Jonathan Rhys Myers, the star of the BBC’s drama series The Tudors, has hit back at claims that the series is not historically accurate.

New babies who arrive in July are being sought to become very young stars of the small screen as producers of The Tudors, filmed in Bray’s Ardmore Studios, look for newborns to star as the heir to King Henry VIII, played by Cork actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers.As history tells the tale, King Henry bore four children, but only recognised his male heir, Edward VI, who was conceived by Jane Seymour and Henry VIII As history tells the tale, King Henry bore four children, but only recognised his male heir, Edward VI, who was conceived by his third wife, Jane Seymour.

The hit show, which is broadcast around the world, is filmed in Ardmore Studios in Bray.

The lucky baby who gets the part as the young Edward VI will be starring in one of the most popular shows ever filmed in Ireland, and will be amongst a strong Irish cast.

Legendary Irish actor Peter O’Toole played the Pope in the last series, and singer turned actress Maria Doyle Kennedy played Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

The show celebrated huge success in the past year, Bray woman Dee Corcoran having won an Emmy for costume design.

The programme also won seven of the eight IFTAs for which it was nominated, two Golden Globes and a second Emmy for its title music.

Sam Neill stranded. Sam Neill, who recently starred in Showtime’s The Tudors, will take on another period piece in his next TV gig.

Neill, along with Sean Bean (The Lord of the Rings) and Joss Ackland (White Mischief), have joined the cast of NBC’s drama Crusoe, a retelling of Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe.

The international production is set to begin shooting soon in the U.K., South Africa and the Seychelles. It’s slated to air on Friday nights on NBC in the fall.

Neill played Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the first season of The Tudors. The Jurassic Park star earned an Emmy nomination for his role in NBC’s telefilm Merlin 10 years ago.

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Jonathan Rhys Meyers is gearing up for a second season as Henry VIII in Showtime‘s ‘The Tudors.’

“IT’S GOOD to be King!” said Mel Brooks in “The History of the World, Part I.” It’s good to be Jonathan Rhys Meyers, too. This young actor — only 30, though acting since his teens — has hit his stride. He plays a new kind of Henry VIII in Showtime’s opulent and sexy “The Tudors,” which begins its second season Sunday. I met with Jonathan down in Manhattan’s Soho, at the trendy 60 Thompson Street hotel. He looked, head to toe, like a page from men’s Vogue. He is impossibly handsome. His features are startlingly lush; the eyes, the famous mouth. Like a matinee idol of years past — Tyrone Power, perhaps — even if Jonathan weren’t a famous actor, he’d stop any room he entered. (The Dublin native began his career playing a glam-rocker in the cult classic “Velvet Goldmine” and he exudes a slightly decadent, ambiguous rock-star glamour.) The star is kinetic, and at first, almost disconcertingly intense. He laughs, “Oh, I know it. People always say to me, you’re so jittery, you can’t sit still, you’re nervous. But I’m not nervous. I’m just a very excitable guy. I’m enthusiastic. I can’t help myself.” He says that when he made “Mission: Impossible III” with Tom Cruise, he found somebody else with a similar powerful energy. “I had a great time on that, and when Tom and I were together it was like, whoosh!, all the air in the room evaporated. He was terrific to work with because he is so committed and professional. I mean, 17 hours a day. You have to respect that.”I REMIND Jonathan that we’d met briefly once before, at the premiere of his Woody Allen thriller, “Match Point.” I hadn’t been able to talk at length with him that night. But, when I passed him at the party, I said, “Great film, great performance, but what a sociopath your character is.” Jonathan stepped back and barked, “He’s not a sociopath, he’s just a guy in a bad spot.” I didn’t pursue further niceties. So now I ask, was Henry VIII a sociopath or “just a guy in a bad spot?” Jonathan says: “Neither. He’s a megalomaniac, somebody with absolute power who has been corrupted by it, absolutely. He was a great King in many ways, and did great things. But he also did terrible things. Not just to his women, but to his people. In the matter of divorcing Catherine of Aragon and marrying Anne Boleyn, challenging the church, he gave his people no choice. Choose the Pope or the King, be excommunicated by the Pope or excommunicated by the King. And God help you if you choose the Pope! I’m trying to show how he became what he became, why he was so paranoid, why he was so ashamed. He was paranoid because everybody wanted to be King and the knives were everywhere, literally. He was ashamed because in the matter of Catherine and Anne, he knew he’d done wrong. He never doubted the legitimacy of his marriage to Catherine. He wanted Anne, period.”

