‘Endgame’ star Jonny Lee Miller still no extrovert

BY LUAINE LEE Comments 0
Published: October 24, 2009

PASADENA, Calif. — Though he comes from a long line of actors, Jonny Lee Miller was never an extrovert. But the star of movies "Trainspotting” and "Afterglow” and television’s "Eli Stone” and "Endgame,” 8 p.m. Sunday on OETA-13, says a buddy helped him overcome his shyness.

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The British Miller met that friend, actor Jude Law, when he was 15.

"We’ve been best friends for nearly 25 years. And he had a great impact on my life. We shared two different flats together when we were younger. When he was younger, he was a very gregarious and outgoing individual, and I was quite shy. And he helped me overcome that,” he says.

You don’t have to be outgoing to be an actor, Miller says. "I think you have to have the ability to extrovert, but you don’t have to be an extrovert. I’m not great … in large groups of people, but I’m not shy anymore.”

Though his performance as film buff Sick Boy in "Trainspotting” won favor with audiences, Miller didn’t bounce back from what followed. "I made some really bad decisions, and I turned a lot of work down and kind of got lost in life,” he says.

During this time, he married and divorced Angelina Jolie. "I did have some interesting experiences work-wise, but nobody saw them. I had an amazing time and went to some great places doing these jobs and worked with some great actors, but I wasn’t really focused.”

One of those "great places” was India, where Miller traveled the perimeter of the subcontinent with 15 strangers on a camping expedition for three months.

"When you’re self-sufficient, you buy your food in markets, decide what routes to take, what you want to do, sometimes you stop in a city, and you disappear because you’re sick of the people you’re traveling with. And you disappear for four days. We never stayed in hotels, and you see much more of the country that way. And I came back a completely different person.”

Miller’s role in "Endgame,” as the bookish businessman who helps orchestrate secret negotiations between warring factions in racial-torn South Africa, is quite different from the heroin-addled Sick Boy or the accomplished Mr. Knightley from "Emma.” But that’s the nature of his work, and he comes by it honestly. His great-grandfather performed in British music hall theater, his grandfather was actor Bernard Lee (M in early "Bond” movies), and his father, Alan Miller, was a respected stage manager at the BBC and in theater.