Helen Barlow
December 8, 2006

Like most actors with an artistic bent, Jeremy Irons occasionally needs to make money-spinners. But for every Die Hard: With a Vengeance and Kingdom of Heaven, there are flops such as The Time Machine and Dungeons & Dragons.

Thankfully, his latest big-budget fantasy adventure, Eragon, looks a cut above those latter films.

He arrives late to our meeting at the Venice Film Festival, having been at a party for David Lynch's Inland Empire, in which he plays film director Kingsley. Sitting behind dark glasses to maybe conceal a hangover, he takes out a nifty role-your-own machine and starts to make a cigarette.

The English actor with the rich, clipped voice is keenly aware of the minuteness of his part in Lynch's long and incomprehensible film, but he knows that Eragon is a different story.

"Eragon reaches an audience that I haven't reached in a while. I'm playing a fairly conventional character," he says, "what I call the Alec Guinness character in Star Wars, the man who's been there, done that, seen it all and who's teaching the young man. Brom [Irons's character] appealed to me because he has a wryness and fierceness but at the same time he's a good man."

A kind of cross between The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and the CGI creatures in Jurassic Park, Eragon is based on the first book in a trilogy by 23-year-old Christopher Paolini, whose imagination was sparked by growing up amid the spectacular vistas of Paradise Valley beneath Montana's Beartooth Mountains.

Eragon, set in a world where flying dragons once brought peace and harmony by bestowing their riders with special powers, bristles with special effects from George Lucas's company Industrial Light & Magic and New Zealand's Weta Digital, which worked on The Lord of The Rings.

The serenity of this fantasy world has been disrupted by the mean and nasty King Galbatorix. Our young hero, dragon rider Eragon (played by 18-year-old British newcomer Ed Speleers), aided by his trusty dragon Saphira (voiced by Rachel Weisz), must try to restore the old order.

Brom, one of the old dragon riders, has been a broken man since the death of his dragon and is resigned to the rule of the evil king (John Malkovich). Brom has become a storyteller, which allows Irons's well-honed tones to come to the fore, and he finds new hope in helping our young hero.

"Jeremy was nurturing me out of the kindness of his heart," Speleers says, "but at the same time so much of Brom was in Jeremy."

Irons, 58, admits to being perennially young at heart. "I maybe look a bit younger than I am, although I am a lot younger than I look in my head."

He seems to get along with everyone - including Casanova co-star Heath Ledger, whom he calls "a sharp young man".

But he has had practice with his sons - Sam, 28, and Max, 21 - who have both appeared with him in movies - Sam in Danny the Champion of the World and Max in Being Julia.

Irons rose to fame in cinema classics such as The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Mission. He won an Oscar for his portrayal of Claus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune, although many believed it was awarded because he missed out the previous year for his eerie incarnation of twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg's masterful Dead Ringers.

Working with that other cinema iconoclast, Lynch, was something similar. Irons equates making Inland Empire to "being in a kind of Hieronymus Bosch painting".

Are Cronenberg and Lynch alike? "Maybe their hair is quite similar," he says, blowing out some smoke.

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