JONATHAN, slender, toned, not towering in height, is a very different Henry than we’ve seen before. “I had some trepidation, when offered the role. You know, when I played Elvis, I could look in the mirror, and sort of see Elvis in myself. But Henry the VIII? So, you know, I decided I’d play it more from here,” touching the smooth plane of his semi-bare chest. “I do think we’ve sort of changed the game. When I saw photos of Eric Bana as Henry in “The Other Boleyn Girl” I thought, “Fuck! He doesn’t look that dissimilar from me. I worried a little how I’d stack up. He’s so tall; he’s got that overpowering quality. And I’ve met him. He handed me my Golden Globe for ‘Elvis.” I remember just looking way up! But this is the 21st century. You have to have a hot Henry VIII! Nobody wants to see a 300 pound man making love to a beautiful woman. Maybe on some strange Internet site, but otherwise audiences demand eye-candy all around.”

The network is already planning a third season, minus the unfortunate ladies, Anne and Catherine, who meet their respective ends this year. Jonathan says, “I hope season three focuses on the rebellion in Scotland, where you see Henry fight for a change.” I wondered if the series would touch on the pathetic Katherine Howard, the second wife to lose her head? Jonathan couldn’t say, but did remark that Mistress Howard “absolutely deserved to be beheaded. Anne Boleyn was executed because there was no other way to get out of that. She couldn’t give him a son and that was the reason for the marriage. But Katherine Howard earned her beheading. She was a little nymphomaniac. She had over one hundred lovers in the palace!” Now, I begged to differ with Jonathan; she’d had a number of indiscreet affairs before and, alas, during her marriage to Henry, but a “nympho” a “hundred lovers?” The actor was adamant and I let it go — you don’t argue with Jonathan Rhys Meyers! He did soften slightly, “Well, she was very young and silly, the poor thing had no concept of ‘wed and bed’ — she didn’t see she was doing anything wrong, Henry being rather gross by then.” Jonathan spoke glowingly of Maria Doyle Kennedy, who plays Catherine, and infuses her every moment with dignity and strength, “Isn’t she magnificent?!” he exclaimed. And of the delectable Natalie Dormer, as Anne, he insists, “season two belongs to her. She owns it; she plays it like a harp and broke down walls with this performance.”

On the bigscreen, Jonathan will soon be seen in “The Children of Hunag Shi,” in which he plays a reporter covering the infamous Japanese occupation of China in 1937. And then comes “Mandrake,” based on the comicbook character, Mandrake the Magician.

Natalie Dormer, who plays Anne, found it easy to see her as a contemporary. She says there were strong likenesses between her character and a more recent British royal beauty: Diana, Princess of Wales.

“They were both incredibly image-conscious,” says Dormer, 26, who was sitting in a dressing room, wearing a 16th-century-style ivory dress. “Anne Boleyn shook up the court in an aesthetic way.”

Just like Diana, who used glamour to court the news media, Dormer says, Anne made it clear that she was bringing “a certain je ne sais quoi, a sophistication” to the court. So far, the historical Anne and the Showtime Anne have not noticeably diverged. (She really did contract and survive what was known as the sweating sickness.) But anything can happen.

Anne will do historically accurate things, like marrying Henry, giving birth to a daughter (the future Elizabeth I), losing her husband to Jane Seymour and losing her head to the executioner. The season will also bring Thomas More’s fall from grace, which really occurred.

Just the other day Hirst swore that there would be no further historical adjustments this season, at least nothing significant that he could think of.

Oh, except the plot to kill Anne Boleyn. He invented that to illustrate how much the English people hated her.