Eyeing His Options : Jeremy Irons likes the decisions he’s made--where to live (not Hollywood) and what movies to make (not only big ones)

It sounds like a joke now, but Jeremy Irons can remember a night walking back from the theater during his student days in England when the principal of his drama school turned to him and said, “It’s a great shame, 30 years ago you would have had a great career on the screen.”

“I didn’t have a face we thought the camera would like,” Irons tries to explain, “because it was too old-fashioned in a way. It was the sort of face we’d seen on the screen in the ‘40s and now there were much more rugged, squarer faces, people like Finney and Courtenay and Caine.”

He tells the story without a trace of pride, which may or may not be related to these various personal details: He has never made a movie in Los Angeles; he drives a 13-year-old Volkswagen convertible; he doesn’t think talent has much to do with success. “I didn’t show much talent through drama school,” he says, “other than for wearing costumes quite well.”

Last spring he won the Academy Award for his ascot-and-fangs performance in “Reversal of Fortune” as the black prince of Newport, Claus von Bulow. More than a few observers thought talent had something to do with it.

Irons’ first role since the Oscar is the title character in “Kafka,” Wunderkind director Steven Soderbergh’s second feature, which opens in Los Angeles and New York this week. Despite its title, the film is not a biography of Franz Kafka, the tormented Austrian author of “The Trial,” “The Metamorphosis” and other disturbing dreams on the 20th Century. Rather, it is a sort of detective story in which an anonymous insurance clerk in Prague bearing some resemblance to the famous writer sets out to solve the mystery of a murdered friend and stumbles into the darkest chambers of the modern state.

Filmed in Prague, mostly in black-and-white and full of damp, empty, cobble-stone streets, the film often looks like a homage to director Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller “The Third Man,” yet its script, by Lem Dobbs, follows detours into vaudeville humor and technocratic horrors, Terry Gilliam-style. The movie is, to say the least, hard to classify, and Irons, who has just seen it, isn’t sure what to make of it himself.

“I’ve never before done a film where I knew so little about what it’s about while I was doing it. Which is sort of right. I didn’t discourage that feeling because I thought, well, my character doesn’t really know what’s happening, so I think I’m in the right place.”

He plucks another British cigarette from its cardboard box and drops the box back on the table. We are having coffee in his two-story suite at the Barbizon on the east side of Manhattan, where he and his actress wife, Sinead Cusack, are laying over for two days after a week of filming a new movie called “Waterland” in Pittsburgh. Irons has on a pair of charcoal-gray corduroy pants, a sweater vest and a paisley tie. There are yellowish nicotine stains at the ends of his fingers.

“It’s a lot of things,” he says about “Kafka.” “Actually, I think the murder mystery is the weakest part. I think the story is the weakest part. But I think it’s so inventive. The pictures are so good.”

When he saw Soderbergh’s conspicuous debut, “sex, lies, and videotape,” the story goes, Irons is supposed to have said, “I must work with that man.”

“Yes, it’s true,” he says now. “It was here in New York. I saw it over on Columbus Avenue.”

Some months later, the script of “Kafka” arrived. “It was an interesting script, and we talked and I liked the sound of him. I knew it was a journey into the unknown, as all good projects are--even while we were shooting it. Because we started with an imperfect script, which is a huge risk and something I always try not to do.”

“Initially I had trouble coming up with possibilities for the lead role,” Soderbergh says. “It wasn’t until my producer, Stuart Cornfeld, mentioned Jeremy that I decided, yes! That’s who it is! From that point on I had no other actors in mind, to the extent that I don’t know that I would have made the film without Jeremy.”

There were rewrites during production and some reshooting months later. A romantic subplot involving an alluring revolutionary played by Theresa Russell ultimately was shaved down to something more like a suggestion.

“I was reading an article about Steven where he said that his first film was all about him but that his next film couldn’t be because only two years had passed and not enough new had happened to him. Then you look at ‘Kafka’ and you think, but it is all about Steven. Steven loves film and he knows film so well. It’s full of film jokes, and it’s in a certain style which he likes. So it is about Steven: It’s about his love of film. I think what’s great is that it’s like nothing else. It’s a real beast of its own. It’s an original work.”

It’s assumed that winning the Academy Award makes all the difference to an actor’s career, but in Irons’ case, not much has changed. He’s still making movies for small companies (“Kafka” was done for Miramax), and he has no plans to leave his home in the countryside between London and Oxford where he and Cusack live with their two sons, Samuel and Maximilian.

