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" Jeremy Irons isn&amp;#039;t one to censor himself. Don&amp;#039;t get us wrong \u2014 he&amp;#039;s deathly polite and gracious. But he had no problem portraying pervert-for-the-ages Humbert Humbert in Lolita, partner-swapping twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg&amp;#039;s Dead Ringers, or the scheming, fornicating Pope Alexander on The Borgias, the third season of which premieres this Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on Showtime. And of course, there were the extemporaneous remarks about gay marriage made during a recent interview with the Huffington Post. Luckily, the recent bout of bad press hasn&amp;#039;t moved the Oscar-winning actor to filter himself. ESQUIRE.COM: I just saw the first episode of the new season of The Borgias. It&amp;#039;s amazing. JEREMY IRONS: Yeah? ESQ: The last few seasons, there&amp;#039;s been sort of this rising tide against the Pope, but with last season&amp;#039;s assassination attempt I feel like he&amp;#039;s in full revenge mode. JI: It must have an effect on you if you are poisoned. You feel angry, but also I don&amp;#039;t know what effect it has for your head. Historically it seemed that he changed after that. I think his faith in God is deeply shaken, and I think he becomes even more temporal. So we will see. ESQ: He&amp;#039;ll become more paranoid and aggressive? JI: Yeah, both those things. He feels like he&amp;#039;s surrounded by people who are out to get him, and he&amp;#039;s going to get them first. ESQ: &amp;quot;Just because you&amp;#039;re paranoid don&amp;#039;t mean they&amp;#039;re not after you.&amp;quot; It seemed like in the second season you started to really revel in playing the Pope. Did you just get more comfortable with the character?  JI: I think the nature of the first series one is often setting up a lot, and then once that&amp;#039;s all set you can really begin to flow with it. I&amp;#039;m not sure if it&amp;#039;s a good thing that you say I seem to revel in it \u2014 I&amp;#039;ve always believed in the theater that if the actor seemed to be enjoying themselves that&amp;#039;s a good thing only as long as the audience are enjoying themselves more.      ESQ: Well, I really enjoy watching it. It&amp;#039;s fun to see someone gain so much power that he becomes disconnected from reality. JI: I think power has a tendency to do that. We&amp;#039;re talking at the moment about the fact that in England so many of our politicians are career politicians \u2014 they&amp;#039;ve always been politicians since they left their education. And in the old days of course politicians used to be fish mongers or doctors or whatever. They&amp;#039;d lived life. These days, power seems to go to the hands of people that that&amp;#039;s all they&amp;#039;ve done. And I&amp;#039;m not sure that&amp;#039;s a good thing, because it does remove them from the realities of life. We see that happening certainly with the Pope, and I think so much that Neil Jordan has put into the series \u2014 you can actually very clearly see modern equivalents, even though it&amp;#039;s sort of gorgeous and medieval and whatever. I don&amp;#039;t think we&amp;#039;ve changed very much. ESQ: No, I don&amp;#039;t think so either. Have you been following the papal election? JI: Gently, yes I have. I was most amused that the stove was put inside the Sistine Chapel, and the hole was made in the roof for the chimneys, and all of that. I never realized that. We missed that trick. ESQ: They won&amp;#039;t let you film in the Sistine Chapel? JI: The Sistine Chapel hadn&amp;#039;t been built by the time Alexander was Pope. It was della Rovere who built it when he became Pope. ESQ: Spoiler alert. He gets you in the end, I guess. JI: Historically, certainly.  ESQ: It&amp;#039;s hard with shows like this and Boardwalk Empire and even Deadwood not to research what actually happened and sort of ruin it for yourself. Do you watch television? I can&amp;#039;t really imagine it. JI: I&amp;#039;m not a great television watcher. I watched Parade&amp;#039;s End when I flew over here for five hours. Did you see Parade&amp;#039;s End? It was a series made for television that I think went out either on PBS or HBO [eds. note: It was HBO], written by Tom Stoppard. It&amp;#039;s a very, very interesting story set just before and during the First World War. I thought that was really splendid. ESQ: I&amp;#039;m a big fan of Benedict Cumberbtach. JI: So am I. I think he&amp;#039;s wonderful. I also thought the girls were wonderful, and I thought Rebecca Hall was absolutely splendid in a really difficult role. And the other girl, the blonde \u2014 ESQ: Adelaide Clemens. JI: She&amp;#039;s really interesting isn&amp;#039;t she?  