"I like the monarchy," says Max Irons, an implausibly handsome composition of black cashmere, tousled hair, and cheekbones arranged regally on a banquette in the café of the downtown New York hotel where he's staying. And why not? The 27-year-old sometime Burberry model and onetime paramour of fashionable young actress Emily Browning is legitimate British film royalty—the son of actors Sinéad Cusack and Jeremy Irons. Still, there are limits to his aristocratic affections. "I like the queen; I like the princes," he says, noting that they're good for public morale. "But the rest of them? The Duke of Cornwall or Norfolk, you know, who doesn't work, maybe does a very little bit of charity but has a vast inherited fortune and land that was all accumulated because of the feudal system?" he says, smiling crookedly. "Get rid of them!"
Irons had ample occasion to consider the British monarchy at its noblest and its most venal during the 120 days he spent playing King Edward IV in The White Queen, a BBC co-production premiering August 10 on Starz. "It's a bit Downton Abbey–meets–Game of Thrones," he says. Indeed, the show is jam-packed with battles, betrayals, scheming dukes, and pay-cable nudity. "The Starz cut contains breasts and buttocks," he says, without blushing. "The BBC cut doesn't."
Based on Philippa Gregory's best-selling novels, the show catches the British throne in a time of chaos. It unspools at the outset of the Wars of the Roses, in 1464, when the Lancaster and York families were plunged into a royal blood feud after Edward IV broke with tradition and married for love, making commoner Elizabeth Woodville, played by Swedish actress Rebecca Ferguson, his White Queen. The show focuses heavily on the women orbiting the royal court, while Irons plays the sun of their universe: a king who is as legendary in the boudoir as he is on the battlefield. To play a man fully aware of his divine (and profane) power, Irons says he attempted at first to wear a historically appropriate, leonine wig—only "I looked like Legolas from The Lord of the Rings, so we lost it on the first day."
Instead he kept his anachronistic but dapper cropped hair and looked to modern men who carry their power with kingly swagger, including, he says, Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Prince William, and, somewhat incongruously, Harvey Weinstein. "I was at an event with him recently, and the room seemed to orbit around him," Irons says. "I once met Jay-Z, and it felt the same way."
Irons, who lives in London, is blessed with a similar natural charm and ease. He grew up in boarding schools and graduated from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 2008, where he honed his talent onstage while practicing mnemonic techniques to cope with his dyslexia. But with those looks and that lineage, Irons was never going to be a character actor, no matter how often he professes his love for Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. He readily admits that the Irons name got him a few callbacks—and that it's partly how he shot straight into the romantic leads of two Twilight-clone teen flicks, 2011's Red Riding Hood and 2013's The Host. Neither film did particularly well, though. "Up to this point I've been involved in young adult fiction," he says, shrugging. "It gets your foot in the door, I suppose."
In today's Hollywood, young leading men blaze and burn out like lightbulbs, but Irons has taken his knocks and adjusted his course. "My dad said once, 'Max hasn't really had an opportunity to fail privately,'" he says. "My dad worked on small stages, instead of finding himself on the big screen, where if you fail, you've failed very, very publicly." Irons says he recently turned down the lead in "a particularly large franchise" as "another male with romantic leanings and a six-pack."
As The White Queen hits cable, Irons will be filming his first dramatic indie: Posh, based on Laura Wade's play about Oxford University's Bullingdon Club, the English equivalent of Yale's Skull & Bones. Alumni include "our prime minister, our chancellor, the mayor of London," says Irons, who hopes it will expose the group's "elitism, misogyny, sexism, destruction."
Posh's exposé of privilege is Irons's next step toward making the most of his own. The bottom line, he says, is this: "You don't want to earn your millions and then be nowhere in six years. I want to be working in 60 years."
Logan Hill, a veteran of New York, Vulture, and GQ, has spent twenty years covering the arts for outlets including Elle, Esquire, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, This American Life, TimesTalks, Wired, and others. For more, visit loganhill.com.