“There’s a little bit more interest (from Hollywood), but I hope it doesn’t change,” he says. “A, I like my life as it is, and, B, I think the way I choose pictures and the sort of pictures that are offered to me, I’m happy with that.”

“Waterland,” adapted from a novel by Graham Swift and directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal for Fine Line, is about a British history teacher and his wife who have no children and come to America in an effort to make a fresh start. Irons describes it as “a sort of valedictory for history, really, showing that it’s not irrelevant what has happened in our lives and in the world.” Cusack plays his wife in the picture. It will be out next summer.

“Kafka,” meanwhile, is likely to be pegged as a cerebral film, at least compared to “Curly Sue” or “House Party 2,” yet Irons maintains it is “the nearest thing I’ve ever done to an action movie. There’s not a lot of acting in it, I mean a lot of complicated stuff that needs acting. It’s mainly reaction shots, walk-bys. It was not that satisfying in that respect. It enabled me to work with Steven, to work in Prague, which I loved, although my juices were rarely used. But that’s all right. I’ve just done a film where they’re used all the time, and it’s quite exhausting.”

Irons, who first became a familiar face to American audiences when he was cast as the beautifully spoken Oxbridge snob Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited,” seen on public television in 1981, has made a career (he is 41) out of playing men who tend to use words more than their fists. He played an adulterous officer in love with Meryl Streep in “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” a Jesuit missionary at odds with South American slave trader Robert De Niro in “‘The Mission,” and identical twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers.” He won the Tony Award in 1985 for his performance on Broadway as the playwright-husband to Glenn Close in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.”

“I do, I know, present a man who appears to be thinking,” Irons says. “I’m often thinking about the crossword or the design of a particular building I’m looking at. But I know that I do play that area, and it’s quite a fertile area for characters.” He pronounces the word fer-tyle . “My area I sort of call the Bill Hurt area, and that’s fine. There are a lot of interesting roles within that area. And I do like secrets, I do like internal conflict. Those sort of roles give me the best time.

“I’m not really a character actor. I don’t really want to disguise myself completely. I don’t like makeup. I don’t like stuff that covers. I’m not very good at pretending to be other people. What I always try to do is find a bit of myself that relates to the other person. For example, I didn’t make Kafka Jewish, which I could have done. It didn’t seem to me important to the story. But, of course, he was Jewish.”

Irons initially resisted the idea of playing Claus von Bulow, the aristocrat who did or didn’t dispatch his wife Sunny into a drug-induced coma. He resisted, not on moral grounds, but based on what he thought was his physical unsuitability to the role. He even suggested other actors. “Duvall I thought would be great. And Klaus Maria Brandauer. I just thought they had the right sort of weight.”

When he finally agreed to do it, it was in part because of his desire to work again with Close, his co-star on Broadway in “The Real Thing.”

“We’d looked for movies we might do together,” Irons says. “Having done a play together for nine months, we know each other, we trust each other, we like each other.”

“Glenn Close suggested Jeremy,” says Nicholas Kazan, who wrote and helped produce “Reversal of Fortune” with Edward Pressman. “We hadn’t thought of him. Then it seemed like a great idea.”

Kazan remembers the first reading of the script in a hotel basement in London before Irons had agreed to take the part.

“I found his performance to be uncanny just at an instinctual level. He wasn’t happy. He thought he had played him, I don’t even remember, a little too guilty or a little too innocent. But I thought his performance was incredible. He had read the script only once. Sometimes an actor just claims a role and certainly that’s what happened.

“He was concerned that he didn’t look enough like him, but once he was comfortable that he could make some physical approximation of the man, he just sailed.”

There was talk he had used Boris Karloff as a starting point. Irons shakes his head when he hears this. “My starting point was Claus. I studied him on video a lot. I tried to get inside what was happening to him when he was being interviewed by Barbara Walters and Donahue. And then read everything he’d ever written, talked to people about him. Did everything but meet him.

“I look at it now, I really don’t know how it happened, how I did it. I think it has a little bit to do with concentration. You concentrate yourself into a different place. It’s what kids do when they play cowboys and Indians or Space Invaders: They’re just there, they’re in it.”

“I read somewhere that he said he was halfway between American Method (acting) and British technique,” says Kazan. “Jeremy, in real life is very charming, very funny, full of life. Jeremy as he was when he was working on this role was much quieter, more introspective. I rode with him out to the set one day, and the stereotypical view of an English actor going out to the set would be that if he is a witty, carefree person, he would be as witty and carefree as ever. Jeremy, on the contrary, was completely turned inward, focused, not at all social, not very different from what you would expect a Method actor to be, so focused on what he was about to do that all other concerns were irrelevant.”