ESQ: Yeah. She&amp;#039;s Australian, I think. JI: Is she? I had never seen her before. Round head like a football, but a fantastic quality. ESQ: As an actor, I feel like it must be hard to lose yourself in the performance and not be thinking about all of the things that go into it. Are you able to do that? JI: Absolutely. Absolutely. Remember that when we shoot, we have to forget all that stuff and put ourselves in an imaginary world and not see the cameras and not see the lights, not sort of be thrown by the artificiality of it all. That&amp;#039;s what we do. So I find it very easy to sit and watch a screen and get sucked into the world without sort of being objective about it, you know what I mean? I think that&amp;#039;s the only way to enjoy it. ESQ: There seems to be a wave of these Shakespearean actors doing these very sort of scheming, power-hungry, big roles, in House of Cards, Ciar\u00E1n Hinds on Game of Thrones, and obviously The Borgias. What is it about doing Shakespeare that prepares you for those kind of roles? JI: I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality \u2014 I mean we&amp;#039;re all very inconsistent in the way we behave. I think a lot of film writing can be very schematic, and one of the joys of doing a prolonged series like The Borgias is you&amp;#039;re able to embrace those inconsistencies and revel in them \u2014 like the fact that he could be called a murderer and a fornicator but he is also a man of God. And that&amp;#039;s not a medieval quality necessarily. Look at a man who I believe is deeply Christian, George W. Bush, and yet through his orders thousands of innocent civilians were killed in a far-off country. ESQ: It seems like in order to get away with things now you have to hide them really well, or at least be able to justify them and pretend to be perfect in public. Pope Alexander got away with so much that Pope Francis couldn&amp;#039;t manage, not least of which is openly having a family. JI: I think the world is much more transparent now, and I think that&amp;#039;s probably a good thing. On the other hand, I think it makes it really tough for people who are natural born leaders who could be guiding us and leading our countries. You look worldwide for the great leaders, and they&amp;#039;re pretty thin on the ground, and of course the problem is unless you&amp;#039;re squeaky, squeaky clean, something is going to come out of the cupboard. Most people aren&amp;#039;t squeaky clean. Most people have fallen by the wayside once or twice in their lives, and because the world is so transparent now, I think they&amp;#039;re very fearful of running for office. It&amp;#039;s a huge shame, because often people who have really lived and are amazing people can be brought down by a past indiscretion. ESQ: It seems like the last Pope might have been gay, and his assistant might have been his lover or his companion. Do you think the same sort of shenanigans are going on now that were going on when Pope Alexander was pope, or is that impossible in this climate? JI: Well, I don&amp;#039;t know. The Vatican is shrouded in secrecy, but it wouldn&amp;#039;t surprise me, let&amp;#039;s put it like that. It wouldn&amp;#039;t surprise me. ESQ: Pope Francis is really playing up the whole &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to sit in the big golden Pope chair, and I don&amp;#039;t want to wear the Pope hat or the Pope Prada loafers.&amp;quot; But it seems to me that it would be very difficult, much like it would be very difficult to become president, to become Pope if you didn&amp;#039;t want to become Pope. It seems like something you would have to work toward your entire life. JI: I don&amp;#039;t know. There&amp;#039;s a wonderful film, Habemus Papam with Michel Piccoli, about a man who gets elected Pope, and it&amp;#039;s the last thing he wants to be. I would have thought, knowing human nature, that Pope Francis probably takes it as a duty, something that has been put about him, something that he might have been happier not to have had to take on. I think he sees very clearly a lot of the problems in the Vatican, and his way of dealing with it is to try and show that the church is an organization for the people, that it&amp;#039;s not a vast bureaucracy completely out of touch. I think what he&amp;#039;s been doing might be to his personal taste anyway, the washing of the feet, the stripping away of all the non-essentials. I think that is possibly a sign for the rest of the church that that is what they need to do, and I do believe it&amp;#039;s what they need to do. ESQ: I&amp;#039;m 100-percent with you that he seems like a nice person, but I can&amp;#039;t imagine that the Catholic Church would elect somebody who would fundamentally change them. JI: Well, they&amp;#039;ve done it before. ESQ: Have they? With whom? JI: They did it with the Pope who only lasted for a few months. He died in