TICKETS for the Electric Picnic festival in 2009 will go on sale next
week, organisers have announced.
Gabriel Byrne’s heading for 60 — and he’s still getting the heart-
throb roles. In fact, they’re now calling him…
Byrne is philosophical about his perennial heart-throb status. “Well,
when I started my career they were calling sheep farmers sexy, so it’s
nice to know that as one grows older…” He breaks off, changing tack.
“I’m nearly 60 years of age. So that Dr McDreamy thing, whatever that
means, it’s a nice thing but it doesn’t change who I am as an actor,
or alter my perception of who I am.”
For the record, Gabriel James Byrne is wearing very well at the age of
58. The face is not unlined, but still handsome with the striking blue
eyes that first set the hearts of the nation’s housewives a-flutter.
Dressed down in artfully ripped jeans, wine corduroy jacket and open-
necked shirt, Byrne is in relaxed mode.
His career has come full circle too. While Pat Barry might be
remembered in popular culture as sex-in-wellies, the role also earned
Byrne the 1979 Jacob’s Best Actor award.
In a nice piece of synchronicity, his role as In Treatment’s Dr Paul
Weston is hotly tipped to win him a prestigious Emmy for Best Actor in
a Drama Series this Sunday.
The show follows psychoanalyst Paul Weston through his week, capturing
a session each night with his patients before concluding each Friday
in the office of Paul’s own therapist, Gina.
As ever, he plays down the hype but adds that, “Yes, it would be nice
to win, if only to have it on my mantelpiece so my kids could make fun
of me”.
That mantelpiece is getting pretty crowded of late. Last year the
Jameson International Film Festival gave Byrne its Volta lifetime
achievement award. NUI Galway has made him an honorary Doctor of Arts
and Trinity College Dublin outmanoeuvred his alma mater UCD by making
him an honorary patron of its Philosophical Society.
Now here we are, sipping coffee and looking out over Dingle Bay as he
prepares to accept the inaugural Gregory Peck award for lifetime
excellence in acting at the Dingle Film Festival. Is someone telling
Gabriel Byrne it’s time to get off the stage?
He laughs. “Certainly I don’t regard this as the end of anything. I
was given that award in Dublin, for example, because I had made 50
films all around the world. It wasn’t exactly the golden clock they
give you when it’s your retirement. Anyway, I don’t work 12 months a
year, I just do the things that I enjoy.”
The pursuit of happiness, or at least career satisfaction, for Byrne
has involved earning the freedom to pick and choose his projects.
“There were some films I had to make in because I had to make the
money,” he shrugs.
“I looked at them and said, ‘This is going to pay really, really well
and I can go on and do something else that I like’. The vast majority
of my films have been independent films in all kinds of weird places.”
So while Byrne has popped up in some forgettable blockbusters, like
Ghost Ship or Little Women, he is more often noted for nuanced,
interesting performances such as his conflicted gangster in Miller’s
Crossing, the crooked ex-cop in The Usual Suspects, or the good guy at
a moral crossroads in Jindabyne. He is excited about what will surely
be a difficult adaptation of ‘s At-Swim-Two-Birds, in which he will
star with other members of the ‘Pat Pack’; Brendan Gleeson, , ,
Cillian Murphy.
The former linguistics student and seminarian has proven his worth in
screenwriting (The Last Of The High Kings; drama Draoicht) and film
producing (In The Name Of The Father; Into The West). His next project
is his own adaptation of Jennifer Johnston’s novel, Two Moons, about
three generations of women in an Irish family, their relationships and
their struggle to live within their social boundaries.
Although it will be his first time filming in Ireland since the mid-
1990s, the recent -directed documentary about him, Stories From Home,
showed that Byrne feels he still has one foot in Ireland, one in .
Exile, says Byrne, is not too strong a term for the state in which he
has spent most of his adult life.
“The meaning of exile has changed in Ireland very much in the last 20
years,” he muses. “I left Dublin because there was hardly any work in
Dublin, or , so a lot of my life has been about emigration and
unemployment and return.”
The boy from is very much tied to America, as his two children Jack
(19) and Romy (16), by ex-wife , live there.
“But if you ask me if I’m American or Irish, I’ll say that I’m Irish,
without any hesitation.”
Byrne comes across as a frank and thoughtful man, but that enigmatic
quality that captivates audiences is also present. “I believe that
every actor that you see on screen is essentially himself,” he says.
Speaking about Gregory Peck, he says, “There was something about him
that drew you in, and the more he drew you in, the more he retreated”.
But in fact, it’s a good description of Byrne himself.
Up close and personal, he is a man who likes to keep his private life
private, unwilling to drag into the limelight those close to him who
have done nothing to court it.
You wonder, for example, about the significance of the large silver
Claddagh ring he has worn for many years on his right hand. The heart
is pointed inwards, as is the tradition for the loved-up.
Byrne is in Kerry with his girlfriend Anna George, who boasts an
exotic CV of hedge fund manager and actress, and is soon to appear as
the mysterious Mrs Singh in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones. She is
waiting patiently out in the lobby of the hotel for our interview to
end, so they can take a drive around the Connor Pass.
But while only the ring on his finger hints at Byrne’s inner passions,
it is fair to say he wears his other, more public, heart on his
sleeve. He was so exercised by the controversial design of the new
Department of Finance building on Merrion Row that he rang the
architects to complain.
“I feel as entitled to express an opinion about the architecture of
Dublin as that architect is entitled to put up a building that’s going
to be here for the next 500 years, long after we are all dead,” he
argues.
His greatest ire is reserved for what he sees as the lack of dignity
afforded to the dying in public hospitals.
“I have personal experience of someone dying in a hospital bed in
Dublin and three feet away, this woman was in a locked-in position
like in The Diving Bell And The Butterfly and there’s a television on,
and people talking at the next bed, and one bathroom between all these
people… it was just horrific,” he says.
Like Brendan Gleeson before him, whose criticism of the health service
on the Late Late Show sparked a national debate, Byrne is conscious of
the power of his celebrity.
“I understand that a doctor can come along and say, ‘This is a
disgrace’ and no-one will listen to him, but that someone like me can
say it and they say, ‘Ah, that’s your man, he’s been in a couple of
films, we’ll listen to him’,” he says.
Later that night, he will graciously tell an audience at the cinema in
that he feels honoured to be mentioned in the same sentence as Gregory
Peck, “an earnest man of integrity”.
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