Simon Delaney
The actor and broadcaster is back on stage in Snapper mode. Donal O’Donoghue catches up with him. Snip Snip!
Simon Delaney earned his rst pay-packet when he was 16. It was the grand sum of £81 for a week of 12-hour shi s as a forkli driver. “Da, wait until you see what I’m going to do with this!” he told his father, having had his eye on a cool leather jacket in Meath Street market for some time. But Billy Delaney had other ideas. “I tell you what you’re going to do with that money! You’re going to give half of it to your Ma.’ I said, ‘For what?’ And he said, ‘I’ll tell you for what! What about all those dinners you’ve eaten and the clothes you’re wearing and the roof over your head?’ at was the best lesson I ever got in my life. It gave me a work ethic and also that if I earned my own money, I could do the things I wanted to do.”
Simon Delaney learned that lesson well. ‘No job too big or small’ could be his mantra, as over the past two decades he has worked on stage, big screen and small: from Hollywood to Christmas panto to hosting Weekend AM. Now he is back as Jimmy Rabbitte in e Snapper, brandishing a garden shears (‘Snip, Snip’) in adverts for the second coming of the stage version of the beloved Roddy Doyle novel. Before the show’s opening last year, some wondered if Delaney could lace up his Dublin brogue to match Colm Meaney’s vintage
take on Rabbitte in the 1993 Stephen Frears’ lm. Didn’t those people see Mr Delaney shoehorned into red vinyl as a beer-guzzling ‘alien’ in Zonad? Or his break-out performance in the 2001 TV drama Bachelors Walk?
It’s noon. e actor is on a break from rehearsals at the Gate eatre in Dublin. We talk on the phone. “You’re looking well son,” cracks Simon. “Out for a smoke?” you counter. “I’m out for a vape,” he says. “I’m a hipster, so I can go out and vape away with the real smokers. I’m o the cigarettes for nearly three years now.” He’s also a powerhouse: actor, writer, producer, director, father of four, script-writer, director of Christmas panto, food truck retailer, all-round joker. Is he the busiest man in showbusiness? “Well I’m certainly the cheapest,” he quips. “Or maybe I’m the most available. My next day o is August 25th!” Even down the line his larger-than-life personality crackles as he talks of his ambitions, his rock (his wife, Lisa) and their four boys, Cameron (12), Elliot (10) Isaac (7), Lewis (3).
Delaney’s range is epic: soap opera ( Coronation Street), children’s drama
( Roy, Moone Boy), and US drama ( e Good Wife, Touch) as well as movies like Alan Partridge and e Delivery Man. “A journalist asked me recently ‘Can you name the last Irish actor who starred in a movie that grossed over $300 million?’ and I said no. And he said: ‘You!’” at lm was e Conjuring 2 which grossed some $320 million globally which Delaney, not a horror fan, watched through his ngers. His four boys have only seen him in Roy and Moone Boy but not Zonad. “Maybe they can watch it when they are 18,” he says. Zonad (2009) was the lm that introduced Delaney to the US when it was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and Variety gave it a ve-star review. “From that I got a US agent, a manager and some work,” he says. Delaney loves the USA: the country, the people and the potential. “We’d do
it in the morning,” he says of moving over. “Lisa and I have agreed that if a job came along that required me to go to the USA we’d go. I’d love to bring my kids up over there. I love the attitude, the sense of family and the fact that it truly is the Land of Opportunity. If you have passion, desire and a work ethic, people will get behind you and push you towards your goal. It’s a tough business and LA is extremely competitive but I’d love to live on the East Coast, for my boys to experience New York. Lisa and I got engaged there, I filmed The Good Wife and The Delivery Man there and if the opportunity came along we’d be gone tomorrow.”
