In Velvet Goldmine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor have a close-up kiss that lasts 18 seconds. My friends and I timed it, rewound it, gathered on my futon and watched it again and again maybe once a week for the entirety of my senior year of high school. 18 seconds! Oh my god!!!
Later, we would develop more nuanced analyses of the film, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Directed and written by Todd Haynes, the film famously began as a David Bowie biopic, and had to be rewritten and restructured after Bowie denied the rights to his music, and threatened to sue based on certain similarities between him and character Brian Slade (Meyers). We wondered what it’d look like if Bowie gave his blessing. We questioned whether the film would have focused so much on the idea of “selling out” if it hadn’t been written in the '90s.
But there’s a reason Velvet Goldmine has become a cult classic and a touchstone of New Queer Cinema, and it’s not questions of authenticity. It’s because, as Meyers suggests, it embodied the promise of glam rock. It was a fantasy of androgyny and sexual fluidity and freedom rolled in glitter. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real, because the fantasy was more real than reality ever was. How many teenagers lost themselves in that kiss? How many clung to the promise, narrated over the image of a young boy putting on lipstick for the first time, that one day "the whole stinking world would be theirs"?
For Meyers, the film seems like a lifetime ago, but speaking to him on the phone, you wouldn't know it. He talks about glam rock, of Todd Haynes, and of filming the movie as if it all happened yesterday. And he wants you to know that if you're an actor and not willing to kiss a guy, you're boring as hell.
GQ: When you were growing up, what was the relationship you had with glam rock or David Bowie or any of the themes of this film?
Jonathan Rhys Meyers: I didn't, really. Glam rock was alien to me. I grew up in a family of musicians, but I grew up in a family of traditional Irish musicians. So whereas music was a huge influence in my life, my father was more into Rory Gallagher blues rock and Led Zeppelin. His influence was different so therefore my influence was different. By the time I got to do Velvet Goldmine, I was interested in working with Todd Haynes. My interest in glam rock was minimal when I did the film.
And of course in the film we didn't get to use Mr. Bowie's music so then we had to alternate what the character was going to be. Originally it was going to be a Bowie-esque character but when we lost the rights to use Bowie's music then we had to turn him into a mishmash of what glam rock was in that time. It was quite complicated because I only had, what, 10 days to sort of readjust to not playing a Bowie but playing a sort of mixture of Bowie, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, basically a general idea of glam rock. By the way, I've only ever seen the film once.
Really?
20 years ago. I've never watched it again.
Is there a reason for that?
I don't watch my stuff. But so my character—he's not real. And it's kind of complicated to bring across and it's only in retrospect, maybe some audiences get it, some audience members don't get it. But he's not real. He doesn't exist. Brian Slade is not a human whereas all the other characters have their human elements. You all see their counterparts. You see Christian [Bale]'s character as the journalist. You see Ewan [McGregor]'s character as the rock guy who has an affair with Christian at the end. Then you see Toni [Collette]'s character as his wife, but then you see the woman being interviewed afterward. All of them have a separate, human side, except Brian Slade because he doesn't exist. He is an imagination. He is their imagination of what a glam rock pop star would have been at that time. So it would be kind of complicated to play because he didn't exist in any sort real form.
And then when you see him as Tommy Stone, it's still very distant.
Well it's very hard for the audience to get that, which I think, I'm not quite sure did we make the right move there. Because I would have preferred to play Tommy Stone myself. You would have got more of the connection. [Todd Haynes] chose another actor to play it to make it so different, so then that almost emphasizes the fact that he doesn't exist, that there was no Brian Slade. So it's just going to whatever pop icon is there at the time. They're choosing their heroes.
And this is why David Bowie—and David Bowie is an enormous influence in this because he did this for real—David Jones [Bowie's born name] decided when he was a very, very young man to not exist anymore. And he spent his life creating different characters, whether it was Ziggy Stardust, whether it was The Thin White Duke, the Crack Actor, David Bowie. These were all within them very different aspects of a spirit, I suppose that’s a very ethereal sort of way to say it, but he decided to lose the essence of the human that was brought up a child and sort of transform into an image of what you were seeing.
It sounds like you certainly learned a lot about glam rock in the last 20 years if you didn't know it before.
No, not particularly but it's, you see: Why was glam rock successful? Why is anything successful? Because it hits to the core of what people are feeling at the time. David Bowie just hit that. Britain had come out of the Second World War. It was just about to happen. The '60s had just kind of happened, 1968 had just happened. There was a little bit of color. He brought out “Space Oddity.” Everything was changing so he became an icon for that type of change and of course he made that incredible song, “Changes,” which said everything about what was happening.
And then sort of as the ‘80s happened, the icons of deception started to happen. And then glam rock sort of started to lose the allure of "We could all be beautiful, sparkly, diamond children." And then it became something much, much darker with the advent of Black Sabbath and Metallica and Slayer and Megadeth, KISS. There was something much more violent, much more aggressive in tone. Also films changed and stopped being the really interesting films of the 1970s and became the wham-bam films of the early 1980s. It all changed as Wall Street started making money and people started selling mortgage bankruptcies and lost more money and everything was bigger, bigger, bigger, better. Instead of being adventurous, the elite became glamorous.
