THE BYRNE IDENTITY

New York Magazine
Sept 17, 1990
By Phoebe Hoban

In Europe, Gabriel Byrne is famous. In Dublin, where he was born, he can't even walk down the street without fans accosting him, and a quiz in a local paper asked which American actress he is married to: Faye Dunaway, Debra Winger, or Ellen Burstyn. (The answer is Ellen Barkin.) But up til now, Byrne's greatest contribution to American cinema has been offscreen. Five years ago, he single-handedly saved Robert Downey Jr. from decapitation during the filming of the NBC mini-series Mussolini. Says Downey, "I am his indentured servant. We were running toward George C. Scott [Mussolini], and I was mesmerized by a plane's propeller and sprinting toward being unintentionally julienned when I felt this Irish hand push me to the ground and this expletive whispered in my ear referring to my IQ." Adds Downey, "I always kind of pictured myself with a cigar in my mouth, saying, 'You should come to L.A. You'd be huge.' But he was always kind of resistant. If he comes to the States, a lot of people will be unemployed."

Gabriel Byrne doesn't talk like a Hollywood actor. It isn't just the way he casually lapses into Gaelic or reminisces about his work as an archeologist. It's the voice the timbre and cadence. It is a quintessentially Irish voice, soft, lilting, and innately literate. The Coen Brothers knew better than to mess with a sure thing. In their new film, "Miller's Crossing", Byrne plays Tom Reagan, a Prohibition-era spin doctor whose brilliant scheming ultimately undermines him. Even though Byrne's character was originally conceived as an American, the voice remains unchanged. "You got a lip on you," says crime boss Johnny Casper (Jon Polito), and he's right.

Imagine a cross between David Mamet's clever "House of Games" and Brian De Palma's choreographed, bloody "Untouchables". Make it more lyrical, funnier, less pretentious. That's "Miller's Crossing", a gangster/morality play whose characters evoke Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. But its language is pure Coen: quirky and articulate. "What's the rumpus?" Tom repeatedly asks his cronies by way of a greeting. He never gets an answer. "When I read the script, it was such a joy to read because the language itself is something you can savor," says Byrne. "I love the way they put sentences together, the rhythm, and how they were able to create that world. They use the gangster convention to deal with things like trust and friendship and business and ethics, and they turn everything on its head."

"Miller's Crossing" opens the New York Film Festival on September 21. Like much in the Coens' movies, the name seems fraught with meaning. But it isn't. After they were unable to come up with a title, the Coens simply borrowed the surname of their editor, Michael Miller. In a moody, unnamed city (the film was actually shot in New Orleans but is unplaceable), Leo (Albert Finney), An Irish politician, is at war with gangland boss Johnny Casper and his band of pistol-packing thugs. John Turturro plays Bernie, "the Schmatta," a gay Jewish garmento. Marcia Gay Harden, in her first screen role, plays his sister, Verna, a hard-boiled babe who diddles with Leo, falls for Tom, and gives as good as she gets. The Coens call it a "dirty town" movie.

The Coen Brothers, Ethan, 33, and Joel, 35, made their mark in 1984, with "Blood Simple" - a tall tale of adultery and murder. Filled with dazzling film-student/auteur camera moves, it also introduced actress Frances McDormand (Joel's offscreen companion). The brothers followed this off-beat, promising start with "Raising Arizona" (1987), a wacky farce about a wacky childless couple, Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, who kidnap one baby in an adorable set of quintuplets.

Cinematographer Barry Sonnenfield, who shot both their earlier films, recalls how the Coens first described their new project: "'It's gonna be about men in long coats wearing hats.'" The credits begin with a hat sailing gracefully through a clearing in an autumn-tinged forest, and Byrne's hat brim shades his face for much of the film when it isn't getting knocked off during one of the many witty fight scenes. He films running gag is that Tom becomes "Little Miss Punching Bag" but, comic-strip-like, recovers almost instantly.

