Gabriel Byrne has always struck me as a restrained type, a master of terse
interchanges and manly silences, so it is a shock to discover that the man
never stops talking. Every question halts the flow of words in a rich,
undiluted Irish accent, made to recite Finnegans Wake or Roddy Doyle, as
sure in its opinions as a sermon from a pulpit. Maybe that isn’t so
surprising in a man whose earliest ambition was to join the Catholic
priesthood. For all his glamour and his former marriage to a movie star,
Ellen Barkin, you can still imagine him offering benediction to the sinners
of a world he sees as more menacing than most middle-aged heart-throbs with
perfect teeth and fan clubs do.
In that melancholy lies his attraction. At 57, in jeans and a blue cardigan
that picks out the navy of his eyes, he is outrageously handsome. He is also
unexpectedly dismissive of a career that has made him wealthy enough to own
a Brooklyn brownstone, where he recently hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary
Clinton presided over by the former president. In Irish-American circles,
the Gaelic-speaking actor is becoming a senior statesman.
Sipping tea without milk (for his eczema, I think) in an elegant Dublin hotel,
he tells me his brother has just retired after 30 years in the fire brigade
and ambulance service. He stops and sighs. “Now that’s a
job. Being in movies is a really overrated occupation.” To some degree, he
has remedied this by throwing himself into establishing an Irish cultural
centre in New York, for which he has wooed support from the business and
arts communities, and even from the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. “Irish-American
culture is in danger of dying,” he says. “Now people go to work on Wall
Street, not to dig canals and sing about home.”
Byrne has always been more interested in the message of his movies than in
progressing his career. After his split from Barkin in 1993, he moved to LA
and made four films – including End of Days, in which he played Satan,
tempting Arnold Schwarzenegger, and The Man in the Iron Mask – and scooped
the wherewithal to return to New York and independent films. The latest,
Jindabyne, is by the Australian Ray Lawrence, director of Lantana. Byrne
stars as Stewart: fisherman, garage-owner, disappointed husband. Based on
Raymond Carver’s short story So Much Water So Close to Home, it is set in
small-town New South Wales, and its landscapes bristle with a sense of
incipient disaster, torrentially unleashed after a fishing trip on which
Stewart discovers the body of a young Aboriginal woman in the river, secures
it and carries on fishing for the weekend.
This is Byrne’s idea of work worth doing, with its racial conflict, the
failure of forgiveness between lovers and tribes, the mesmerising ritual of
an Aboriginal funeral filmed on a sacred site. He plays a man’s man for whom
the bonding experience of fishing is sacred; who, after a fight, clicks his
bleeding, dislocated nose into place over the kitchen sink. What he admires
is the film’s courage in showing flawed people – neither he nor Laura
Linney, who plays his wife, wore make-up; the light is harshly natural – in
unresolved turmoil. “If this was a mainstream film, he would have acted
heroically around that body.” he says. “He would have rescued it and
reassured everyone. But my definition of a hero, and the film’s, is
different. What I think is heroic is these two people in a marriage who have
deeply hurt each other, but who find within themselves the strength to go
on.”
The film begins with the looming embodiment of evil, a bearded psychopath in a
pickup truck who, after all atonements have been made, is still lurking at
the end. “Our delusion is to think the world is ordered, when it is random
and unsafe,” says Byrne with relish. “We think we can impose order with all
our laws and rituals, but evil is still waiting. What rituals do we, the
white tribe, have left to protect us? St Valentine’s Day?”
What Byrne no longer has is religion, which he now calls “a denial of fact and
science”. As a child in Ireland, it was a duty never questioned, though
reading John McGahern’s banned novel The Dark, about the rejection of faith,
at 14 helped him “lift up the rocks to see what came crawling out”. The
eldest of six children, son of a Guinness cooper, he was educated by the
Christian Brothers, beaten and humiliated, like the other boys. At 11, he
left for a seminary in Droitwich. “I wanted to do good things for people,
and I wanted to see outside of Ireland. I had images of men in straw hats
with horses in faraway villages, bringing faith to the people.” He was
expelled for smoking, but the sight of a young woman in a slip (one of a
group of visiting actors) had already shaken his commitment to chastity; if
it hadn’t, the sexual abuse he suffered there might have done. He shrugs: “I
can’t honestly say it affected the rest of my life.”
Byrne’s childhood was tough, but you sense he would never have traded it for
the cushier version his own kids enjoy; it was not lacking love, even if it
went unexpressed. “We didn’t go around hugging and saying, ‘I love you.’
When we got a television, I remember watching The Brady Bunch and wondering
what planet these people were from. My father would say, ‘Will you have
another cup of tea before you go?’ Or, when I was at university, ‘You’re
doing great at the books.’ What he meant was he loved me.” When Byrne
graduated in archeology from University College Dublin, the registrar handed
his father a degree certificate by mistake. “‘Sure,’ says my father, ‘I can
hardly read or write, this is the man you want.’ I can only imagine his
pride in me.”
