Rhys Ifans has blamed a bad reaction to antibiotics for storming out of a interview which was meant to promote his new television drama.
The Welsh actor, 45, slurred his words, declared that he was “bored” and cut short his meeting with journalist Janice Turner of The Times, telling her to “f*** off”.
An “ashen” publicist later insisted the tirade was due to medication and that he had lost his temper because of bad news he had received weeks earlier. Although Ifans had “really enjoyed” the conversation, one of the questions had upset him, she said.
The interview about Gifted at a Charlotte Street hotel in London had been arranged under strict instructions not to mention his ex-girlfriend, Sienna Miller, who dumped him in 2008, reports of him slapping a guest at a pre-Bafta party last year, or his girlfriend Anna Friel’s declaration that she is thinking of freezing her eggs until the Notting Hill star is ready for fatherhood. Ms Turner described it as a “horrible, almost menacing encounter”, and despite her best efforts to charm and flatter the “hell-raiser”, Ifans treated each of her friendly questions with “disdain”, “disgust” and finally “mad-eyed vibrating hostility”.
The journalist, who from previous interviews believed Ifans to be “a thoughtful man of the boozing, carousing actor school of Richard Burton or Peter O’Toole” had decided to dispense with the usual PR game and rather than just let him plug the show, ask him about important issues of the day such as Welsh independence and press regulation. But the approach backfired. “He wants to make it absolutely clear to me that I am his intellectual inferior,” she wrote. “When I try to clarify, he just talks over me until I am silent.” In one rant he claimed that prosecutions such as those in Rochdale and Oxford against Asian sex rings were racist, saying: “Look, they shouldn’t focus on them, when you’ve got Jimmy f****** Savile.”
In another, after being asked about domesticity with Friel, he retorted: “What do you want to know? Do I worm the cat?” I worm the cat and I f****** wash up and I mow the lawn... No, I worm the lawn and I mow the cat.” Even asking about his success was met with: “I don’t give a shit.” A question about his views on the Government — “I dunno, there’s two, isn’t there?” — proved to be the final straw: “I wanna end this interview now. I’m bored with you. Bored. Bored.” Ifans was unavailable for comment.