Gabriel Byrne isn't wearing a hat this warm summer evening. He's wearing a ponytail, a vestige of the movie he's just finished shooting: "Shipwrecked", directed by Nils Gaup, in which he plays a pirate. "It's about eighteenth century buccaneers in the Caribbean," says Byrne. "I make people walk the plank. I've mostly played Italian husbands, Spanish lovers, and Israeli lovers. It's been a weird career. I've never been in a movie that people have seen. So only punters who rent weird videos would know who I am."

But "Miller's Crossing" could change all that. Byrne's performance is an introspective star turn. His quietness gives Tom a wry certainty. Barkin calls Byrne a minimalist actor, and she's right. Byrne's Tom is in the merest details: a tilt of the hat, a glint in the eye. He's certainly convincing as a kind of gangster Kasparov, silently plotting killer moves. "The kid's a thinker," says Johnny Casper, and Byrne makes you believe that. It's rare for an actor who isn't larger than life a Brando or a Nicholson to rely on such small gestures. "In the seventies, there were character actors who were also leading men," says Byrne, "Hackman, De Niro, Hoffman, Pacino. Very simply, not everyone is Kevin Costner." Byrne, 40, made his feature-film debut in 1980, playing King Arthur's father in John Boorman's "Excalibur". "People say, 'Which one was he?' And I say, 'He was the fellow in the big helmet and the big nose who dies fairly close to the beginning.'" He starred with Jill Clayburgh in Costa-Gavras's "Hannah K." about problems in the Middle East, and in "Defense of the Realm", a dark little British movie that didn't find much of an audience, he played a journalist who discovers a near-nuclear accident at a military base. In Ken Russel's "Gothic", he was a kinky, overripe Byron.

Hollywood typecasting also stuck him in a series of bad reincarnation movies starring famous blondes. In "Hello Again", which he deeply regrets, he was the hunky doctor whom Shelley Long falls for when she's resurrected. In "Julia, Julia", he dies right after he marries Kathleen Turner but mystically reenters her life once she begins sleeping with Sting. And in "Siesta", he's a trapeze artist and the ex-lover of stuntwoman Ellen Barkin, who's feverishly reliving her last moments on earth. "I taught you to fly," he says in a sexy Spanish accent, "but you chose to fall." To punish her, he marries Isabella Rossellini. The film, directed by Mary Lambert in a style that managed to merge the worse aspects of Antonioni and MTV, was a bomb. But Byrne and Barkin made the most of their collaboration. "Ellen came to London with Mary to make sure they more or less agreed on the same cast," says Byrne. "Little did I realize how fatal that meeting was going to be. I had never heard of her and she had never heard of me, but my agent said, 'She's a really up-and-coming American actress, and I think you should meet her.' I told her some ridiculous story about some cardinal I knew who had died in flagrante delicto, so to speak, and this woman took his berobed and cassocked body and threw him off the balcony, but his leg got caught, and there was this cardinal swinging in his full regalia seventeen feet up in the air. It's the first thing I ever said to Ellen. I don't know why I told her that, but I think she responded to it."

Byrne got the part, though he and Barkin don't agree on the finished product. "All the reasons I did that movie are still things that really interest me," says Byrne. "Obsession. Sex, death. Spain. The idea that somebody can rewind their lives. I thought it was a great script. There was only one problem I would love to see that movie directed by Polanski. But don't make me say bad things about "Siesta"."