As impressive as his portrayal of Von Bulow was, Irons considers his role in Cronenberg’s unnerving fantasy “Dead Ringers,” alternating the different personalties of gynecologist twins Eliot and Beverly Mantle, to have been perhaps his top achievement.

“Personally I think my work in that is more complex than Claus and showy on a certain level, and I always felt that when I got the nomination and won, an awful lot of it was due to ‘Dead Ringers.’ I got a big response from people in Los Angeles when I wasn’t nominated. People I hardly knew wrote to me to say they thought it was a disgrace I was passed over. But it’s not a life-enhancing movie, and the Oscars being the sort of birthday party of the movies, I think they like movies that show human beings at their best, not at their worst, which is what ‘Dead Ringers’ was. So I sort of understood it. But I think had that performance not happened I wouldn’t have been nominated for ‘Reversal.’ ”

“The first time I saw Jeremy was in ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ ” says Soderbergh. “which I went to see because of all the talk about Meryl Streep--what unusual casting, she’s doing an accent, etc. So I’m watching the film and thinking, yeah, she’s fine, but who’s the guy? Ever since then I’ve tried to see everything Jeremy has appeared in, but there’s no question that his peformance in ‘Dead Ringers’ was one of the best of the last decade. This is an opinion shared by every actor I’ve ever spoken to, as well. Just unbelievable.”

Unlike such British stars before him as Richard Burton and Michael Caine, Irons has not been tempted to move to Hollywood. He has never even worked a day in California. “I’ve always felt that living in Los Angeles would be a bit like living over the shop,” he says. “And when the shop’s closed, I like to be away doing different things. I’m not one of these people who enjoys being at parties being asked what my next project is. Now, I think you pay a price for that. It probably means I will never be such a big star or quite as rich, but that’s all right. My personal taste is I don’t like that weather so much because I love contrasts in everything, and I quite like the excitement of drawing the curtains in the morning and seeing what kind of day it is.

“Whatever I have as an actor is because of where I come from and what I am. And to move somewhere else so different as Los Angeles would worry me.”

For someone who says he doesn’t like to pretend to be other people, one can’t help but wonder which of his roles has been the most transparent. A woman friend of his for 10 years says, “I think the most of him was in ‘The Real Thing,’ referring to Henry, the brainy playwright trying to come to terms with the meaning of love.

Others have suggested Charles Ryder, his emblematic role in “Brideshead Revisited.” “I think Charles Ryder was the me I’d been educated to be--if I hadn’t become an actor,” he says. “And he was sort of my goodby to all of that. No, he’s much softer than me, Charles Ryder, and I hope less giving than me. That was the big lesson in that character--if you don’t give, you don’t get, and he was someone who sort of lived off other people. And maybe Waugh was like that, I don’t know.”

Sinead Cusack has returned from an errand, and she is waiting in the outer room to join her husband for lunch. They are going to spend their only afternoon in New York shopping and gallery-hopping.

But there is a last question. What was it he meant exactly about talent not being central to one’s career? Irons doesn’t think long before offering an answer. He tells the story of a classmate of his at the Bristol Young Vic, whom he considered the most talented actor in the class and who later went on to the Royal Shakespeare Company and then into semi-obscurity.

“I then realized that success is not to do with talent. You have to have the talent, yes. But you can learn an awful lot. It’s to do with many other things: how open you are, how you get on with people, how you interview, how you look, and how you make choices. And I think if there’s anything that I’ve been blessed with it’s my ability to make the right choices. And I don’t know where that comes from.

“It’s true that I look at other people’s careers and the way they’ve gone and tried to work out why they’ve done certain things. And Burton’s a classic example. A great English actor. But cared too much about razzmatazz and money. And because he was Welsh he drank. He found out that razzmatazz and money don’t make you happy, so he drank more. And what happened was this great talent didn’t really fulfill itself. O’Toole (is) another example. Olivier--hearing him say in an interview here in New York when he was making ‘Marathon Man’ that he wasn’t very happy with the way his career had gone, and I thought, Jesus, then what am I chasing? I think that helped me with choices.

“So careers are not just about talent. They’re about other things. And then there’s luck. But I think luck has to do with balance. Luck is the result of a mixture of many things. I think we all get chances in life, but probably a lot of us don’t notice them. Don’t notice they’ve happened, don’t notice we’ve missed them.”

Not a pleasant thought, not an Academy Award thought, you might say. And coming from a guy whose drama school head told him he was probably going to have to spend his life playing repertory theater in Ipswich, you have to wonder, how would he know?