GABRIEL BYRNE - DUBLIN’S HEAVENLY GIFT

COSMOPOLITAN - September 1993
By Chris Chase

He doesn’t have a bodyguard or a limousine: there is no doorman guarding the entrance to the building where he lives: his dark, rumpled hair, despite his best efforts, falls into his eyes: and unless that black T-shirt is by Armani, you’d have to call him the least pretentious of dressers.

The least pretentious of actors too. He meets interviewers in a SoHo coffee shop where nobody pays him any mind, and he can’t get a second cup of coffee without asking-civilly-three times.

But the Irish-born Gabriel Byrne is about to become a major movie star, despite his apparent failure to understand how a major movie star is supposed to live, and despite the fact that he didn’t start acting until he was almost 30. Now 43, he’s in every other picture you come across. By the time this year is over, you will have been able to watch him in Point of No Return, Into the West, Dangerous woman, and as this is written, he’s in Denmark, shooting a new version of Hamlet.

What is more surprising, no movie he makes seems anything like any other movie he has made. Point of No Return, for instance, is a cross between a James Bond movie and My Fair Lady. (Byrne, a U.S. government agent, convinces Bridget Fonda-after he’s had her trained to wear high heels, use a fish fork, and speak French-to kill for her country, rather than just out of irritation in that sloppy way she’s been doing.)

Tell him you think Point of No Return was idiotic, not to mention hideously violent, and he says mildly, “It’s the only movie I’ve ever been in that’s made money.”

This, however, may change. Because Into the West is magical, never mind that no big studio wanted to put a nickel into it.

“It began with friends of mine walking through the projects in Dublin,” Byrne says, “And seven floors up, they saw a white horse on a balcony. One of them sat down and wrote a short story on it, and later we got Jim Sheridan, who wrote My Left Foot, to do a script, but it took us a long time to convince anyone that two kids and a white horse was something people wanted to see.”

Ah, but what kids, and what a white horse. Eat your heart out, Walt Disney Studios: this is a fable to make grown men sniffle and to delight every child on the planet. In it, Byrne plays a gypsy who, racked with guilt after his wife dies in childbirth, quits his tribe and brings his sons back to Dublin and the projects. The boys play hooky from school, the father plays hooky from life, seeking forgetfulness in whiskey.

Then an enchanted horse gallops out of the sea, and the real adventure begins. “We cobbled the money places,” recalls Byrne (who’s also an associate producer on the project), “and we still didn’t have enough, so when I went to Harvey and Bob Weinstein at Miramax, who are sympathetic toward small independent movies, and we sat in this restaurant in Tribeca, and I told them the story, and when I was done, they just said, ‘Okay, we’ll make it.’ Because of them, we were able to finish the last of the financing. It wasn’t a huge budget-probably the equivalent of Tom Cruise’s per diem for a week.”

Into the West was the number one movie in Ireland last year, and it was equally popular at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Byrne thinks people find it moving “because the movie says the mother comes back to ensure that the kids are really okay: it says that the love of a mother for her children is stronger than death. To some people it might seem really corny, they don’t want to know about this stuff. But the idea that love is stronger than death is the theme of Wuthering Heights, and it’s also the theme of Ghost, which made $250 million.”

To learn about the life of Ireland’s “travelers,” Byrne hung out with a man known as the King of the gypsies. “Until the beginning of the plastics age, the travelers were tinkers,” he says, “In the old days, they would come to your door and say, ‘Do you have any pots or pans you want repaired/’ and you’d say ‘Oh, there’s a hole in this teapot,’ and the man would sit there and fix the teapot. I remember when I was small, they would come to the door and the woman always had a baby in her shawl, and two or three other children holding onto her skirts and she’d say, ‘God bless everyone in this house: have you got a little bit to give to a woman that’s hungry?’ And you’d give them food, and they’d go on to the next house and get clothes.”

“They were always regarded with distrust by the settled community. It’s actually apartheid. They drink in the streets because they’re not allowed in the bars.”

“The same thing happened in America with the American Indians. You take away culture, you take away identity, and you have a major problem. It seems as if Ireland has no color problem, but that’s because there are no colored people there. The gypsies of Ireland represent a kind of romantic freedom: on the other hand, nobody wants them in their town. Get out, you’re not staying here, move on.”

In his own way, Byrne has lived as itinerant a life as any gypsy. During the course of many interviews with assorted interviewers, he has claimed that he worked as a bartender, an archaeologist, a maid, a plumber, a journalist, a Spanish teacher, an apprentice priest, and a bullfighter.

He vows that all of the above is true and that he was a failure at most of it. Yes, he might have become a famous chef, but for having blown up Jackie Onassis’s dinner. Yes, he left the seminary after an older man tried to seduce him. Yes, he was a terrible plumber; yes, he found archaeology tedious; and yes, he would have liked to be a bullfighter. “But the three things you need-grace, finesse, bravery-I lacked all of them. All I had was enthusiasm and it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t afraid of bulls until I actually stood beside one, and the horns on him were like out to here, and there was this fierce look in his eyes.”