As actors, Byrne and Barkin are opposites; he implodes, she explodes. Although Barkin said he's so funny he had her in painful stitches during her pregnancy (they have an eleven-month-old son, Jack) Byrne is an old-fashioned brooder: dark and complicated. Barkin, Byrne, and baby Jack are a peripatetic family. They shuttle between L.A. (when either of them is shooting a film) and Barkin's loft in the West Village. They can also be found in Byrne's cottage on a lake outside Galwayuntil he sells it to get a bigger place. "I don't really live anywhere," says Byrne, grinning. "I guess he's a bit hard to place in Hollywood in 1990," says Barkin. "Most stars are not dangerous, not threatening. They have nice, sweet faces. As we say in Yiddish, milchediga, little milky, white bread. And Gabriel is definitely not that. He looks like he could hurt you. He has that edge." But he's so immensely appealing. "He's an incredibly attractive guy," says John Turturro. I'm not a woman, but if I was one I would probably go for him. I think he brings a whole deepness to Tom. If you look into his face, there's a empathy there." Byrne was born in 1950, the son of a soon-to-be-obsolete cooper. When Guinness switched from wooden hooped casks to metal containers for its famous stout, Byrne senior was out of a job, and his wife went to work in a hospital, leaving Gabriel's father to care for three boys and three girls. "A small family by Irish standards when you consider Christy Brown's mother had 22 children," says Byrne.

The Ireland of his childhood, says Byrne, was very nineteenth-century: "We grew up on a little road that led to a larger road that led to the mountains. There were hay carts and farms all around the place." And even Dublin's working-class families were steeped in literary tradition. "My mother could quote reams of poetry," says Byrne. "She would always have a line from Robbie Burns to cover any situation. The literary pubs of Dublin were chock-a-block with people with people writing novels and poems and everything. It was like one artistic hive. But we didn't come into contact with that."

Byrne's mother did take him to the Abbey Theater, and his grandmother, who smoked a little pipe, idolized Tennyson and Oscar Wilde. Byrne says, "I remember growing up thinking that she knew him, because she used to say, 'Poor old Oscar, what they did to him.'"

