Jeremy Irons sweeps into the room like an invigorating breeze. His friendly greeting and casual demeanour come as a balm after a long afternoon of Gabriel Byrne looking sulky, Gerard Depardieu telling toilet jokes, Randall Wallace going on like a runaway train and Judith Godreche trying to play mysterious.
'We can make it interesting; we can have a good conversation,' Irons promises sympathetically after some good-natured whingeing from the assembled reporters. This offer is deeply appreciated because of all the cast of The Man In The Iron Mask, Irons probably has the heaviest promotion schedule. He is also promoting Lolita and Chinese Box, and has admitted he 'gets confused' sometimes.
Being in a film like The Man In An Iron Mask has been a source of less consternation for the proper Englishman with a penchant for rather improper roles than Lolita. Based on the book by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita had major problems finding a US distributor because of its paedophilia theme, and the release of Wayne Wang's Chinese Box - filmed in Hong Kong in the run-up to the handover last year - has been held up for almost a year. It is certainly good to be in a film that does not have the same problems, he admits.
'Promoting a film like Iron Mask, where you feel a major studio is 100 per cent behind you . . . I wish we could find a studio which would stand 100 per cent behind Lolita,' Irons says in his strong British accent.
He has been disappointed by the response to Lolita because he feels it was timely and among his and director Adrian Lyne's best work. 'Lolita is a morality tale. It shows what happens when you go against the mores of society, and I think, as a result, it is a very ethical film to make; a very moral film to make, which should join the debate because paedophilia is very much in the news, and I think an informed judgment can be wrought by such a film.' Moralists would probably find a problem with Irons' reasoning, just as they may have had difficulty approving some of most of Irons' other roles: the British MP Stephen Fleming who becomes obsessed with his son's girlfriend in Damage or the French diplomat who has a 20-year love affair with a male Chinese opera singer in M Butterfly. And let's not forget the weird Claus Von Bulow in Reversal Of Fortune, for which he won an Oscar and a Golden Globe.
As financial journalist John Spencer in the Chinese Box, his character is caught in a love triangle between karaoke bar owner Vivian (Gong Li) and a streetwise Hong Kong woman (Maggie Cheung). Irons, who has yet to see the final cut of the Chinese Box, says diplomatically: 'It is not a movie that I think will go wide. It is a very particular movie . . . it is more a collage within which there are various disparate stories. It's a very good film - not a terribly commercial film - but a film which [will appeal to] people who like Wayne Wang's work and who like movies that are not run-of-the-mill.' Playing the musketeer Aramis-turned-religious man in good old-fashioned, swashbuckling The Man In The Iron Mask is probably one of his more honourable film roles, even though he jokes that he and the boys 'behaved appallingly' on the set.
