There’s no way to put this without sounding creepy: But we’ve been eyeing Max Irons, 29, playing peekaboo with the son of Academy Award-winning actor Jeremy Irons and actress Sinéad Cusack over the years; catching him smiling shyly above the collar of a Burberry trench. It was hard to ignore the handsome son one of the few actors who can turn a New York Magazine profile into a Fifty Shades compendium in a single look. “At 62, he still possesses a liquid-eyed hotness,” wrote Jada Yuan in 2011, with what one imagines as a serious flush in her cheeks. “Jeremy Irons is just so Jeremy Irons—that is to say, the man of flesh is very much the man of your fantasies.”

That’s a hard standard to live up to, but the younger Mr. Irons is no slouch. Despite not speaking a word of German, he’ll be playing Austrian Holocaust survivor Fredrick “Fritz” Altmann in The Woman in Gold (starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds and currently in theaters), before co-starring in The Riot Club, a hotly anticipated thriller about a fictional, hedonistic Oxford club. (This besides his turn on Starz’ White Queen last year.) We sat down at The Smith—the Lower East Side one—because, though Mr. Irons has lived here for several years now, he still couldn’t remember the name of his first choice, a West Side diner that was kitschy cool.

We didn’t mind. With a wide fedora and long winter coat, before asking if we could do something “cheeky” and smoke a cigarette, he was most certainly his father’s son.

What were your early memories of New York?

It was all about FAO Schwartz. It was like every year, I’d need to go. We lived on the wrong side of the Hudson. (Shakes head, in gloomy voice:)

“The wrong side of the Hudson….”

Well we were there for about nine months when I was really young, and I’ve been coming to New York City as long as I can remember. I Iived uptown, then downtown, then in the West Village. Now I’ve been in Union Square for just about two years.

Above a Whole Foods?

Actually, above a nightclub. The kind where they serve Jägerbombs.

The best of American customs.

You hear fights all night long. Last week, a guy in a suit comes in and fights with the bouncer—“I work for Morgan Stanley! I make more in a week than you do in a…”

Well, the bouncer just picked him up and threw him in a big pile of trash.

Unfortunately, I think it’s being made clear that for professional reasons, I need to move back to London. Which is upsetting, because every time I cross the bridge here, I’m filled with joy. But it turns out there are much, much fewer opportunities to be an actor [in theater] here than back in London.

What are you most excited about right now?

Professionally: The Riot Club. It’s based on this real club, The Billingtons Club. It’s based on this real club, The Billingtons Club. It’s basically a club that stands for hedonism, elitism, success, wealth, sexism, chauvinism, and the occasional homophobia and racism. It wasn’t really nice things to be associated with. And it was attended by three of the most powerful people in British politics. There was this misunderstanding in Britain that the Upper Classes were all sort of fluffy and harmless. And that’s dangerous. These guys aren’t Downton Abbey. These guys were Masters of the Universes. The people who held the keys, who were handed all this wealth because of feudalism and basically organized slavery.
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Trigger warning: The Riot Club might make you want to scream and rip your hair out. In a good way. The new movie, directed by Lone Scherfig and based on Laura Wade’s play Posh, stars Max Irons, Douglas Booth and Sam Claflin, among others, as Oxford students who belong to the film’s eponymous social club, said to be based on the university’s real-life Bullingdon Club. It’s a study of privilege, ego and what happens when spoiled brats with too much money and too little compassion decide, in the name of tradition, that they’re entitled to have some fun (which, in this case, means wreaking havoc on a country pub, vandalizing the establishment and terrorizing the owner, among other offenses). In its excess and cringe-inducing scenes of violence and vulgarity, the movie offers a sharp critique of the entrenched systems and classism in some of the world’s most esteemed institutions. While it’s set in the UK, there’s obviously much that’s applicable in the States and elsewhere.

