Michael Talks Bond, Minka, Gina, Mel, Music, & Tattoo Removal with Esquire

2012 ::: The Year Hollywood's Darkest Soul Finally Found The Light 

It's a warm but windy day in London. Cast and crew scurry about trying to set up for the last shot of the day. The film is Moneyball, the 22nd James Bond film. The $250 million budgeted action picture has been shooting for almost 2 months now and soon production will head overseas to India, China, and Turkey, amongst other locales. The center of the storm is American born (but with English routes, on mom's side) Oscar nominated actor Michael Reese Meyers. He is having a bite to eat at an outdoor restaurant and he does not have high hopes they will get the day's shoot complete. "Look at the sun" he says as he points to the horizon. "By the time we get this all sorted out it's going to be too dark" he explains. "We're going to have to come back (to set) tomorrow". I ask if he is upset and he admits "Two or three years ago I would have. I HATED when things go wrong on set or take too long. Hell, I used to be the same way in my personal life. But I'm not like that anymore. I just smile through it and look on the bright side. No worries."

 Michael Reese Meyers is not an actor who has ever had much reason to lack worries or speak much of a "bright side" in recent memory. The troubled actor (whose battled substance abuse, been to rehab for both pill and sex addiction, arrested multiple times for assault and public intoxication, and famous for his manic dating and issues with women) feels his dark past was the result of a rich kid from a dysfunctional Beverly Hills home being thrust into the world's most phony industry naively hoping it would provide him with the one thing he felt he always lacked: Love. "I got into acting for all the wrong reasons" he confesses. "I wasn't some artistic brat looking to explore my inner demons, at least not intentionally. I was trying to get laid. I wanted to kiss a girl. See what a love scene was like. I wanted to travel and get the hell out of my house where my parents bickered like children about the silliest things day after day. Constantly fearing 'is this the night I have to break them up again and keep it from being violent?'. I can't tell you how many times I've had to separate them. It wasn't healthy." He adds school was not an escape either. "High school was even worse. Kids bullying me and girls I liked rejecting me. It was awful. We had money but I wasn't enjoying any of it. I just wanted to escape to a fantasy land where I could become someone else. Someone cool. Acting provided that for me. I wanted to meet actresses and hoped they'd fall for me and I could be happy. But it didn't work that way. Actresses kiss you on set then go back to their boyfriends in real life. That was a hard pill to swallow. So I became bitter. I ran to acting to get me out of the hell that was my home and school life, which it did, but I also wanted acting to help me find love, and other than Kristen (Bell), it failed at that. I failed."

 Meyers knows of his reputation for sometimes taking things too far with his co-stars and he feels although he is guilty of some of what is said, much of it is exaggerated. "I know I have a battle to fight when I walk on set with my female cast mates. I have to prove I'm not some creep trying to get in their pants and it really creates an unnecessary air of tension on the set that can be toxic" he says. "I had to deal with it with Natalie Portman on Brotherly Love, with Ellen Page on Tears of the Sun, with another actress in Trust Me who had a tiny speaking role. You say 'Good Morning' and they assume you want to rip their panties off. You want to pigeon hole them an arrogant bitch who is wrong to assume every guy who speaks to her wants to get her in bed but you have to remind yourself, she probably heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone else, 'don't get too close to him. He'll try and fuck you. If you let him he will brag to the press and ruin your reputation. If you don't hook up he will make your life on set a living hell and then go and lie to the press and say you hooked up anyway just to piss you off'. I'm serious. I heard this from someone's mouth. It's crazy the rumors that go around town about you. It's why the actresses I just mentioned didn't say a word to me that wasn't scripted. They wanted nothing to do with me on set".

