GABRIEL BYRNE

INTERVIEW - July 1992
By Lisa Liebmann

NOT SINCE ROBERT TAYLOR AND MONTGOMERY CLIFT HAS THE CINEMA HAD A LEADING MAN WITH THE BROODING ROMANTICISM OF IRISH ACTOR GABRIEL BYRNE

Gabriel Byrne is very handsome. At 42, the Irish actor has some of the brooding energy of Alan Bates or Al Pacino. His complexion, lustrous and maritime, is made up of the sort of dusky pinks and blues that recall two fabled beauties of old Hollywood, the Taylors Robert and Elizabeth. And the rugby-boyishness of Byrne’s tousled demeanor is set off by an ineffable female something-a crucial something a la Montgomery Clift.

Byrne’s first movie was as Uther Pendragon, fearsome father of the bastard King Arthur, in John Boorman’s 1981 epic, Excalibur. Later, as a moody Lord Byron in Ken Russell’s perfervid Gothic (1986), he played a mean game of house with his young married hosts, the poetic Shelleys. He is best know, no doubt, for his performance as the lieutenant and betrayer of irish mobster Albert Finney in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing (1990). Meanwhile, a sexy bit of fluff called Siesta (1987) dramatically changed Byrne’s private life. He played Ellen Barkin’s flame, a torrid Andalusian aerialist, and the two actors subsequently married.

He’s not yet a household name, but Cool World could set that straight when it is released this month. Directed by Ralph Bakshi, the film is a wizardly concoction of live action and animation in which Byrne stars alongside Kim Basinger and Brad Pitt. This fall, he co-stars with Bridget Fonda in the American version of La Femme Nikita and with Barkin in Into the West, an Irish fairy tale that Byrne also helped produce.

When I turned up for our mid-afternoon appointment in April - poolside at the Sunset Marquis in Hollywood - Byrne was in the midst of an intense tete-a-tete with his wife, who, in hip Hollywood fashion, was looking impeccably ashen. She said hello very quickly and left. Legal pad in hand, I assumed Barkin’s chair, feeling, for the first time ever, like an accountant.

I USED TO SEE YOU AND ELLEN IN NEW YORK FROM TIME TO TIME, AT A PLACED CALLED JERRY’S, IN SOHO, BUT I HAVEN’T IN A WHILE. HAVE YOU MOVED OUT HERE?
No, no, we’re just here for a few weeks longer-I’m still on standby for Cool World, and I’m just finishing Nikita. Oh, yeah, we haunt Jerry’s. We practically live there, because it’s very near Ellen’s old apartment.

YOU STILL LIVE IN THE APARTMENT?
We’ve kept it, but we recently bought a house in upstate New York, quite close to the city.

IN FACT, I REMEMBER SEEING ELLEN VERY PREGNANT, THEN AGAIN MAYBE A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, HAVING LUNCH WITH YOU AND THIS GREAT BIG BABY-A BOY?
A boy, yeah. He’s about two-and-a-half now.

AND YOU TAKE HIM EVERYWHERE YOU GO?
Yea, it’s still easy. (brightening) He has traveled more in two years than my father did in his entire life. Paris, Rome, London, New York, everywhere. But he’s got a nice thick Irish accent, which I’m really glad about.

HOW DID YOU MANAGE THAT?
He’s got a wonderful woman taking care of him-Ann McAfee from Belfast. And there’s me. It’s two against one: Ellen’s accent is not a pronounced New York accent-at least I don’t think it is-so the irish won out! It’s a really cute accent.

WHEN DID YOU FIRST COME TO AMERICA?
Well, I was in Miami once, a long time ago. I was only in the airport, but I talked about it for the next two years. Whenever anyone in Ireland would ask me about America, I’d just improvise around my airport impressions. I was 37 years old by the time I first came to New York.

