Irish-born actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers was arrested and detained for several hours on Saturday after allegedly assaulting a waiter at an airport in Paris.
According to Agence France-Presse, the 31-year-old star of “The Tudors” was involved in a drunken scuffle when the staff at Le Quotidien bar in terminal 2F at Charles de Gaulle airport refused to serve him.
A witness told Britain’s The Daily Telegraph that Rhys Meyers threatened the staff at the airport bar.
“He was like a man possessed. He’d been drinking heavily while waiting for a flight home from France,” the witness claimed. “He got into an argument with bar staff who refused to serve him any more. There was some pushing and shoving, and when a waiter intervened he was punched full in the face. There were further attacks on other airport employees. Rhys Meyers was shouting things like ‘I’ll kill you all’ at the top of his voice.”
Rhys Meyers was ordered to appear in court in September, where he will face charges of “willful violence, outrage, hitting and threatening death,” a judicial source said told Agence France-Presse.
Rhys Meyers, who has had two previous stints in rehab in 2005 and 2007, told the Irish Independent newspaper in February that drinking is a relatively new activity for him.
“I didn’t start drinking until I was 25,” he said. “Since then I’ve been drunk maybe a dozen and a half times. When I do I’m like Bambi. I’m all over the place, hopeless, like a 16-year-old kid. People notice.”
As previously reported on AccessHollywood.com, Rhys Meyers was arrested in 2007 for public drunkenness and breach of the peace at a Dublin airport. The actor apologized for the incident and the charges were dropped.
In addition to playing King Henry VIII on Showtime’s “The Tudors,” Rhys Meyers has also starred in Woody Allen’s “Match Point,” “Mission Impossible III”, “Elvis” and “Bend It Like Beckham.”