Jonathan Rhys Myers is very down on the Irish media for reporting his recent woes. After months of trying to speak to him, he finally shows up, early, for an interview with HQ. He is a bit moody and guarded at first.

Dressed in a mustard-coloured leather jacket over a white shirt, he looks tanned and fit and tells me he has spent the past week on various California golf courses with his three brothers, two of whom are visiting him from Europe. He is still in a hiatus before beginning filming the final season of The Tudors at Ardmore, with time to brood over the past two years which have seen more in the media about his erratic behaviour and concerns for his well-being than his many professional accomplishments.

Earlier this year, he failed to show up to collect two different awards for his work -- at the IFTA event in Dublin in February and at the Oscar Wilde event in Los Angeles.

"I just felt I needed time off and I didn't need to go to awards ceremonies," he says, not altogether convincingly, sipping a large glass of orange juice in the garden of the Fours Seasons in Beverly Hills. "You can get slightly waylaid as an actor doing that sort of thing and I'm never that comfortable at them anyway. But you know what Irish newspapers are like, there are always going to be more aspects on your personal life than your professional life, because you're an Irish person so they tend to make up or embellish whichever story, trying to sell newspapers."

He won't give me an example, so I invite him to talk about the photos of him falling down drunk on the street in LA that appeared on the night of the Golden Globes in January.

"Someone said there were photos of me alright, so I went and looked on the internet and that photo was from six or seven months previously. If I'm not at something, they'll just print an old photo of me. I go out for a night once a year or something like that and it just ends up in the newspaper because you're a celebrity. It's very hard for the media with actors like me, because I don't date other actresses and I don't hang out with movie stars.

"It's very hard to find stories about me, because I live an incredibly low-key life. People would like to think I'm a hell of a lot naughtier than I am. I am actually quite a boring guy. I spent the last week and a half playing bloody golf. Me, Jonathan Rhys Myers! If anyone saw me in those stupid golf clothes on the golf course, there would have been a different story written!"

Actors are always being asked how like the character they are playing they are in their own lives. Henry VIII in The Tudors is not the first time Rhys Myers has played a king -- he also played a very charming very young Elvis in a CBS series four years ago, for which he was nominated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe.

"All actors are frustrated rock stars," he laughs and reminds me that his three brothers are all musicians who play in a band called Suzy's Field.

"Elvis was not a great businessman but he was a great artist and he needed somebody like Colonel Parker to get him there. I don't think Elvis would have existed without Colonel Parker, he wouldn't have been anywhere near as famous. So you take the good with the bad.

"Henry VIII had the same, first of all with Wolsey and then, after Cromwell, he learned his lesson and he decided to become the manipulator instead. I don't know why people blame a certain politician for what's wrong. You have to look at the advisers. You have to rely on the people that are counselling you very, very much, but that's the same in the whole business."

And who counsels him? He won't name any names, except to say he just spent a few months in Middlesex staying with a counsellor, but denies vehemently that he was in rehab.

"No, no, no. I was never in rehab. I spent that time in the English countryside with a good friend of mine who is a counsellor, but I wasn't in rehab," he tsk-tsks crossly.

In spite of his private ups and downs in the past two years, including the break-up of a long engagement to Reena Hammer, and the sudden death of his mother, Geraldine, Rhys Myers' output has been prodigious and he has continued to make his mark, working consistently with the A-list, such as Woody Allen, Tom Cruise and Jessica Lange.

He is animated when it comes to talking about work, but becomes visibly guarded when the interview veers towards anything personal, crossing his arms across his chest and tilting his body away from me.

"People say that the film industry is a very competitive industry, but I don't see my enemy," he laughs. "It's not like a tennis match and I've got a guy on the other side of the court. You've just got to be the best actor that you can possibly be. I'm 31 now and I believe everything I've done has been an apprenticeship so far.

"It's like the first phase, when I was allowed to play roles that were extraordinary, play roles that were risqué, and make mistakes, have successes, have failures, all of these by the time I was 31. Thirty-six films and three TV series -- that's the apprenticeship. What I do from 31 to 50 is probably my career, so I haven't even started yet." HQ

- Patricia Danaher