The tension is something he wanted to avoid on Ridley Scott's upcoming Alien: Genesis film, in which Meyers co-stars with Anya Camilla Bella and Charlize Theron. "I kept my distance" he says. "Anya knows me. We worked on a film together 7 years ago. But even then, if we didn't have a scene or need to talk, I stayed away. Same thing with Charlize. I don't think I said more than 10 words to her in those 4 months. She probably thinks I'm some ass but I don't care. I know myself. Still recovering sex addict. Still get too attached to people. One of two things can happen when I spend too much time getting to know someone as drop dead stunning and intelligent and charming and talented as Miss Theron, and neither one of them is good. I didn't want to even go there. I've been to too many dark places and I ain't going back. It's like putting an alcoholic in a liquor store. I mean come on." Meyers admits his behavior on the set of the MTV2 series The Best Tears (along with his now legendary verbally and physically abusive relationship with Mel Morley on that series) is partially to blame."I have no one to blame but myself. Between how I treated the girls on that (Best Tears) set, which was 100% true and all my fault, to the crazy ass rumors that have spread about me stalking cast mates who don't reciprocate interest, which are 100% bullshit, it's a wonder female cast mates are nice to me at all. No matter what you've heard, it's either true or so creepy anyone would fear there's some truth to it. Either way I can't win."

Michael is missing something very noticeably on his body. His neck precisely. In the second week of March he quietly began having treatments done to remove the Mel tattoo on his neck. The procedure was painful and completed sometime around late April. He does not feel it was a mistake, but he understands why he needed to get rid of it. "I don't really regret it persay. I really don't. It's not like how when most people get tattoos of someone in which they are still together and the tattoo is supposed to symbolize them being together forever. I got it a year after we broke up and it was supposed to be a symbol of me saying 'you may be gone and I may not be able to get you back but I will always have you on me and as a part me and it was a sense of pride. Like yea, this amazing thing was mine once and we had our moment in time, those memories, and no one can take it away from me. Ever'." What Meyers didn't anticipate was the reaction of other women he hoped to move on with. "I foolishly never thought about how it would make other girls feel. To have someone else's name on my body, and such a prominent visible place like the neck. They don't want to see that. It is a reminder to me of something special I had once but to them they took it as a reminder of something they may never measure up to. I never wanted to make them feel that way." Meyers knew the only way he could convince another woman, the media, and maybe even himself, that he was once and for all over her, was to remove it. "I didn't get rid of it because this is me saying 'okay I'm over her now'. I've been over her for a while. I got rid of it because of how it made other girls feel."

In Meyers' mind being 'over' someone means "if they walked in the room right now and said 'let's be together', would you say no?' Meyers feels if that moment happened...today...he would tell Morley to take a hike. I ask 'so you're saying you don't love her anymore, at all?" and he confidently says "Correct". I remind him of an old 2007 interview quote where he said "I don't believe you ever truly stop loving someone, you just learn to live without them". He replies: "That's crazy to me. Because I can clearly, as if it was yesterday, remember a time where the thought of not hearing her voice and seeing her everyday made me unable to breathe or sleep. Made me cry nonstop for hours, everyday, uncontrollably. A time where all she had to do was walk in the room and tingles would shoot through my body and my heart would race. No one else had ever done that for me. No girl I've EVER met or been with. And I was hooked because I thought that rush, that chemical reaction she gave me was what love was. But I was wrong. It was obsession and that is very different than love. I know now I didn't love her. I loved the IDEA of her. The idea of having someone young and impressionable to control and who would need me and love me." Meyers admits love is unselfish and uncontrolling, but he was very selfish and very controlling when it came to Morley. "I saw someone very young who was in a new country and felt she would not leave me. (I felt) She needs me. But I was wrong. I was the one who needed her. She smelled it a mile away. All women can smell needy. And it's a turn off."