WITH ELLEN, WHEN YOU WERE DONE SHOOTING SIESTA IN SPAIN?
Ellen and I didn’t really get together until six months after that, and I had already come to America. When we finished filming Siesta she said, ‘If yo come to New York, give me a shout.’ So I eventually did give her a shout, and that was it. (laughs) A fatal shout. But I came to L.A., first of all, to see John Huston, who was very ill at the time. He lived in Ireland for many years, you know, as a sort of country squire-he rode to hound, that kind of life. So there he was in the hospital, breathing through a tube. He still had tremendous vitality. He had emphysema, and he told me that he would wake up at 3:00 a.m. and smoke a cigar.

DO YOU-LET’S SEE IF I GOT THIS RIGHT-DO YOU “RIDE TO HOUSE”?
(laughs) It’s something like that. But no. I grew up in Dublin in the ‘50s-it was still sort of semi-rural then-and my father worked in the Guinness brewery as a laborer, until he was made redundant.

REDUNDANT?
Yes, obsolete. Then he became like the wife at home, and my mother-most unusually, for that time - went to work instead, as a nurse. It was a little strange in those days to see a man cook.

WHEN DID YOU BECOME AN ACTOR?
I was 28 or 29 when I started. I’d done basically everything. I had worked as a bartender, a plumber, a maid…

YOU WORKED AS A MAID?
Yeah, well, I never quite made it to plumber. I also tried to be a journalist. I had this romantic idea that by learning typing and shorthand you could work on a local paper and work yourself up through the ranks. Then I went back to school, and studied archaeology and Celtic studies-Gaelic and Welsh-at University College in Dublin. And I lived in Spain for about two years.

HOW DID THAT COME ABOUT?
I had also studied Spanish, so I was able to get a job as a translator and gave private classes to people who wanted to learn English and didn’t midn paying to listen to me for an hour a week. I have always loved Spain - Hemingway and al that - and it just seemed to me to be a place where you could go and have some passionate adventure happen to you.

AND?
Well, to be a dark-haired Irishman in Spain was a bit like being a Spaniard who couldn’t speak proper Spanish. I should probably have gone to Norway, where I would have stuck out more. I returned to Ireland and became a teacher. But I still get homesick for Spain. I brought 57 girls to Spain once-just myself and the headmistress. I was teaching Spanish, and I wanted them to experience the place. What I accomplsihed, I’m afraid, was to ignite the fire of 57 love affairs - that I hope were never consummated, but you never know. I’d go up to where we were staying, and there were guys everywhere, hanging off the balcony, just all over the place. We’d have to pry everyone apart with crowbars at the end of every evening. We spent the rest of the year at school writing love letters-you know,learning how to say ‘I miss you very much’ in Spanish.

HOW ABOUT YOUR OWN LOVE SCENES?
Personally, I’m not too crazy about them. When I see a script with a wild, passionate love scene, I tend to say, Oh no, please. The one thing you can say about making love is that it’s spontaneous. But when you have to take your clothes off in front of a bunch of strangers, surrounded by prop guys and fellows scratching their asses, all the while watching your toes to make sure you’re not blocking the leading lady…it’s a little inhibiting.

I CAN UNDERSTAND. BUT NOW I HAVE SPANISH BOYS AND IRISH SCHOOLGIRLS AND NUDE SCENES SPINNING IN MY HEAD - AND I STILL DON’T KNOW HOW YOU STARTED ACTING.
I was always interested in the theater, and some of the girls asked if I would start a drama class. So that’s what they and I ended up doing every day after school. We’d work on plays till eight o’clock at night. But I was starting to find teaching depressing. I loved working with kids, but they’re more ruthless than a pack of hounds around a fox. I still wake up from nightmares-and it’s been 11 years now-about correcting exams. So I decided to try acting for a year.

WHERE?
Jim Sheridan, who co-wrote and directed My Left Foot, was starting a theater group then, so I worked with him. It was very exciting to be in Dublin in 1978-1979. U2 started at that time, and so did the revival of Irish folk music. In poetry there was Seamus Heaney…there was an explosion of stuff. And it was the first time in probably a century that a group of actors came together with a vision. Liam Neeson, for example, was also in our company-a lot of very good people-and we did repertory, new plays, experimental stuff, everything. And it happened that John Boorman came and saw me in a prison drama called The Liberty Suit, written by peter Sheridan, Jim’s brother. And Boorman put me in Excalibur, and that was it. He shot the film in Wicklow, ireland, literally in them fields behind his house. I think every member of Irish Equity was able to claim they were in the movie.

