Gabriel Byrne
The Hollywood star who’s enjoyed the luck of the Irish…
A former trainee priest who briefly worked as a teacher, archaeologist and bullfighter, Gabriel Byrne didn’t begin acting until he was 29. But the 65-year-old Dubliner has made up for lost time with films like Miller’s Crossing, The Usual Suspects and Spider. His latest sees him take the lead as a grieving husband in Louder Than Bombs.
Had you seen the earlier films of Joachim Trier before you took on Louder Than Bombs? Yeah, I’d seen both of them, Reprise and Oslo, August 31st. I had no idea I was going to work with him but I realised from those films that he was a unique voice. A movie is the product of choices rejected and I understood all the possibilities that he had at his disposal. What he ended up with was a very singular vision. In the film, your character’s wife is a war photographer who finds it difficult to return home. As an actor, do you recognise that? When you go away from home for work, it’s always difficult. You miss who is at home. And you’re away in a hotel room by yourself. Sometimes that can mean freedom to be away, but a lifetime of that… I hear people say, “I wasn’t there for the first time they walked” or “I wasn’t there for the school concert”. You pay a price for the job. You did a number of jobs before you got into acting. So how did it come about? I didn’t have any career plan in mind. I went into acting at nighttime because I didn’t want to spend my free time in pubs, which was the only place people seemed to congregate.
How did you make it to Hollywood? I followed a woman to America, that’s why I went there. She said to me, “They’re auditioning for this movie.” I went and auditioned for it, and it was Miller’s Crossing. Did you ever get close to working with the Coen Brothers again? No. Somebody was talking that they were going to do a follow-up to Miller’s
Crossing, where now I would be in Albert Finney’s role, but I don’t know what happened. Might be an interesting film. Might not. I don’t know.
You’ve produced as well – notably In The Name Of The Father. How did that come about? I found that book at an airport in a wire basket that said 30 per cent off. It was old and forgotten! What films of yours do you consider were big studio movies?
The Man In The Iron Mask was a big budget film, so was Stigmata and End Of Days. When I was living there, I did my clutch of Hollywood films. I got to live in Hollywood and got to be a Hollywood actor, I suppose. I didn’t not enjoy Los Angeles – it’s a nice place to live. But there was a pressure there. All of those films went to number one – and with that is also the pressure of saying, ‘It’s got to make $100 million’ and I didn’t like that kind of pressure. So I went back to making films with directors I felt were cutting edge. One of those was David Cronenberg’s
Spider. How was that to make? We were doing that picture the day September 11th happened. Myself and Ralph Fiennes came into the studio, and we were looking at this thing on TV, and we thought it was a commercial for a movie. Cronenberg immediately said, “The only way we can deal with this is get straight back to work.” Was HBO’s In Treatment a big thing for you? You won a Golden Globe for it… Yeah, it was and it wasn’t. I don’t think of it in terms of a ‘big thing’. You do the work, you go on stage, you do an independent film… Every actor is up down, up down.
ETA | 22 April Louder Than Bombs opens this month.
‘I went back to making films with directors I felt were cutting edge’