching snack, and his favorite line of dialogue—which the award-winning actor had the opportunity to say twice, in two of his best-known roles.