On the home front he still has fingers in many pies. He hesitated before taking on The Snapper a second time: a run of 22 weeks, summer holidays with the family gone, again. “That’s the joys of being freelance and selfemployed,” he says. “You take the work when it comes along because you have that innate fear that they mightn’t ask you again. But it was a big family decision so I sat down and talked with Lisa about it. Lisa should be sainted because she has never, ever stopped me doing anything and I’ve had some stupid ideas over the years. But she has always supported me. So it’s head down now until August 25th!” Delaney is a true-blood Dub, born and bred on the northside of the city in a working-class suburb, not dissimilar to Roddy Doyle’s fictional enclave of Barrytown. Or as the actor quips of his home-place: “It’s Raheny if you were applying for a job, Coolock if you were signing on and Edenmore if you ever got in a fight.” Rereading The Snapper reeled in his childhood years and memories. “Jimmy’s son Darren talks about blemmin’ his bike down Tonlegee Road and I did that back in the day,” he says. “And when the girls are quizzing Sharon who the father is, one of them asks: ‘Is it Billy Delaney?’.
And I’m thinking that’s mental because that was my Da’s name! So there are all kinds of connections in the novel and the play.”
Father’s Day is just over the horizon, a big date for Delaney even though he will be working that morning on Weekend AM. “Fatherhood is everything to me, the reason I get up in the morning,” he says. “The greatest pride I have is being a father to our four boys, polite young men that I’m trying to raise to respect people and give them an appreciation of work and education. In other words, all those things my father did for me, although I didn’t listen to my Da. Hopefully my boys will listen to me! So I take the job of fatherhood very seriously and I’m very lucky to have Lisa, who is the strength in the house and enables me to go to earn money and give the boys things that I didn’t have as a kid. My Da is gone since I was 26 and I still miss him to this day, just as I miss my Ma.”
Margaret Delaney was just 50 years when she died of pancreatic cancer. Seven years later, her husband Billy died from a heart attack. “Jesus it was hard when they were both gone,” says Simon. “I was 26 and my youngest sister was just 19. I have a brother and two sisters and we take family very seriously. They are my best pals and we talk to each other every single day no matter where we are in the world.” It still hurts that his parents missed many of the landmark events in his career: the big TV and film roles, his West End debut with Stones in his Pockets, hosting the IFTA Awards. “But what breaks my heart even more is that they weren’t at my wedding, they didn’t see my kids being born and they missed all the family moments.”
Yet Delaney believes his parents are still with him, especially in moments of crisis and high emotion. “I have this tradition that I do in theatre,” he says. “On the night of my West End debut, with 15 minutes to curtain, I was nervous and upset because my Mam and Dad weren’t there. So I walked to the back of the theatre, touched the back wall and said: ‘Mammy and Daddy please be with me tonight’ and I have done that every night before I go on stage for the past 20 years. And I believe they are with me, not physically to give me a hug or a clatter afterwards, haha! So I take fatherhood very seriously because I know what it’s like to have a dad and mam who loved us unconditionally. I want to replicate that with my boys.”
Last summer, Delaney lost nearly two stone during The Snapper run. “I will have to lose it again because I’ve put it all back on,” he says with
a chuckle. “I’m back to my natural fighting weight but I’ll be getting rid of it with eight shows a week and the TV at weekends.” Affable and loquacious, Delaney’s personality can light up a room. “I like making people laugh,” he says. “I’m a hugger and I’d like to think I’m a person people would like to hang out with and have a pint.” Impatience, he concedes, is his worst trait but even that could be spun as a positive. “I hate when someone says to me ‘We’ll do it tomorrow!’ What are we waiting for? We’ll do it today. Solve the problem now because it will only get bigger.”
So it’s no surprise that the 48-year-old still dreams of Hollywood, even as he keeps the pedal to the metal at home. “I’ve written two TV dramas, I’m trying to finish a novel I started two years ago and come Christmas I’ll be back directing a pantomime,” he says of plans and possibilities. Following his appearance in the final of Celebrity MasterChef in 2017 came his publishing debut, Simply Simon’s: The Diner Cookbook and this summer, in his ‘down time’, he will give cooking demonstrations at festivals across the country, still spinning as many plates as he can. And every night, before the curtain goes up, he will go through his ritual, remembering his folks who made him what he is and what he can yet become.