ALL THOSE PEOPLE IN ALL THAT ARMOR! DID YOU ALL CHANGE IN BOORMAN’S HOUSE OR SOMETHING?
(laughs) Well, no, we did have trailers. I had never acted in a film before, and I thought you could just do something once and go home. But there was one long scene that began with me and 45 horsemen and finished with me sitting alone on a tree. My armor was sticking into my throat so that I couldn’t manage even a sip of tea or water, and I had this one line-a made-up, bullshit line, sort of half-Old English and half-Gaelic-that I was forced to repeat until I was completely cross-eyed with dehydration. I remember Nicol Williamson, who played Merlin, looking at me in that amazing way of his, sort of cocking an astonished brow. And after a long while he said (does Williamson’s nasal voice): “Could you please tell me what it is that you’re saying?” So again I uttered it: (booms effortfully) “An’ all Na’ Drach!” and he said to me, “Jesus Christ, I thought you were saying I want my granny.

HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO GET YOUR FILM INTO THE WEST PRODUCED?
It’s a story I had been attracted to for years-a friend of mine in Dublin had come upon it-and I basically brought the script to Miramax and they got on board. It’s a poetic fantasy about two children and this white horse who comes from the sea to lead them on a strange and mysterious journey.

TWO BOYS?
Yes. And the father tries to follow. The mother is dead, you see, and he has lost contact with…with life, really, because of his grief. It’s set among the gypsies of Ireland, and the entire cast is Irish, except for Ellen, who plays a sort of good witch who helps the father or his search. She has access to the ancient lore of travelers, ancient wisdom.

DOES ELLEN DO AN IRISH ACCENT?
Yes. She does it really well, too.

ANY OTHER PROJECTS CLOSE TO YOUR HEART?
I’ve written a film that I’m also driecting. In Ireland, at the end of the year. It will be a short feature, probably with Ellen, about the effect the Cuban missile crisis had in Ireland. That was the first time I remember the world being a fearful place.

WHAT’S COOL WORLD ABOUT?
I play a cartoonist who’s had to go to jail because he’s killed his wife’s lover; he caught them in flagrante. But while in jail he becomes very famous for his cartoon strip he invented called “Cool World”-you know, where everybody’s cool. Then he gets out of jial and goes to Las Vegas, and he’s propelled into this other world where he meets Kim Basinger, who plays a cartoon character called Holli Would. And she’s obsessed with An-Margret in Viva Las Vegas. The only way for her to escape from Cool World is to make love with someone in the real world. So she seduces me, and the whole balance of the universe is distorted. There are all sorts of cataclysmic events.

ARE WE TALKING ABOUT ACTORS WORKING AGAINST BLUE SCREENS?
That’s right. The blue screen. It was like being sedated for three months. What was supposed to be there never was, and what was there wasn’t. Not many people noticed a difference, which was worrying. But I noticed. I became intensely aware, for instance, of objects instead of people.

OH DEAR.
But the real fear is that you’ll look like a total idiot. You have to pretend, for instance, that there’s this thing jumping out at you, or play a scene as if a gang of thugs were chasing you from behind, but you’re improvising with nothing-the director might say something like, “Just knock on the door and we’ll fill in the details”-and you’re worrying that people, when they watch the movie, will wonder why you don’t seem to be reacting to, say, a huge truck flying right over you. O rin the seduction scene with Kim Basinger, for instance: she wasn’t there, either.

THAT CERTAINLY SOLVES THE LOVE-SCENE PROBLEM.
(laughs) That’s right. She bloody wasn’t there. Then I got to do some stuff with Brad Pitt, and I would wonder, is he really there? Am I here? At one point I turned into a cartoon and I didn’t know it. I was being “doodle-ized,” you see. It’s this amazing process they’ve got. I could say to the technical guy on the set things like, “I’d like to see the teddy bears having a picnic over there wave to me”-and there they’d be, waving. WOW!
No, really. It was like an LSD trip. I even got him to put in some leprechauns.