Not to call him a liar, but when you listen to his new Chants of Reign album titled "The Epic Mysterious Journey From Melancholy to Eutopia" (he played snippets of each song from his MacBook for us) which hits stores September 25, Meyers does not sound like someone who is over Morley, at all. While he hints that more than a few songs were actually written with MMA fighter and actress Gina Rage (whom he dated briefly at the start of the year) as the inspiration, it is clear on such tracks as "Tattoo", "Women Are A Hurricane", "Somebody That I Used to Love", "Why'd You Go?", "Lying In The Sun" and the first single "Lightning" that a certain young British female is the cause of much of his pain. "Lightning", which recently debuted on radio and has a music video he also directed which will premiere within a week or two (and features Meyers' tattoo-less neck on celluloid for the first time since 2008), is all about that "epiphany-like lightning bolt moment" he says where you realize it is time to move on from someone in your past. He has hyped this second album, which is the band's sophomore LP and a follow up to their very dark and depressing 2009 debut album "These Empty Streets and the Lonely Heart That Still Beats", as a bright and happy batch of songs ranging in sounds and genres from techno to reggae to rap and even dubstep all about getting over someone. Yet strangely, half the songs on the album seem to be about Mel and how much he misses her. Meyers says this was intentional. "I didn't want to just skip over the grieving process. That would be unrealistic and bad advice for everyone out there who listens to this and will use it as an anthem to get over someone in their life. And that's who this album is for. Everyone whose been left behind, left for dead, and to show them that there is a light at the end of the tunnel but it's a long ass tunnel, haha. That's why the album is titled the way it is. I wanted to be realistic in this path to getting over someone who had that much power over you. I could have just made a very simple 11 song album with all happy love songs saying 'I'm so totally over her, it was all so easy' but that's simply not how life and humans work. It is a long journey and this album from start to finish represents that. In life after a breakup of that magnitude you go from bad rebound relationship to single and mulling over the ex you can't forget for a while to (dating) a good girl but you screw that up because you're still hung up on your ex, to being single again, and so on and so on until you truly let go. My life was hitting that pattern and the songs on this album represent that. The whole record tells a story of someone almost battling an addiction to someone, which love can be. In any addiction you relapse, but eventually you kick it. Here the addiction is a person. By the time the album ends you get a sense that any emotion he had for this woman has been purged out of his system and analyzed and over analyzed and now he is ready for something and someone new to stimulate him."

According to many recent sources (and photo and video to back them up) that "someone new" has taken the shape of one miss Minka Kelly. The drop dead gorgeous actress, born in Barcelona by her Aerosmith rocker father Ricky Dufay and exotic dancer mother then raised in Los Angeles by said mom and her step dad, has been with Yankees short stop Derek Jeter and singer John Mayer. Now she and Meyers are an item and he feels the happiest he has been in a long time. "I had a feeling, 2012 was the year. This was going to be a good year for me to meet someone. And I was right. Something, some strange intuition was telling me. I had no idea where it came from. But I just knew. And she fell right into my lap" he says. He knew of her interest in him for a while, admitting in a 2011 interview that he got word that she wanted to date him as early as 2010 but she was with Jeter at the time and Meyers sensed an "arrogance" in her eyes when watching her interviews on YouTube. "I was so wrong" he admits. He met her the night of his 28th birthday at the LA premiere of The Avengers (where he brought 90210 actress Jessica Lounge as a date but ended up spending more time with Kelly). That evening he saw another side of Minka he did not expect. "She was so shy and sweet and humble. She listened more than she talked, which shocked me. She is incredibly smart, went to law school, speaks something like 10 languages. She is the nicest girl and I just think she has been through alot in her life and has used the wrong coping mechanisms to numb that pain, which is why she comes off so cold and detached on camera sometimes. But in the time we've spent she's been open. I can see someone trying to open up and feel. I am too. I'm sick of being numb." I remind him that "she's been through alot" is something that could describe the majority of the women he has been with (Megan Fox, Julia Fonda, Sasha Grey, Mel Morley, Naomi DeLa Fuente, Leighton Meester, Demi Lovato, and most recent girlfriend Gina Rage) and he smiles, simply responding "I see myself in them".