As new member Miles Richards, Irons (son of renowned actor Jeremy Irons) plays the one character with any sort of conscience — even though it doesn’t always override his desire to be accepted into the group. His evident unease with his fellow club members’ antics mirrors the discomfort the audience feels and, while he’s not exactly blameless, he’s the one guy you’re left rooting for. We had the chance to speak with Irons, who’s also appearing in Woman In Gold, and hear his thoughts on shooting some of the film’s most difficult scenes and how the movie opens our eyes to the messed up justice systems in the West.

After I finished watching The Riot Club, the only thing I could think of was “whoa…”

That’s why I’m attracted to it. The first time I actually read the script I didn’t want to do it, I thought it’s too unpleasant and it gets your blood boiling too much. But then, I sort of realized the importance of it, and the idea of a double standard in justice that’s sort of inherent both here in America and England. And to think that the club that we were heavily influenced by was attended by three of the most powerful political figures in English politics. [Ed. note: That’d be Prime Minister David Cameron, London Mayor Boris Johnson and Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne.]

That’s crazy.

I mean, it’s nuts, isn’t it?

How familiar were you with the Bullingdon Club before getting the script?

Well a lot of people knew about the Bullingdon Club, but members are quite secretive about what they got up to, so when people who were in it are asked about it they tend to just say “oh it was a time in my life, I was very young”, and that’s all you get. There was this famous photograph of George Osborne, Boris Johnson, and David Cameron all on the steps, dressed up in their Bullingdon Club outfits but that’s all we sort of knew. But we managed to do some research, interview some people, and we were shocked to find out that our film wasn’t exaggerating at all! It’s frightening to think that the people who set our moral standards in our country associated themselves with those values.

Did you know or had you worked with any of your fellow castmates before?

I knew quite a few of them like Sam Claflin, Doug Booth and Freddie Fox. The English acting community today [is small] and, remember, we’re all male and of a similar age so we’re all competing for the same parts. You’re aware of each other. But they’re a lovely group. I was always nervous about the potential for competition or showboating or ‘alpha males’ but there was none of that. We all knew the film we were trying to make and the importance of working together to achieve it. So, yeah, it was a really, really nice experience.
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Born to famous parents, Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack, blessed with model good looks, and educated in the finest schools, it would have been very easy for Max Irons to turn out to be just another entitled rich kid. Instead, he’s been forging a quiet but effective career in a variety of movies, as Amanda Seyfried’s suitor in Red Riding Hood, and yang to Saoirse Ronan’s yin in The Host.

Based on the hit play, Posh, Irons’ latest film The Riot Club provides him with his first leading role as a freshman at a prestigious Cambridge University. There, he becomes the envy of his friends when he is selected to join an elite group known as The Riot Club composed of members of Britain’s most powerful families. What appears to be an honor turns into a nightmare as he learns the savage nature of privilege.

This is your first real lead role in a movie that really defies expectations.
On first reading I really didn’t like it because I was worried that it glamorized these people unintentionally. I worried that it made that world look too fun and inconsequential. Also instinctively I found the very characters and their nature so repulsive that I didn’t want to be around those ideas. But then I read it again and I realized that it wasn’t in fact glamorizing, that these characters had purpose and were written in detail, and it was making a point which you rarely see made in a movie about the fate of the upper classes, that they’re not these soft woolly largely harmless people. They’re actually the gatekeepers, people that control the upper echelons of government and big corporations.

But you’re well aware of the double standard between classes when it comes to social standards.
The film shows that they’re two types of justice, which I do believe does apply both in America and in England. If you’re wealthy, privileged, highly educated, you tend not to wait often, get a different understanding and a different treatment by the judicial system than lower class backgrounds.

You see it in England too?
We famously had the riots in London when young kids with call for complaint, from difficult backgrounds, few resources at hand when they’re growing up, express their dissatisfaction with the situation and they were very quickly and mercilessly branded thugs and hooligans by our politicians, the people who should be representing these people.
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