Max Irons has longevity on the brain. The 29-year-old is wary of Hollywood’s current template for young actors — wherein a role in a major franchise is designed to generate instant stardom — after witnessing the fate of many of his peers. “Where are they now?” he pointedly asks, singling out Robert Pattinson as a rare exception. Instead, this eloquent, humble prince of the movie biz, who hasn’t an ounce of the entitlement you might expect from the son of Jeremy Irons, has a different model in mind: one followed by men like Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert De Niro, who both experimented as they tiptoed toward the A-list.

“Philip Seymour Hoffman was always a genius, but no one gave a shit about him in the beginning,” Irons says. “He laid a foundation of work that went up and up until he could get a movie made. De Niro won’t even have his first two films on his résumé, because he’s ashamed of them. I understand that kind of trajectory, and it takes time. And learning.”

A sci-fi buff enamored of the book and film versions of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Irons had a natural attraction to his role in 2013’s The Host (the Stephenie Meyer adaptation that wasn’t a franchise), yet he seems aware of the generally poor reception of that film and 2011’s Red Riding Hood, in which he also starred. And he’s OK with it. Risks also generate rewards — films such as March’s The Riot Club, in which he plays a reluctant member of a group modeled on Oxford University’s elitist, infamous Bullingdon Club; and April’s Woman in Gold, a drama centered around Gustav Klimt art that casts him as a Jew escaping Nazi-occupied Austria.

“A lot of young actors don’t really care about history or other 
actors’ histories,” says Woman in Gold director Simon Curtis, who also worked with Eddie Redmayne on My Week With Marilyn. “I found Max to be incredibly intuitive about all that. Both he and Eddie are very emotionally intelligent. Eddie is going all the way, and I think Max will, too — for that same reason.”

Born and raised in London’s Hampstead, Irons is also ardently curious about the histories and trajectories of Britain’s political elite, many of whom — the current prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer included — are Bullingdon Club alums, and who may or may not have been involved in, as Irons describes it, “restaurants being trashed left and right, 50-pound notes being burned in front of homeless people, and Aston Martins being destroyed for the sake of it.”
“I don’t know what these men got up to personally, but if they even associated themselves with these values, I want to know about that,” he says. “I think if The Riot Club does anything, it’ll make people google the Bullingdon Club and ask questions like, ‘Do these men truly, honestly represent the values of the people?’ I’m not so sure. Our film has made certain people angry, and it’s also generated applause. And I think that’s exactly what we wanted and expected.”
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