The Dancer and the Dance
In Dance First Gabriel Byrne plays two sides of Samuel Beckett in a resonant performance. He talks to Donal O’donoghue about home, Hollywood and the price of fame
Since I can remember, I have talked to myself,” says Gabriel Byrne – actor, writer and a man who, through his 72 years on this earth, has never ceased to question his part and his place on it. “ey used to say that a hairy palm and talking to yourself were the first signs of madness. And back when I was 13 or 14, I used to think, ‘Maybe I am going mad?’ Because of society, where you can’t be walking around and seen talking to yourself, that voice transferred into the head. In my case, now there are days when I wake up and there’s a committee meeting going on in my brain. ere’s no chairman and everyone is shouting at the top of their voices at each other. Sometimes life can feel like that.”
In his latest lm, Dance First, a biopic of Samuel Beckett in which Byrne plays two versions of the Nobel Laureate, the actor spends much of the time talking to himself.
“I think we look back on the past all the time,” he says of this interrogatory device. “You look at decisions made, regrets you have, sadnesses, joys and so forth. Sometimes, people ask, ‘What would you do if you could live it all over again?’ I think that if you did get the chance, you would just make a di erent series of mistakes. Maybe that’s what life really is: we make mistakes and go on making them with a few successes. It’s like how an actor prepares for a role. at journey. Strasberg and Stanislavski’s thing was: ‘Where have I come from, where am I now and where am I going?’”
Gabriel Byrne went on that journey in his acclaimed memoir, Walking with Ghosts (the 2020 publication was reshaped into a one-man stage show). Rich, raw and lyrical, the narrative chronicled a life among ghosts, from growing up in the Dublin suburb of Walkinstown to the heady heights and lower depths of Tinseltown. He wrote of his alcoholism, being sexually abused by a priest and the tragic passing of his sister, Marian. Yet it’s also a remembrance su used with hope and acceptance, closing with the actor stepping onto the Broadway stage, going on as you must.
“At the end of the stage show, when my father comes back and says, ‘We’re all right, don’t worry’, that’s the feeling I have of people who have passed. You tend to forgive yourself and you forgive them too.”
First Dance’s director, James Marsh, says Byrne was his rst choice to play Beckett, an actor who “hasn’t pigeonholed himself at all.” e Dubliner’s career suggests as much, from the swords and sorcery of Excalibur to the gangster brogue of Miller’s Crossing to his Golden Globe-winning trip as a therapist in In Treatment.
“Spielberg said to me once that he never knew what I’d show up in next,” he says to this. “I wished that I’d done Hamlet and more Chekhov but in the end those characters come to you in di erent forms. ere were experiences I wouldn’t want to go through again but for the most part a career, or even a life, is a bit like being on an express train where you ash past the various stations, and some stations you remember better than others before you get o at the terminus.”
One signi cant station was e Usual Suspects at Cannes in 1995. A er the premiere, Byrne was told that he was now a star. He was horri ed and terri ed.
“I had seen how sudden success can change people’s lives and what it did to them,” he says. “It was like what Richard Burton said to me, that it’s not so much that you change but people around you change and that eventually changes you. With e Usual Suspects I had what was, I suppose, a prolonged panic attack.”
But he never bought the BS. “When I lived in Hollywood, I never believed anybody about anything. I had meetings with people o ering advice and I realised that they didn’t really give a shit about me. Maybe it was because I came to the business late (he was 29 when he got his break with e Riordans) but I just didn’t believe the bullsh*t.”
Gabriel Byrne now lives far from the hurly-burly of Hollywood, in a farmhouse in Maine with his wife, Hannah and their daughter, Maisie (he has two adult children from his rst marriage to Ellen Barkin). “Ireland has always been my home,” he says (now and again he watches Fair City, a sort of umbilical connection to his old town and his TV past), even if he also believes that the exile can never truly go back. Not that he hasn’t negotiated a return of sorts in Walking with Ghosts and he is working on a novel with an emigrant theme. “I’m happy with how it is going,” is all he will say.
And you wonder, with all that has passed, what gives him joy now? “Family,” he says, adding that happiness is o en found in the ordinariness of the everyday.
When I lived in Hollywood, I never believed anybody about anything