Copyright: Venice (August 1995)
BYRNE 'N' DESIRE... Its there when he walks into a room, stoop-shouldered, lazily rolling a toothpick across his lips. It is the neon luster of a theater marquee, a perfect moment beaming from a screen stretching 50 feet through innumerable lives. Gabriel Byrne can sit down quietly, flip through a magazine and all eyes instantly gravitate toward him.
By the looks of him, you would swear that the Irish actor is every bit the consummate movie star. After all, you can't miss the penetrating blue eyes, the jet-black hair, and brooding allure, recalling leading men of years gone by. and then there's the confidence--a man modestly aware of his undeniable talent. Could be the glowing reviews he received for his turns as calculating Tom Reagan in the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing, grief-stricken Papa Riley in Into the West, or as Mackey, the tortured drifter in A Dangerous Woman.
By most standards Gabriel Byrne would be a star of the highest echelon. But critical acclaim doesn't pay the bills. Remember, this is Hollywood folks, and in an age when featherweight matinee idols are paid handsomely to churn out revenue-pumping no-brainers, Byrne must be content with stardom of a more modest variety.
"In Hollywood, everyone knows movie making is a business," he says, gravely, flicking his toothpick into a nearby ashtray. "As an actor you're graded by how much money you generate. There's an A-List and something else where you're neither A nor Z -- somewhere in between. That's where I am, I guess. Look, the only reason I would want to be on the A-List is to get projects made that wouldn't normally be made. The fame and the other stuff it brings, I don't care about that; I think that would be kind of scary actually."
And Gabriel Byrne was almost famous. Twice. First in 1990 with the highly anticipated Miller's Crossing which failed to make even a dent in the box office. Then in 1992 when he joined forces with the powers that be for Cool World, the mega-budget, semi-animated bomb that apparently someone felt sure would put him over the top. Set to be animator Ralph Bakshi's long-awaited comeback, Cool World teamed Byrne with Kim Basinger, a virtually unknown Brad Pitt, and a hefty $35 million budget. The result was a confusing mess of bad animation and a far worse storyline.
"I've never regretted a movie I've made," Byrne says in defense of Cool World and some of his other films that might be considered, well, bad (i.e. Ken Russell's Gothic and Hello Again, with Shelley Long, to name just two). "Some of them may not have been seen by a lot of people, but I can look at myself in the mirror knowing I didn't do them for the money, but because I believed in something the script was trying to say.
"Unfortunately, as an actor I can't always control the final product. Like with Cool World, it all looked good on paper -- the story, the concept -- but I saw things wrong with the film during looping and took notes during a preview. I made suggestions to anyone who would listen. They said, "Listen, you're a fucking actor, you don't made suggestions." Ultimately the film was a big loss for everyone. It could have been a franchise movie for me.
But there have been other occasions. At one time or another Byrne has turned down a handful of films, any one of which could have made him one of the most highly sought after actors in the world. Among others, he said no to Die Hard, Lethal Weapon 3, and Patriot Games. With a less principled actor, decisions such as these could be construed as an outright attempt at career suicide.
He grins as I recount the missed opportunities, one by one, nodding his head knowingly. "I didn't turn down the films out of snobbishness or anything like that," he explains. "I just said no to them because the parts were pretty stupid. I've said this before and I've said it a thousand times. With Patriot Games, for instance, I just didn't feel that they cared about the realities of the issues they were dealing with. What they cared about was that the movie would be a success. Dealing with the issues wasn't even secondary."
So what do you do when, for one reason or another, you're not quite A-List, many of your films, despite your best intentions, have gotten away from you, only later to tank at the box office? Byrne, for one, has taken matters into his own hands, creating his own projects by branching out to producing, writing and directing. And so far, so good. As producer, he has already brought to the screen two unlikely prospects in a matter of two years, 1992's Into the West and 1993's Academy Award-nominated In the Name of the Father. Okay, it wasn't quite that easy. Into the West was four years in the making, a grueling process of raising funds to finance the relatively low-budget project that few other than Byrne believed in. But this may have been the easier of the two films to make.
Although he won't go into detail about the problems he encountered bringing In the Name of the Father to the screen, this much is known. After reading Proved Innocent, Gerry Conlon's autobiographical account of his experience as one of the wrongly convicted members of the "Guildford Four," Byrne contacted the author who sold him the rights to the book for only a dollar. Conlon convinced Byrne to produce the picture and he, in turn, contacted Jim Sheridan, screenwriter of Into the West and an old pal from Dublin's Project Arts Theatre, to direct. Once on board, Sheridan felt he needed absolute control of the project, and the freedom, as he saw fit, to change some of the story's facts for dramatic effect. Byrne disagreed on both counts, but was slowly squeezed out of day-to-day involvement, retaining only his title of executive producer. His friendship with Sheridan since strained, Byrne insists it is all, as they say, water under the bridge.