When I ask Meyers what caused the breakup with MMA fighter turned actress Gina Rage he readily confesses "She wouldn't let me in". Meyers goes on to explain: "Listen. I have not one bad word to say about Gina. She is an amazing, amazing girl. Super sexy, super chill. Crazy swag, just the bomb. You know. One of the funniest people I've ever met. No one made me laugh like her. But I have this thing, where I'm obsessed with knowing people inside and out and I believe if a relationship is going to get serious you need to really ask the deep questions and truly get to know each other, beyond that honeymoon period of the first few weeks and months where everyone wears a mask and only shows the best side of themselves. And one night Gina and I had this bad conversation that turned into an argument. I was trying to ask her something real, something deep. And she used her wit and sarcasm that I normally loved, and she used it as a mask and after trying and trying and trying I began to realize, she's not gonna answer the question. She's doing everything she can to dodge it. She's never gonna let me in. And if you don't let me in I begin to detach (from you) emotionally and mentally and once I do that I lose attraction, and once that happens, then why am I with you? We basically broke up that same night". While Michael does admit he still thinks about Gina sometimes and certainly misses her ("her bedroom skills were insane and more importantly I could see her as a great friend, she's that special" he adds), he is focused mostly now on making things work with Minka. "If anything everything I have been through has taught me, I can't dwell on the past, which I used to do alot. After breakups the best medicine for me is to either drown myself in my work or jump into someone else. A new relationship. New energy. That's what Minka brings. I can't force Gina to grow up and be more open. She has to do that on her own and when she finds the right guy she will. That guy just wasn't me." Meyers and Kelly have been spending alot of time together and when he finishes filming Moneyball in August he plans to spend even more time with her as he gears up for his first tour with Chants of Reign who co-headline this fall with 30 Seconds to Mars, among other acts. "It's exciting and I hope she is there with me for the ride. It's going to be an amazing journey."

Speaking of Moneyball, Michael is excited to step into the shoes of 007 once again. "James Bond has always been my favorite movie character of all time, up there with Anakin Skywalker I think. And it wasn't until I began to play him that I realized how much we have in common" Meyers says. Sam Mendes has taken the directing reigns on this film from Chris Nolan who shot 2011's Quantum of Solace. Many regard Quantum as one of the best Bond films ever and Mendes has quite big shoes to fill, but Michael says he has faith fans worldwide will be more than pleased with what they have in store. "This film is an excellent continuation of what we covered in the first film and on top of a great script that deals with topical economic issues in the world, we have a sexy cast, an unbelievably charming and enigmatic Bond girl who gives James a run for his money in mental issues, a slew of favorite 007 supporting characters coming back, tons of cool action and locations, some of the most gorgeous cinematography a Bond film has ever had (thanks to the legendary Roger Deakins), and mainly, what I think people will remember the most from this film, is Javier Bardem as the first truly iconic Bond villain since Blofeld. He has some great great scenes and lines fans will be quoting for years. He is menacing and truly truly evil. He was born for the part." Meyers when asked to describe the film in one word quickly says "Epic".

While Meyers could completely relate to Bond's journey in the last film, as a "young boy confused, lost, and looking for somewhere to belong, looking for a family, and mainly looking for an occupation where he could channel his rage. He had being a spy and killer for hire, I use acting, haha"...he says he is going in the opposite direction in real life compared to where Bond is headed in this next picture. "We are clearly in the Bond Begins phase of this franchise and we are leading up to the cold hearted womanizing Bond we all grew up with, and you see the seeds of that in this film for sure, but we first have to show how he got there and we start to see the beginnings of that in this film. He is starting to care less and less about finding love. Thankfully I am going in the other direction. I want love and I think I know now what it takes to find it." When I ask him to clarify what exactly that is he smiles, contemplates, then says "Well I am becoming a believer in the notion that you need to spend time with the types of people who you want to be like. That's the only way you will soak up their energy. Like hands on experience. Like on the job training. You wanna be rich, hang with rich people. You wanna be tough, hang with tough people. You wanna find a good relationship, hang with good couples. The one thing I have seen a lot lately is that there is a huge difference between people who are looking for someone to love versus people looking for someone to love them. People looking for someone to love have the most success in finding a partner because they are confident in who they are and what they have to offer and are looking to share all that with someone. That kind of attitude of 'I'm awesome. I know I'm awesome. Come join in this awesomeness' is incredibly attractive and infectious. People are drawn to that kind of energy. But people who are looking for someone to love them have less success in love because they give off a needy and insecure vibe and the sad part is they don't even know it. So you either attract people who are just looking to take advantage of an easy target or you turn off people completely who don't want the pressure of having to love you in order for you to love yourself. You gotta do that on your own."

....Maybe Hollywood's reigning bad boy is finally learning to do just that.