mysterious circumstances, and he was a real man of the people. The conspiracy theorists would say that he was bumped off because he was doing too much to change things. ESQ: Okay, I&amp;#039;m looking at the list. The Pope before JPII was, yeah, only in office for 33 days. JI: That&amp;#039;s right. ESQ: I know that you aren&amp;#039;t a practicing Catholic, but has learning about all the papal history pushed you further from the church, or has being in the Pope&amp;#039;s skin made you empathize and feel closer to it? JI: I think my position has remained the same through it. My wife is Catholic, and my children are Catholic, and though they&amp;#039;re all pretty lapsed, I go to church with them. I happen to have a wonderful local Catholic priest in Ireland who is sort of the center of our community, and I admire him enormously. So for me the Catholic Church is our church down near Skibbereen in Kilcoe. I don&amp;#039;t judge it by what is done in history, what it&amp;#039;s doing now, the terrible rash of pedophilia which is coming out. I just judge it by this immensely humble man who cements our community in an extraordinary way, because that is what the church should do. I see the good that Father Kyle does in my community and I value that. ESQ: Do you think your Catholic past and your connection to your home church have influenced your charity work? JI: I don&amp;#039;t know. Maybe. All these things are sort of part of a person, aren&amp;#039;t they? What little charity work I do comes out of a feeling of &amp;quot;Wherefore by the grace of God go I,&amp;quot; which is why I tend to support prisoners. Because I think so many of us make mistakes and are actually good people but get on the wrong side of the system, and God help us then. ESQ: Let me preface this question by letting you know I&amp;#039;m not going to ask you to elaborate or defend what you said about gay marriage in the Huffington Post interview. To me it didn&amp;#039;t seem that you had an anti-gay marriage agenda or that it was coming from a bad place, but it was something you just thought of in the moment. When you&amp;#039;re a public figure, something like that immediately becomes part of who Jeremy Irons is, an entry on your Wikipedia page \u2014 does that bother you? JI: It does. I&amp;#039;ve always believed that the great strength of the Internet is that it allows us to communicate with each other, it allows debate. And I think that is a huge step forward. But debate is throwing ideas about, and when it becomes sort of a weapon of character assassination, I think that&amp;#039;s crazy. I think the situation in America is different from in England, where we have civil partnership, and now the vote on gay marriage has been carried, and whether it will go through Parliament I don&amp;#039;t know. All I was doing was, and it&amp;#039;s very difficult in short sound bites, was just sort of addressing marriage and what marriage sort of meant, and I&amp;#039;m very ill-informed on it. I think everybody should have the chance to be happy, and to feel secure within relationships, and perhaps gay marriage is the way that if you&amp;#039;re gay that can happen. But I don&amp;#039;t know. It&amp;#039;s a subject which divides people. It&amp;#039;s a subject we should talk about, and I&amp;#039;m probably too loose-mouthed for my own good. But I do believe that we should confront these questions and discuss them in a sort of adult and unhysterical way, with no bigotry attached. Which is what I tried to do.  ESQ: It is heartening that the public is so adamant in demanding equality for everyone, even though it comes at your expense. Your remarks came out in a way that people could really jump on. JI: I think I should perhaps be more politic. I&amp;#039;ve never been politic. I&amp;#039;ve always believed that we owe it to ourselves and to society to state our views, which are probably ill-informed, and unclearly thought out. But that&amp;#039;s the nature of it. I in no way denigrate any section of society at all, and perhaps gay marriage is the way it should go. But it affects the status I suppose of heterosexual marriage, or does it? I don&amp;#039;t know. I mean I&amp;#039;m exploring it, and the danger is when you explore that on a public stage you can be castigated. But I see politicians being so political when they&amp;#039;re talking about things, and I think, Why don&amp;#039;t you actually say what you feel? They don&amp;#039;t, and I think that puts a muzzle on real discussion, and that&amp;#039;s very dangerous. ESQ: Part of being a politician is offending the least amount of people you can. JI: But that&amp;#039;s not the way forward. ESQ: Well, luckily you don&amp;#039;t have to be elected to be an actor. JI: I know. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interviews/a21937/jeremy-irons-the-borgias/>