By the way, all these kids that were glam rocking out to David Bowie in the 1970s are the same people that were the elites in the 1980s. So you know, there is that certain element that the glam rock audience are to blame for a lot of the bullshit that went on in the ‘80s.
It's funny because I think the film totally reckons with that, that with the present being the ‘80s in the film. It's very bleak-looking. And it's a very sort of depressing, very much not sparkly, not hopeful time. And so you see exactly what everybody from this glam-rock era has become.
And yeah, well not everybody. But you know, certainly there was a footmark that yeah, they went on to become the elites, to become Wall Street, the cocaine, yuppie Wall Streeters. And others became different, but of course economic downturn is certainly economic downturn. In England it was a real mess in the 1980s. Conservative power came in. Maggie Thatcher came it. They started closing down the mines in Wales and in the north of England. That's why, in the late 1970s in England particularly—now when I was talking about the darkness of how rock got, I was specifically speaking about America. In England, it was different. It England, it was much more revolutionary than the United States was. The United States revolutionary was leading toward something more aggressive, but financially very successful. In England, it was the fucking Sex Pistols. It was that pure aggression. Pure aggression. No money. The Clash are the perfect example of what happened bringing in to the 1980s. The Sandinistas, the Iran Contra, everything political that happens in the world, it goes into music and becomes part of the music that people are into because it's what they're attached to at the time.
And Todd is a very, very intelligent director. So he intelligently knew growing up in the West Coast of the United States at that time that he was viewing a very different world, but we were all connected through the music. And so it's a good way of reflecting. You know, music does it very well. Funnily enough in the United States, baseball does it very well, reflects the political atmosphere of the nation.
Oh really? How do you think so?
If you look at baseball history it always ties in to the economic, social, functional military thing of the United States. It's just strange. But anyway, music has always been a driving force to pull whatever the political thing is. And glam rock was almost a bracket. In the middle of all this revolution there was like these three year brackets of people just going bananas and dressing up like girls. And it was kind of crazy. They didn't really know what to do with themselves and David Bowie tapped into this unrest. And he did it, Marc Bolan did it, Roxy Music did it. But [Bowie] did it better than anybody.
You mentioned that you really wanted to work with Todd Haynes. What drew you to him and to his work?
He's incredibly intelligent but he's also a really sweet person. And I was a teenager, I’d just turned 19 years old when I met Todd for this movie. I had only done a handful of films in small parts, so you know, I was excited that he'd cast me in it, and with the other actors who were far more accomplished and far more successful at the time. Obviously Ewan was very successful off of Trainspotting. Christian had been successful since he was a little boy, and Toni Collette is just one of the world's great actresses. It was beautiful to be surrounded by these incredibly talented people so young. I was so young. I was so out of my depth. But it was very, very sweet. It was a very sweet movie to do.
Did you maybe have any sense while you were filming it of what it would become, that it would really become this cult classic and gain this following?
No.
Does it feel weird knowing that that's what it is now?
It's just a film. No. I don't even see it as me, to be honest with you. A different life, a different person. And sometimes my wife will be playing with her iPod in the car and a song from a Velvet Goldmine soundtrack will come up and I will see the poster with my weird face. It doesn't even look like me. I don't even recognize it as me anymore. It is a lifetime ago, literally.
Did you feel at the time, also given that it was 20 years ago and maybe a different political climate, that it was at all risky to play a character who was so explicitly bisexual?
No. I didn't even think of that. Look, I've always thought: If you're an actor, you're an actor. Which means leave your politics and your personal taste at the door because you're there to perform and you're there to play characters. Some of them are Republicans. Some of them are Democrats. Some of them are straight. Some of them are gay. But if you're going to play them authentically, you've got to be able to leave your own personal things at the door. Do not bring them in to whatever you're doing work wise. Because it becomes too complicated and it gets in the way. It’s boring to watch. It's boring to work with and it's boring to watch.
People don't care about what you think. People don't care about what anybody thinks. They care about what you do, you know? And if you do it well and you do it authentically then you'll be respected for it regardless of what that is. Of course it's a difficult world now and there's a different climate, you know? I suppose having any type of alternative lifestyle today is de rigueur.
Even if you didn’t have personal qualms, were you worried the role would have any ramifications on your career? That other people would see you differently because of this?
Well do you see me playing soldiers?
Good point, no.
No. So obviously it did. You know, you're working within an industry that in certain respects has an incredibly broad mind, and in other respects has an incredibly narrow one. So do I think that it had ramifications? Enormous, I think. Yeah, sure. I'm sure there were roles that I would never get because... because hell, I was just too damned pretty. You know? But I think that goes for every actor. So yeah, from that point of view, yeah from that point of view was doing Velvet Goldmine a good career move? I don't know. Is it a good piece of art? Yes. But was it a good career move for me? I don't know. Possibly not. But I certainly enjoyed working with Todd Haynes immensely. He's immensely gifted.
And “good career move” could mean so many things, right? If you got to do something that you're proud of and that you had a great experience with then that certainly should be the main qualifier.
[affirmative noise]
I don't know. I mean maybe. You might disagree with it.
Don't worry, I've made other tricky career moves since. Let's not blame Velvet Goldmine.