Byrne had no early interest in acting, although at the age of seven, when his mother read him 'The Old Curiosity Shop', he pretended he was hunchbacked Mr. Quilp for months. "One day, the men came to deliver coal," he remembers, "and I was sitting at the kitchen table with this big hump. And the coal men turned to my mother in horror and said, 'It doesn't matter about the money, ma'am. You have your own cross to bear.'" At twelve, Byrne decided to become a missionary. "I went to a school that was run by Irish Christian Brothers who wore long, black, stained soutanes and if you didn't know your algebra would lift you up by the hair," he says. "One day, a guy came in with a slide projector and he showed us photographs of these guys in white shorts with little black people smiling. And he said, 'How many of you boys feel that you would have a vocation to save souls?' About fifteen of us put up our hands. I went away to England to this seminary in the heart of the countryside." Byrne played football and excelled in Latin until a teacher tried to seduce him. Soon afterward, he was expelled for smoking in the graveyard. When he returned to Dublin, Byrne worked in a hospital ward and in an accountant's office, then as a plumber and a messenger. He got a scholarship to University College, Dublin, where he studied phonetics, languages, and archaeology. "I don't know why I did that combination, but I had this image of being a swashbuckling scholar," Byrne says, "Archaeology is quite like the movies. You are down in a very confined space with people, and you have a very intense relationship with them for a short period of time, with the hope that something great will happen at the end." At 21, he moved to London, where he had another succession of odd jobs. He worked in a teddy-bear factory, fastening on teddy-bear eyes. He apprenticed with his brother, a chef at the Cafi Royale, until a dessert he prepared for Jacqueline Onassis exploded in the oven, and he was demoted to dishwasher. For a while, he worked as an archaeologist. On one dig, he found a child's shoe from the tenth century. Later, he lived in Spain, where he gave private English lessons. At one point, he taught himself shorthand with the hope of becoming a journalist. A few years ago, he did write a monthly column for "Magill", an Irish political magazine. He has also written several short stories, one of which was recently published in "Ireland's Best Contemporary Short Stories." It's amazing he ever found time to "fart around," as he puts it, with theater. Back in Dublin, he palled with Jim Sheridan, director of "My Left Foot". Byrne was in several productions at the Focus Theater before joining the prestigious Abbey Theater. There he was spotted by a television producer, who gave him a screen test for a role in Ireland's most popular nighttime serial, "The Riordans". "My father was a man who came from that old world," Byrne says. "When television came on, he couldn't believe it. He used to laugh himself sick, saying, 'Godamighty. You'd think it's real." The Riordans, which ran on Irish television for eighteen years, was my father's absolute favorite thing. I think that one of the biggest thrills of my entire life was to see my father sitting there for the first episode and me walk onto the television screen. And he said, 'I never thought I'd see the day when a son of mine would walk onto the Riordan's farm, but there you are.'" Byrne says he played a "wandering, Heathcliffian kind of rebel guy who wouldnt pull his own weight, a very roguish character." The series ended after only six months, but the character became the basis of a new series called "Bracken". "Bracken was a farmer who was living by himself and cheating on about six women, and he was a real lovable liarthere's a kind of sneaking respect for a character like that in Ireland. He's up to every roguish thing with a wink and a smile. So there's lots of shots of me looking meaningful in flocks of sheep." "Bracken" made Byrne a household name in Ireland. "It is kind of weird to be known in Europe and unknown here," he says. "I have to explain who I am here, whereas over there I don't have to explain anything. You feel like you are neither fish nor fowl, and you are kind of betwixt and between. On stage, I would alternate between villain and comedic roles, whereas in movies, to be honest, I don't think they knew what to do with me. Is he a character actor, or is he a leading guy? And I think that in "Miller's Crossing", they finally figured it out." Byrne first saw the Coens' script in Barkin's trailer on the set of "Sea of Love". 'It was one of those hot New York summer nights,' he says, "and I remember her reading the script and kind of throwing it down and saying, 'Well, that's one movie I won't be doing.' Because she knew there was no way she could do it in terms of her schedule. But she told me later on that the reason she said that is that she thought I would be right for the movie and she didn't want me to be disappointed if the script wasn't sent to me. But a few weeks later, "Miller's Crossing" arrived." (Ironically, Byrne was recommended by Donna Issacson, the same agent who had cast him in "Hello Again.") Byrne prepped for the film by watching old gangster movies: "Cagney, Bogart, the B gangster movies of the thirties and forties," he says. "To see if there was anything I could maybe subconsciously absorb. There was one scene in "Scarface" where Paul Muni lights his cigarette off a policeman's badge, so I stuck that in." Byrne continues, "I think Tom is a guy who feels everything and shows nothing. He's like a chess player: all his strategies are done with the same kind of 'Don't let the other guy know what you are doing, but make sure you take his pawn at the end of this move'. And Tom, because he plays by certain rules, loses. I can see the Coens reading this and saying, 'What the f--- is he talking about?'" The Coens are famous for their laconic, obsessive directing style. Every frame of their movie is storyboarded before they shoot. "Joel and Ethan finish each other's sentences," says Byrne. "The two heads become one head. Joel sits and gets this expression of great intensity. And Ethan chews these swizzle sticks all the time, and the two of them arrive at a decision without communicating. I remember on the first day of filming, I was sitting in this chair and Turturro was sitting across from me, and the entire crew is standing around and it was really nerve-racking. And I am supposed to pick up this phone, and just as I started the scene, Joel came over and said, 'That's great, but can I ask you something? Do you think when you sit down, you could toss off your hat and get it to land on your foot? I'm just asking.' And by some fluke, it worked. We did four takes, and it landed on my foot each time. And for me it established a casualness about the character that I really latched on to, without Joel giving me a long rigmarole of direction." Byrne says, "The Coenheads' are funny, smart, unassuming, approachable, easy to work within short, top of the line, real Citizen Coens. The weird thing is that in L.A., which is a town of incredible hostility in certain areas, everybody loves the Coens. They are just too talented to hate." A few months ago, Barkin threw a surprise birthday party for Byrne in L.A. The biggest surprise was that the Coens showed up. "You just don't think of them as party animals," says Byrne, who has become their close friend. "Joel was kind of standing on one foot and being a bit uncomfortable, and Ethan was sitting there, eating the top of a swizzle stick. They gave me a card saying CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BAR MITZVAH, and BAR MITZVAH was crossed out and BIRTHDAY written over it. Their present was a gigantic gray box. Inside it was a hat."