Jonathan Rhys Myers is a kook. And he's proud of it. Having made eleven movies over the last two years since his debut as the "assassin" in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins, Myers seems oblivious to his growing fame. Today, all Jonathan Rhys Myers seems interested in is the here and now. And the here is the Edinburgh Arts Festival and the now is the morning after the opening night. With his latest movie, Velvet Goldmine, having received its UK premiere last night, Myers got a free lesson in humility at the after-screening party.

"I had this one guy come up and tell me how great he thought the movie was, and how he was going to tell all his friends about it. I was pretty flattered by all this until he said, 'So what do you do then? Are you in PR or something?'. That brought my ego crashing back down pretty quick."

Having already appeared on our screens over the last year or so in (deep breath) Suzi Krishnamma's A Man Of No Importance, Sue Clayton's The Disappearance of Finbar, Stephen Poliakoff's The Tribe, Tim Hunter's The Maker and Albert Sciamma's Killer Tongue, Myers has also completed work on (even deeper breath) Mike Figgis' The Loss of Sexual Innocence, Sandra Goldbacher's The Governess, Michael Radford's B Monkey, Nic Roeg's Samson And Delilah and, most recently, Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil. Right now though, there's Todd Haynes' thinly-veiled Bowie biopic Velvet Goldmine, with Myers playing the lead role of glam tart no.1, Brian Slade, with Ewan MacGregor as the Iggyesque Curt Wild.

"Originally I was going to play Bowie," offers the Cork-born Myers, "but then we were refused the rights to his music, so Todd quickly rewrote the whole thing as fiction. A lot of the same core structure remains, with the ideas Todd had about that era and what it meant to those who grew up in it. So, of course, there are still some strong similarities between my character and that of Bowie, but, if anything, the freedom coming with not playing Bowie was enormously liberating."

Having just turned 21, Myers readily admits to having had little knowledge of the Bowie that strutted his then considerable stuff through the '70s, and for the purposes of this film, he states, he deliberately avoided delving into the man and his music until filming was over.

"I just didn't want to be influenced too much by him. Brian Slade is a fictional character, and I felt it was important that I took that journey from curious teenager to alien rock god with as much surprise and curiousity as Slade would have. The music I listened to therefore was the '50s and '60s r'n'b that Bowie would have been devouring. Afterwards, I got into '70s era Bowie, and it just blew me away."

Having spoken to Myers a little over a year ago, I decide to throw a few of his old quotes back at him to see if he still feels the same way. On acting, you said 'I haven't got a fucking clue what I'm doing; I just do what I feel'.

"And I still feel the same way. I haven't got to a stage yet where I can simply turn it on and off; I have to be constantly in character. I've never done much stage, but in stage you can be so unlike yourself. It's very loud, very expressive, whereas film is about suppressing that, to do as little as possible. And I still feel that I don't have much of a clue about what I'm doing until I'm doing it. And it's like, I'm asleep most of the time. And then, when you go on set, the costumes and the set immediately put you in that era. So all you have to do is be honest with yourself, even if it's not the emotion that that character is supposed to be feeling at that time. The audience can tell when you're being honest."

You also said at the time that you don't 'research for hours and hours for a part', you just go into it and do it. Has that changed?

"I don't prepare, because for me it has to be spontaneous, erratic. Because I'm a very erratic person. It has to be there and gone. If I rehearse something three times, I'm bored."

Do you still feel that 'movies are a stepping stone for me, because movies aren't my life'?

"Yeah, because I'm not trying to take things too seriously. If I don't make another film, it wouldn't bother me. Looking back on something you made a year ago is pretty strange anyway; it's almost as though you don't recognise yourself, it's so removed. So when people come up and say, 'great work', it doesn't really register. I think I'll have to wait until I'm old and incredibly vain before I start looking at what I've done."