He came late to acting, travelling to Spain on archeological digs and teaching
Spanish in a girls’ school. (The story that he tried bullfighting isn’t
true.) He started a theatre group and graduated to the Project Theatre, in
Dublin, cycling to auditions through the city, with the high ambition of
appearing at the Abbey. He was 28 when he started acting full-time and 39
when he got his American break, in Miller’s Crossing (1990). He moved to
London at the same time as his friend Liam Neeson, who took a starrier
route, though it has not divided them. “He hasn’t embraced the system,” he
says approvingly. “He spends most of his time chopping wood.” I ask if he
had envied Neeson the part of the Irish revolutionary leader Michael
Collins. “No, Liam specialises in playing great men... Schindler, Lincoln,
Collins. I do something different.” What he means is that he prefers to
subvert the standard lines, not enhance them. “I happen to believe Collins
was a conflicted, tormented, ruthless man.”
Far more pleasing to Byrne is his other new movie, Leningrad, the story of the
1942 siege. “Russia lost 22m soldiers in the second world war. It lost
another 60m [people] under Stalin,” he says, the people’s tragedy clearly
more interesting to him than his role as a journalist in the all-Russian
(except for him and Mira Sorvino), state-financed project. Apparently,
Russia’s best actors, playing Lear and Hamlet by night, all turned up in the
morning and learnt their English lines phonetically, a discipline that
clearly impressed him. Is it going to be a good film? He chuckles at the
irrelevance of the question. “I’ve no idea. The point is, it was a
fascinating experience.” Does he never crave lightness and joy, a sweet
little romcom? “I can see you think I’m a sad, melancholy old sack-puss,” he
says with a smile, “but I’m actually not. It’s just that ...” The darker
roles are more interesting? “That, and I’ve always believed acting is about
letting people see who you are. I have a sense of humour, but I’m not a
joke-a-minute person.”
Byrne plays Jindabyne’s Stewart as an Irishman; he always uses his own accent
if he can, having grown up watching English and American actors doing an
atrocious job. “I’m actually very good at accents,” he says, “but I want
people to hear an authentic Irish accent on screen.” When he was cast in
Miller’s Crossing as Tom, the mobster struggling to hide his heart, the Coen
brothers asked for a “George Raft” Irish-American accent, but
let him have his way. His success in the role got him hired by Bryan Singer
as the slick thief in The Usual Suspects (1995).
It makes sense to meet him in his home town; he no longer owns property here,
having moved to New York two decades ago for Barkin, “when the wild card of
love was thrown down on the table”. But Irish is not just Byrne’s
nationality. It is his raison d’être, the way he explains,
one way or another, all his tastes, his politics (galvanised by the
Troubles), his atheism and, not least, his plan to make an Irish Magnificent
Seven with his mates Pierce Brosnan, Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea, and other
stars of the motherland. His life is that of the successful, privileged
star, but his soul is full of rebel songs and memories of the poor,
working-class Ireland of the 1950s, which he finds more compelling, frankly,
than the polished present. He still cites the film Into the West, the story
of Irish travellers in high-rise hell, as a personal favourite. It was
written by Jim Sheridan, for whom he produced In the Name of the Father,
having campaigned on behalf of the Guildford Four.
It’s no surprise that Byrne feels drawn to the work of Eugene O’Neill, with
his Irish-Americans dreaming of the past, and their fragile, disillusioned
women. On Broadway, he has starred in A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the
Misbegotten; personally, he has settled into the skin of the exile, the
immigrant observing and comparing both cultures, feeling at home in neither
place. “I feel that sense of yearning and loss for the place I’ve left, but
I don’t fantasise about coming home.” Do his two teenage children (with
Barkin) feel Irish? “No, they’re American. I try to keep them connected, but
they aren’t exploring their cultural roots on a Saturday night.” Actually,
if his family wasn’t Manhattan-based, he would probably settle in rural
England, where he wanders with a rucksack as often as he can; he is just
about to present a segment in a television series on Britain’s Favourite
Views. He chose Haworth, where the Brontës lived, because Wuthering Heights
is a great passion. “The power of the book is that death cannot separate the
lovers,” he says, which sounds banal until he adds, with a lugubrious smile,
that in Buñuel’s 1954 movie version, there is an intimation that Heathcliff
comes back for Cathy’s body. “So death isn’t the end of sex after all.”
Byrne may be serious-minded and impatient with Hollywood’s sugary love stories
– “They were pleased to see the back of me when I left,” he laughs – but he
is deeply romantic by nature. After spending 10 minutes with him, the idea
of his dating Naomi Campbell and Madonna, as reported, seems not just odd,
but somehow preposterous. He says he is happy to be on his own until he
meets the woman who will outlive him, though I suspect this might be a way
of keeping his female fan base keen. “I’m not lonely,” he reassures them.
“But I’m still waiting for my ship to come in. When it does, I want to make
sure I’m on the quay to meet it.”
Jindabyne opens on May 25
