Jonathan Rhys Meyers was arrested yesterday afternoon at Dublin Airport after a drunkenly yelling at a female worker. She told him he couldn’t get on the flight as he was clearly too inebriated, which angered him and resulted in his shouting, “I will get on this flight no matter what” over and over again. Rhys Meyers has been to rehab twice in the last few years – this last time in April – which he left after only two weeks. Rehab is boring after all, I’m sure it’s fine to leave because you want your freedom and to be able to go out and have lunch with your friends. How could sobriety possibly compare to that?

Match Point actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers has been arrested after an alleged drunken row with airline staff. The Irish actor reportedly launched an angry tirade of abuse at one female worker when she told him he was “unfit to travel” at Ireland’s Dublin Airport at around 2.30pm on Sunday.

The 30-year-old star – who was trying to board a British Midland flight to London after appearing on Irish TV show Tubridy Tonight on Saturday – repeatedly told staff: “I will get on this flight no matter what.” One source said: “After being told he couldn’t fly he flew into a temper and started screaming at this woman. She seemed to be very upset by the whole ordeal.” Police arrested the star at the airport and took him to the nearby Whitehall Garda station where he was charged under the Public Order Act with being drunk and disorderly and a breach of the peace.

Speaking outside the station after being released on bail, a disheveled Rhys Meyers said: “I said the wrong thing to the wrong woman at the wrong time.”

[From News.com.au]

It occurs to me that the problem isn’t that he said those things to the wrong woman, the problem is that he said the wrong things at all. It’s not like there’s a right person Rhys Meyers could have screamed at. He’s one of those actors who’s very face has always annoyed me. He just has this “I think I’m the greatest thing ever” air about him, and it makes me want to smack the cockiness right off his face.

Rhys Meyers is on the cover of this month’s Details. There’s a very bizarre interview with him in which he mentions his alcoholism (and how he never touches the stuff anymore) along with screaming out “PUSSY! I want pussy!” through the streets of Dublin for no apparent reason, and then burning the fake hair off his jacket sleeves with a lighter in a café during the interview. His reasoning being that it’s something to do. Alright, totally normal.

Rhys Meyers himself no longer goes to those sorts of mobbed, cacophonous venues. A notorious partier, he’s recently sworn off alcohol. “I didn’t drink until I was 25, and I never drank every day, but when I did, it was bad. It would be a couple of days that just wouldn’t work out for me, waking up with a hangover. Drink doesn’t fit into the groove of where my life is going.”

Rhys Meyers, now 30, has been in rehab twice. “I want to do really good things with my life,” he says. “And drinking is not synonymous with that. The [Richard] Burton days, the [Peter] O’Toole days, they are gone.”

[From Details]

I guess not so much. Sometimes you can just tell when people are “functional” alcoholics who will probably remain that way for life because they don’t suffer any severe consequences for it (though everyone around them often does). Rhys Meyers strikes me as one of those guys.