Brendan Coyle
The former Downton Abbey star talks about returning to the Dublin stage
Brendan Coyle is an actor who can channel darkness as easily as he can re ect the light. Perhaps that’s why the creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes, once described him as “cuddly and dangerous.” Right now though, Coyle just sounds exasperated, having come direct from the set of the lm version of Downton Abbey (due in 2019) to the Donmar theatre in London. He also sounds breathless, not helped by a crackly phone line that ghosts in and out of audibility. It is two hours to curtain for Saint Nicholas, a one-man show penned by Conor McPherson that has proved to be more demanding than Coyle anticipated. “I had just nished an Arthur Miller play, e Price, before going into Saint Nicholas, and I thought ‘ is is going to be a walk in the park’. How wrong I was.”
Coyle rst worked with McPherson on e Weir in 1996, a collaboration that earned the actor an Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actor and a New York Critics’ Circle Award for Outstanding Broadway Debut. Saint Nicholas, a weird tale about a lustful, loathsome Dublin theatre critic who hangs out with vampires in London, fascinated him ever since Brian Cox rst grabbed the part by the neck that same year and poured his blood and guts into it. “About three years ago, I emailed Conor about the rights, then the Donmar got involved and it was agreed that I was the man to deliver it.”
In his foreword to this new production of Saint Nicholas (which he wrote in 1996, the same year as e Weir), McPherson recalls “a very special time in his life” and imagines it was also thus for Coyle. “It was an extraordinary time,” the actor agrees. “I had seen Conor’s is Lime Tree Bower at the Bush eatre a number of times and was fascinated by his writing. I was then cast as Brendan in e Weir. While I knew it was magical and wonderful, we had no idea it would impact the way it did, being subsequently listed as one of the greatest plays of the 20th Century. It was amazing to perform in it as was the potency of the play itself.” Coyle grew up in the steel town of Corby in Northamptonshire. His Irish father worked as a butcher and his Scottish mother was the force who impelled him away from a life in ‘the freezer’. His father died suddenly when Brendan was just 17, a traumatic event that prompted him to reevaluate his life. “I had been working in the butcher shop since I was a kid but I knew that it wasn’t something I was going to do for life,” he says. “It was my Mum who pointed me towards acting, telling me that I had a cousin in Ireland who was in acting so I just red o a letter and very generously, she said to come over and see what we are doing here.”
So he went to visit his father’s family in Dublin and it was there that he discovered the Focus eatre, a dynamic and intimate space presided over by its unconventional founder, Deirdre O’Connell and Coyle’s cousin, Mary-Elizabeth Burke-Kennedy. He began to study his art and cra under the watchful eye of O’Connell, herself a student of the famous Lee Strasberg. “Deirdre was the most amazing woman and she was like a guru to us,” he says of his edgling drama days. “We lived and breathed the whole world of the Focus, its ethic and focus on new writing as well as the classics, and that was a huge in uence in my life. It was a life-changing experience. To this very day, my warm-up before I go on stage is the one Deirdre O’Connell taught me.”
Recently, when asked if he believed in the supernatural, Coyle said “I was brought up a very strict Catholic and am kind of resistant to any sort of ‘notion’”. What did he mean by that? “I’m very open to the notion of spirit and spirits who commune. I know that exists because we all feel it with each other and within ourselves, this higher energy. But it’s like talking about acting and that whole process because as soon as you try to vocalise it, it all falls apart for me. It’s a sense, something almost beyond words, something to do with communal energy and I nd that very powerful because I know it exists.”
What do you get from acting? “Oh God,” he says. “Well, it’s what I do now. When you leave drama school, what you’re seeking is employment and while I’m still looking for that now, I’m also seeking a choice in what I do. I get an energy from acting, from the people in that room engrossed in storytelling. Last night, people came up to me a er the play and they were crying. So I do it because of a basic need to tell stories and try and understand myself and get to grips with what we are but of course, it’s also about entertaining. I once asked Imelda Staunton why we do this and she said that like much in life we do it because we can and we should.”
I have met Coyle a number of times but I very much doubt he remembers. Once was in the bowels of a London hotel for the media circus that launched each new season of Downton. With someone ringing a bell every 15 minutes or so, the actors were wooshed from one table of journalists to the next like some weird version of speed-dating with the cast of the world’s most famous costume drama. “Jeez, that was so crazy,” says Coyle now, “you’d constantly be photographed with camera phones, but that’s good because it’s a sign that your work is recognised. Although it can be weird if you’re getting photographed as you queue up for a bowl of soup.”
He returns to Downton when the lm version arrives some time in 2019. He loves being reunited with Bates, the tetchy but loyal valet of Downton who spent time in gaol for a crime he didn’t commit and made the actor globally famous and a pin-up for people of a certain age. If he didn’t seem comfortable with fame in the past, he’s more sanguine now, checking the Wilde line that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. He loves being back with the old family that is the Downton ensemble. “Rob Collier is one of the funniest people I know,” he says of his co-star, a very infrequent theatre-goer, who he had to coax to see Saint Nicholas.
And then he has to go, the clock as ever ticking towards the curtain. Coyle is looking forward to his return to the Dublin stage for the rst time since e Weir. “Come and say hello,” he says, before the line goes quiet for the nal time. I imagine the actor heading to the sanctuary of his dressing room and going through that warm-up ritual learned long ago in Dublin. And I recall his comments about the communal spirit of the stage, the sorcery of storytelling and the supernatural elements that writhe through Saint Nicholas. “I felt that spirit so much with e Weir and again with this play,” he said. “As someone said, it’s almost like being at a séance.”