Yet, it's ironic how this experience may have influenced his career as a producer. He has formed his own production company, Mirabillis Films, with partner Patrick Rainsford and, though Miramax will not be involved as originally planned, three films are currently on the slate: The Zen Detectives, a cyber-thriller adapted from a 1942 Robert Heinnemann story, The Secret of Wyndham Hall, for which Byrne co-wrote the screenplay, and Lark in the Clean Air which he wrote and will direct.
"I regard producing as an extremely creative occupation," he clarifies, perhaps alluding to the less attractive implications of the title. "I have the freedom to search out projects I want to make, choose a writer, cast the roles and so on. But more than that, I can help put a voice behind Irish culture, to help erase the national stereotypes you see in a lot of films today, because they are actually betrayals of what we really are. Mirabillis is based in Ireland and, for example, Lark will deal with the effect of the Cuban Missile Crisis on an Irish family, told from an Irish perspective. The subject matter and how it is presented are very important to me."
Spend some time with Gabriel Byrne and you get a sense that his Irish identity is more than a point of passing interest. It is his fundamental preoccupation. Pictures In My Head, to be published in September, is his collection of episodes recounting his most personal memories from his youth in the Dublin suburb of Walkinstown to his eventual marriage to now-estranged-wife, actress Ellen Barkin, and the birth of their two children, Jack Daniel and Romy. The man and his culture are at times indecipherable.
Born in 1950, Byrne had what he calls a 19th Century upbringing, a childhood among hay carts and green fields and farmlands. His father was a cooper, otherwise known as a barrel-maker, at the Guinness factory in Dublin. As a child he'd wake early in the morning to hear his father getting ready for work, donning his impressive blue Guinness jumper and freshly polished boots before heading off to work.
"The brewery was fascinating," he gushes, "the sights and smells. The horses carrying the big barrels and the cobbled stones. I remember going to their 100th anniversary celebration and they had cream pies and lemonade for us kids. It was a magical time."
But it didn't last. Byrne's father was soon made obsolete at the age of 50 when the company switched from wood to metal containers. His mother went to work as a nurse, his father stayed home to take care of the children. "About that time, my grandmother got me hooked on the sixpenny rush. She took me to the pictures for the first time and that was all I needed. We saw Darby O'Gill and the Little People with Sean Connery. After that I'd be off to the picture houses all over Dublin -- The Rialto, The Star, The Tivoli."
Byrne's obsession with film was accompanied by a romantic curiosity that was to take him from one study or occupation to another over the next seventeen years. "I think I've always drifted," he fondly recalls. "I guess I've never really planned anything; it's futile, really. I always looked to the future and thought, fuck it, if it doesn't work out, I can always do something else."
At the age of twelve, he traveled to a seminary in Birmingham to study for the priesthood. Not that he felt any particular calling. He rather fancied himself visiting mysterious places like Tobago and Peru where the order had missions. He was to be a crusader on horseback, in straw hat, visiting savage lands, a savior of the masses. But, alas, the seminary wasn't quite what he had anticipated. He was expelled four years later for smoking in the graveyard.
Back in Dublin he tried his hand at a string of odd jobs during and around school. He was a plumber's apprentice, a fledgling journalist, a teddy bear craftsman, a bathrobe fittings assistant, a morgue attendant and an innocent bartender at a gay pub who couldn't understand why women never came in. At University College Dublin he studied archaeology and languages. Archaeology would doubtless give him the opportunity to come across a million-year-old tomb that was in dire need of being discovered. But, much like the seminary, things looked an awful lot better in the brochure.
After a couple of years teaching English in Spain with the hope of meeting friendly Spanish women, he became reacquainted with his childhood enchantment of images on the big screen. He was 29 years old. "I taught drama at UCD," he winces. "But I found teaching depressing. I love kids, but students are pretty ruthless; I never really had any authority over them. But I was going to the theater and movies all the time and just fell in love with acting all over again. It was always there, I guess. It never really goes away, that love."
