Sexy, shy and dating a saint
Jonny Lee Miller found fame with Trainspotting but somehow his career failed to ignite. Now he's back with a new stage play, a Hollywood film and a celebrity girlfriend - Natalie Appleton from All Saints.
Interview by Jim Shelley
It's eight months now since Jonny Lee Miller started dating pop chick/fashion babe Natalie Appleton from super-cool girl group All Saints. But it's probably only recently that the consequences of being half of what is now officially 'Britain's Coolest Couple' are beginning to sink in. However, the small, surprisingly shy star of Trainspotting and Plunkett and Macleane has suffered the ignominy of being warned to get away from Appleton by over-protective bouncers, and, when he demurred, of being physically removed from his beloved's side, because they presumed he was just another fresh-faced fan.
The attentions of fans and the paparazzi mean that eating out together has become so difficult (far, far worse than the simple celebrity he enjoyed, or endured, after Trainspotting) that these days, more often than not, he and Appleton decide just to stay in. 'Your security gets infringed upon,' he mumbles meekly.
What about nuisance phone calls at home, things like that? He thinks about this for a second, then laughs sheepishly. 'Actually, that happens to her,' he admits, blushing at the presumption. 'I just happen to be in the house. It's not happening to me at all!' He mimics the scene of two celebrities, bickering, 'They're not calling you, darling! They're terrorising me.'
If this imagined scenario appeals to Jonny Lee Miller it is possibly the one aspect of his current, albeit surrogate, celebrity that does. His profile these days is that of the hip, happening young actor who shot - or shot up - to fame as part of the Trainspotting gang, the 'Cool Britannia' Britpack, and the in-vogue Primrose Hill Mafia. Meeting him, though, you can't help feeling that he has been miscast for the role as a big noise in the city.
On paper, he has all the right credentials. He was brilliant (unrecognisable, in fact) in Trainspotting, as the smarmy, archly stylish, drug-pushing pimp called Sick Boy - he of the 'obshesshive Sean Connery fixashion'.
His personal CV, too, lives up to his billing as Boy About Town. He has been romantically linked with Anna Friel and Kate Moss, and he is famously part of the Natural Nylon film company, along with friends Ewan McGregor, Jude Law and Sadie Frost, who are to the current London party scene what Mick Jagger, Terence Stamp and David Bailey were to the Sixties. He even has one highly glamorous, tempestuous failed marriage behind him - to Hollywood wildchild Angelina Jolie, daughter of Jon Voight, whom he met while making the Hollywood movie Hackers .
His three years in America have contributed to the Lee Miller mystique, which you can't help thinking he's developing. While he was there, he took up sky-diving ('which makes you realise why birds sing') , aikido, and acquired several tattoos (including a rat on his forearm) . In interviews about that time, his ex-wife, describing their relationship as 'pretty wild', alluded to sado-masochism.
None of which seems to relate to the subdued figure sitting unnoticed in the foyer of Kilburn's Tricycle Theatre in northwest London, where he is performing in Paul Corcoran's debut play, Four Nights in Knaresborough - a sort of Reservoir Dogs meets Murder in the Cathedral affair about four hoodlums on the run.
Looking like a bookish, fresh-faced schoolboy in his thick NHS-style glasses and baggy blue Adidas tracksuit, and carrying a cute little backpack, on first impressions, Lee Miller seems to be introverted to the point of chronic insecurity, with none of the cocky confidence displayed by the likes of Law and McGregor. The constant comparison with McGregor must, indeed, prove particularly irksome. Both actors made their film debuts in Trainspotting, and for a while both were similarly high profile, but their career paths then diverged.
McGregor has since made many movies; Lee Miller only six. Two of these (Complicity, and the Miramax adaptation of Mansfield Park) have yet to be released, leaving only Plunkett and Macleane (opposite fellow Trainspotter, Robert Carlyle), Afterglow, Hackers and Regeneration to add to his film credits.
Then, while McGregor has generated endless publicity through his penchant for films involving nude scenes, and for talking about his willy during interviews, Lee Miller is happier to keep his clothes on.
'I haven't done any of those, no. Not likely to happen,' he mutters nervously, as if I might be about to try to make him. 'I've had a problem with nude scenes. I find the whole idea of large quantities of people seeing you naked really . . . disturbing. I had to do one for Complicity, which is coming out next year. I was ****-scared, man, terrified.'
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