Rhys Meyers: 'Sex with 22 people is normal'

Jonathan Rhys Meyers has insisted that having sex with about 20 people is "not so much".

Speaking about playing Henry VIII in The Tudors, he noted that his character had slept with roughly 22 people, Showbiz Spy reports.

"Which is not bad, because if I go out in London on a Saturday night and I say to some handsome young dude or some handsome young girl that's standing in the club, 'How many people have you slept with this year?' [They'd say], 'Er, about 50'," he commented.

"So it's not so much."

He continued that Henry VIII had been much more "prudish" in real life, but added: "Sex happened and sex was very much a matter of state then."

Rhys Meyers also confessed that he thought it was a "ridiculous" idea when he was asked to play the monarch.

"Then I understood what they wanted," he said. "They wanted to bring a sense of history to a much younger generation."