He pauses thoughtfully and begins to laugh as if at an inside joke. "You know, it's funny, when I started acting at the Abbey and the Project Theater in Dublin, I did a lot of comedy. I don't know if anyone remembers. It's strange that I've been saddled for so long now with this image of being the heavy, remote Irishman. Once you do one movie and people get to know you, that's it, you're handed your tag. I'd really like to do comedy again."
Ditching, as he says, the tweeds and brogues for blue jeans and scuffed cowboy boots, Byrne was the born-again bohemian, a thespian. Life on the dole soon opened to paying gigs and the chance to work with fellow up-and-comers Liam Neeson, Colm Meaney and Neil Jordan. High-profile work followed as Pat Barry, the cowboy on the popular RTE soap "The Riordans." Then there was "Bracken," his own series. "I ended up getting a small role in Excalibur," he says, "as Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon. John Boorman shot the film in Wicklow, literally in the fields behind his house. It's only an estimation, but I'd say he employed about half of Ireland. Right after that I left for England and worked there for about four years, doing films and theater. That's when I first learned something I had never realized."
Unfortunately for Byrne and his ilk, the Irish actor doesn't share the fortune of his British and American counterparts. Theater-goers, especially we Americans, are endlessly impressed with the British accent. After all, it is a dead giveaway of refinement, breeding, and culture. Even a Cockney accent is...quaint. The American actor enjoys world-wide acceptance on practically any movie screen anywhere by virtue of the ubiquitous Hollywood export. Then there's the brogue.
"In England I was saddled with this handicap I never knew I had. I had a dialogue coach teaching me how to lose my accent. And it certainly didn't get any better when I came over here. For eight years now I've faced a similar problem in America: speak with an Irish accent and you're pigeonholed. I mean, name five stars who aren't American or British. And don't say Mel Gibson; you know, I really don't think people remember that he's from Australia." Under the gun, I can come up with only three. He laughs. "See? I'd like to see how American actors would like it if every time they tried to get work they were asked, "Before you begin, could you change your accent?"
Extra baggage aside, Byrne is a working actor. Has been for fifteen years. And even with his frequent ups and downs, he continues to land some plum roles. He currently has three films in the can and one set for production next month.
First up, Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects, a cleverly conceived story of five cons brought in for questioning after the hijacking of a truckload of gun parts. Before they know it, they are bound together by a $91 million prize and an enemy of near-mythical dimensions. The film also stars Chazz Palminteri, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak and Benicio Del Toro.
Byrne plays Dean Keaton, a bad cop gone outright thief, who, in spite of his natural instincts, is trying to go straight. "Keaton is a very complex character," says Byrne, remembering what drew him to the film to begin with. "There is a moral struggle there. I guess I'm drawn to that because I think there is a challenge to making the audience sympathetic to a character who is not necessary likable. I guess that's what attracted me to Tom Reagan in Miller's Crossing and Mackey in A Dangerous Woman. There was a similar struggle."
A glow appears in his eyes when he talks about the film, like it's another Miller's Crossing or something. "It is, in a way," he laughs. "There's that same level of excitement that you get when you're working on a really terrific project. The script is exceptional; it's funny, tense, sort of film noir like one of those crime capers from the '50s. And Bryan [Singer] has an incredible passion about his film. On top of all that there were these actors I've admired for so long, all coming together. Basically it was the right actors in the right film."
To hear Byrne describe it, it seems he has hit a high point in his acting career. He is equally enthusiastic about Frankie Starlight, also starring Matt Dillion, Anne Parillaud, and produced by My Left Foot's Noel Pearson. Adapted from Chet Raymo's novel The Dork of Cork, it is the story of a dwarf born to a young French woman in Cork shortly after World War II. "I play a man who is married who has an affair with this French woman, played by Anne Parillaud, and takes her and her son under his wing. He stands by them and loves them and introduces his son to the world of the stars and astronomy. It's a simple, poetic, deeply felt European film."
Since shooting a cameo in the soon-to-be-released Jim Jarmusch film, Dead Man -- a black-and-white Western starring Johnny Depp -- Byrne is taking a brief respite before going off to Ireland to star in The Last of the High Kings. Does he ever see himself slowing down?
"Not really. I find it hard to pass up a good role in a good film. What, can you blame me? I mean, be Jaysus, if there is one thing I've learned in this business it's that the combination of the two are pretty rare, so when it's offered, I better damn well take it. But, maybe, unlike a lot of actors, I'm not addicted to it as much anymore. It's not essential. Like I say, I can always do something else -- producing, writing, directing. Lately I've been thinking about writing a book of Irish fairy tales for children."