“I’ve since come to revise my whole opinion of bullfighting. It’s very beautiful until you remember that it ends in death. It’s the ritual of life and death lived out in the space of 10 or 15 minutes. I can understand why people find it exciting, but the thing of it is, I don’t anymore. It’s just when you’re 20, and you’ve been feasting on novels, you expect to get off the plane and be met by Papa Hemingway saying ‘Come on, I’ll show you the real Spain.’”

It is only natural that such a man, having tried everything else, might turn to acting thought he knew it could be almost as dangerous as bullfighting. “In Dublin, I used to go a lot to one little theater and there was an actor I came to know. He was one of those guys you flee when you see him coming because you know you’re goin’ to be trapped in a corner listenin’ to ‘the highlights of my career.’ So he was in this play where he had to be onstage from beginning to end. And the curtain came up, and then the lights came up, just enough to reveal his face, and there was a woman sitting beside me and she said, really loud, ‘Oh, Jesus, I hate this fella’ and the guy on the stage heard it, and he had to go through two hours of knowing this.”

Byrne’s own theater experience began with a repertory company called the Project Arts Centre, and soon afterward, he was cast in The Riordans, a long-running soap opera. “It was on every Sunday night: it was a national institution: the entire country came to a standstill. My father used to watch. He watched The Honeymooners and The Flintstones. He used to sit there with tears runnin’ down his face, laughin’ and he used to watch this other thing. Apart from that, he never watched anything. He was a man who came from a time when there was radio and nothin’ else.”

The Byrnes were working-class people with six children (when the father was laid off by the Guinness brewery, the mother went to work as a nurse), and they family has remained very close. “I work to pay my phone bills to Ireland,” Byrne says. Fortunately, his wife, Ellen Barkin, is enthusiastic about her husband’s native country. “She gets off the plane in Shannon and turns into Maureen O’Hara.”

For Into the West, Barkin (playing a cameo role) delivered an excellent Irish accent. “She’s been listenin’ to me for five years,” Byrne says, taking some of the credit. “She’s picked up my inflections, and the funny thing is, I haven’t picked up her rhythms at all. Maybe that’s because in some ways I feel I don’t really belong here. But then again, I speak to New Yorkers who’ve lived here for 50 years, and they tell me they don’t really feel they belong here either.

“My brother-he’d been in a New York airport on his way to somewhere else, and that qualified him to discourse on America-he said to me, ‘You have to be very careful in America, and especially in New York, not to be lookin’ up, because that’s how they know you’re a hick, and they attack you.’ so for the first like two months in New York, I was goin’ around staring down at my feet, afraid to look up in case somebody would say, ‘Oho, Irishman-mug ‘im!’”

“I think that when you come from an intimate city like Dublin, where every street, every house, almost, has a history I relate to, to come to a city where you can’t walk from one end of it to the other in a day is very alienating. I don’t like the environment to oppress me with its hugeness. In Dublin, the buildings are not tall: you can come over the crest of a hill and glimpse the mountains beyond, and the sea. I love Paris too: I feel Paris somehow envelops you. London I find grim, alien, a very cold city.”

Even so, London is the place where he found Ellen Barkin. By that time he’d already made several movies, some good, some not so hot. He’s played King Arthur in Excalibur, a district attorney in Hanna K., a journalist in Defence of the Realm, a dead guy in Julia Julia, and Lord Byron in a Ken Russell picture called Gothic. (Though it wasn’t until 1990, and Miller’s Crossing, that American audiences really sat up and noticed him. Marcia Gay Harden - now having a triumph on Broadway in Angels in America - was Byrne’s lover in that picture. “I think,” she says, “he’s one of the sexiest men in Hollywood. And Ireland. I think he has excellent taste in women, and Ellen has excellent taste in men. He’s dark, funny, he knows lots of poetry…he’s very, very different from the average bear you meet in Hollywood.”

Anyway, the people in London who were casting Siesta had set Ellen Barkin as their female lead and wanted to see Gabriel Byrne. “They needed some vaguely Spanish-looking guy, so I went to meet them. I didn’t know who Ellen was- I thought she was Ellen Burstyn. And of course she didn’t know who I was either, so that put us at a distinct advantage, I felt.”

“She walked through the door of the Mayfair Hotel in a green suit, and she had long blonde hair, and I was struck by the presence of her. We sat down and I started to babble, and I told her some entirely irrelevant story about a cardinal who was found in flagrante delicto with his mistress. She said, “Why did you tell that story?” and I said, “I don’t know; I was nervous. Do you mind if I say something:” She said, “Go ahead.” I said, “You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”

“She said, ‘Thank you.’ I got the job, and three months later, as we were walking down the street, she said, ‘Remember that night in London when you told me I had the most beautiful eyes? Can I tell you something now? They were contact lenses.’ And they were. Those beautiful green eyes. So when they say men are not taken in by exteriors, that’s nonsense.”

In 1988 he and Barkin were married. He disputes stories that she’s difficult to work with. Last April, a man named Gordon Cotler wrote a letter to the New York Times saying he had always thought Barkin would be a star “if some producer didn’t strangle her first.” He said he’d produced a television movie in which she was to play a weaver who lived in a loft in SoHo.

“The craft was never mentioned in the dialogue, nor would the actress be called upon to practice it…” wrote Cotler. “As it happened, a loom turned out to be too much of a hassle…so the set was dressed with a potter’s wheel and a kiln…Ms. Barkin showed up, too one look…and burst into tears…She had prepared to play a weaver, and no way could be she play a potter. She was adamant, she was in despair…” Later, Cotler admitted, Barkin came out of her dressing room and “played the part superbly.”

The letter to the Times made Barkin laugh, “I was an idiot,” she told Byrne. “I could have been a bus driver. It made no difference to the movie.”

All well and good, says her husband, “but I think if she was a man, there wouldn’t be any of this stuff. when Robert DeNiro stands up for himself, they call him a genius. Ellen is a woman who stands up for herself, and I admire anybody who will do that. People say I’m easy to get along with, but you can only push me so far, and then I’ll be twice as bad as Ellen is. I think her reputation is hugely overblown.”

The couple’s little boy, Jack (now four) is already a working actor, having made an appearance in Into the West. “There’s a shot where I come to the caravan,” Byrne says, “and Ellen’s holding a baby. When Jack saw the movie he didn’t recognize himself, and he got really jealous. He said, ‘Mommy, who’s that baby you’re holdin’ there?’ She said, ‘That’s you, Jack.” He said, ‘That’s not me, that’s a girl.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you had your hair real long that time, Jack.’”

Jack now has a baby sister named Romy, which thrills Byrne. He says every man yearns for a daughter. “I had this vision of myself drifting into my dotage surrounded by a family of girls, little Little Women. Well, co course it didn’t quite work out like that. Boys are marvelous, but a daughter- I can’t see Father of the Bridge, which I used to watch blithely, without getting a lump in my throat.”

Soon, he knows, it will be harder to just pick up the children and go where the work is. “It’s already started,” he says, “I was getting ready to go to Denmark, and I suddenly realized I can’t bring them. Before, I was never really bothered about the travel: it was just pack at bag and off you go. Now you begin to say, Which is more important? I don’t even want to think about two years down the line, school and everything.”

Asked for an appraisal of himself as an actor, Byrne is thoughtful. “You know what? I don’t know. I’m not a showy actor. I try to feel the life of the character from within. It’s like what James Joyce said about writing. The only true writing, he said, is when you lower the bucket into the well of your unconscious and you pull it up, and whatever’s in there, you spew it out.

“I believe every actor has like nine lives - metaphorically speaking. When you’ve done your shtick five or six times-even if your shtick is about being totally different in every role-after a while the audience has seen it. You can’t really surprise them anymore, and I wonder sometimes if that isn’t the way it should be. ‘Okay, we’ve seen your thing, now could you please move aside and let’s see somebody else comment on the human condition.’

“But actors go on and go on until eventually they become irrelevant or start to imitate themselves. I was thinking about this the other day when I saw movie with somebody in it who’s incredibly famous, and I said to myself, every film she’s made over the last 15 years has been as empty and as pretty and as detached from reality as a painting that you would pick up in an airport. It looks good, you take it home, and then you say, ‘This isn’t about anything.’ I know this woman, and she is so removed from reality that she can’t be in a room unless the lighting is just so, and it’s sad. Though it’s not said for her, because she doesn’t even know.”

Unlike that woman, Byrne is not removed from reality, and he doesn’t imitate himself. He keeps moving, changing, trying. A while back, he read a book he liked-it was In the Name of the Father, based on the story of Gerry Conlon, accused of being an IRA terrorist and imprisoned by the British for 15 years. “I went and met the guy who wrote it, and he gave me the rights to it for a dollar, and I said okay, I can’t promise it’ll have Arnold Schwarzenegger in it, but I’ll get the movie done. So I found a writer who was reading his short stories in a café in the East Village, and we did a treatment, and again, I took it to Jim Sheridan and then Daniel Dan-Lewis came aboard, and Emma Thompson, and that will be by second time as a producer.”

“It’s not that I know how to put a movie together financially, because I don’t, but I was always sitting at a table saying to people, ‘That’s a good idea: why don’t we do it? I recognize an idea when I hear it.”

Lark in the Clear Air is another idea that sang to him. He is going to make it in Ireland, he and the Missus will act in it, and he will also direct. “It’s about the Cuban missile crisis and how a 10-year-old boy averts the third world war. He thinks he stops it through magic.”

Is he scared of directing, or does he view it as a natural progression?

“Funnily enough, I’m not scared at all. I’m scared of acting, but not of directing. It’s just a matter of juggling the pieces. I know what I want to say, and I know what I want it to look like. But it takes so much time to direct a movie, that’s what I have against it.”

He feels time nipping at his heels. “I was saying to Ellen the other night, ‘You now, life goes so fast, it’s like the blink of an eye. God, when you look in the mirror, you say, What happened to the last 20 years? What have I done?”

“And she said, ‘Are you off your head? What have you done? You’ve done everything!’ But I think everybody feels it goes like that.”