THE QUIET FIRE OF GABRIEL BYRNE

ROLLING STONE - November 1, 1990
Nancy Bilyeau

The Star of Miller’s Crossing Shines in Gangster Role

Gabriel Byrne is not the type you’d expect to do Bogart impressions for the hell of it. A forty-year-old Irish actor with black hair and penetrating blue eyes, Byrne plays serious men, passionate men, brooding men. But he was shooting a scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Miller’s Crossing, a tale of intrigue and betrayal among mobsters set in 1929, and while it’s not a parody of crime movies like The Maltese Falcon, it is teeming with hard-drinking, double-crossing gun toters.

The scene, Byrne says, was a tense confrontation between his character, Tom, and tom’s roundheeled lover, Verna, in a doorway at night. “For a joke, I did my really bad imitation of Humphrey Bogart,” says Byrne. “Ethan just said, “Thank God you don’t really play the role like that.”

Byrne smiles at the memory of his prank; he clearly relishes good stories and tells them with self-deprecating wit. Between sips of mineral water in a Manhattan restaurant, he notes that Bogart really wasn’t much of an inspiration in playing Tom, an Irish immigrant who is the shrewd right-hand man of Leo (Albert Finney), a political boss in an unnamed American city. “I looked at all those movies from the Twenties with Bogart, James Cagney and Paul Muni, and there was really nothing I could take from them, “he says.

To gain insight into Tom, Byrne says, he headed for SoHo café to watch chess matches. “The intensity with which these guys play was interesting because it’s about working from in here,” he says, tapping his head. “:That helped me a lot.” Then there’s the mysterious man who Byrne says always appears with the pope in public: “You know nothing about this guy, and yet he’s the one who knows to the last cent what the Vatican is worth. Then there’s a guy named Richelieu…”

Chess players, the man behind the pope, and a cardinal of the 17th century may seem uncommon role models for a guy playing a gangster. But then, Byrne has made uncommon choices throughout his career. “I’ve always tried to pick films that are interesting and offbeat,” he says. Byrne’s roles include the lusty father of King Arthur in Excalibur (1981), a glowering DA in Hanna K. (1983), a relentless journalist in Defence of the Realm (1985), a hyperdecadent Lord Byron in Gothic (1986) , and a sexy trapeze-artist instructor in Siesta (1987). In the last film, he played the lover of Ellen Barkin, who he married in 1988; they have a one-year-old son, Jack.

There’s a big risk, however, in going for unusual roles. Byrne has appeared in more than a dozen films in the last decade, yet he’s never starred in one that’s succeeded both artistically and commercially. That could change with Miller’s Crossing. As visually stunning as the Coen brother’s two earlier films, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, it is more emotionally complex. And despite the presence of actors like Finney and John Turturro, Byrne carries the picture. He turns in a subtle yet forceful performance as an impassive man concealing deep pain.

“I’ve known people like Tom - totally in charge and totally unhappy,” says Byrne. But portraying someone who tries to stay two steps ahead of his enemies didn’t come easy. “He was a difficult character to play, because he’s enigmatic, mysterious,” Byrne says. “How do you know how much to give and how much to leave to the imagination? I used to say to Joel, ‘Is the audience going to buy this? Are they not just going to say, “Oh, we don’t care what he does”?’ And Joel said, “No this guy is a thinker, a plotter, and a man who knows how to use power.”

Of working with the Coen brothers - Joe directed, Ethan produced and they co-wrote the script - Byrne says: “The script was watertight. There was no improvisation on set. They’re meticulous. Having said that, they’re also the most down-to-earth, unhassled guys you could meet. And they’re very funny.”

Byrne, his Bogart impression not withstanding, would like to be funny, too - onscreen that is. Says Byrne, “This is like the 98-year-old nun who’s been in an enclosed order all her life and is asked, “Is there anything that you regret? Yeah, I guess that I’d better admit it, I would love to do comedy.” But the closest he’s come is playing the straight man to Shelley Long in the forgettable Hello Again. According to Marcia Gay Harden, who plays Verna in Miller’s Crossing, Byrne has real potential for comedy. “He’s charming and full of yarns about Ireland,” Harden says. She adds, though, that Byrne was a trifle aloof during the film’s shooting in New Orleans. “There was a contingent of people always going out who would say, ‘Oh, there’s still one restaurant we haven’t tried yet,’ and Gabe wasn’t a part of that. He and Ellen were enjoying their time together. I don’t want to say he’s enigmatic. He’s the strong, silent, sexy type, and that’s what Tom was like, too.”

One reason for Byrne’s reluctance to play the Hollywood game could be that he came to acting comparatively late. His first career choice one he practiced for a short time after graduating from Ireland’s University College, was archaeology. “The whole idea of someone who just goes off to a totally exotic climate and discovers a lost city, that to me is absolutely fascinating,” Byrne says, “But I found that my romantic expectations as an archaeologist and the reality clashed greatly. It was rain, mud, and scraping things with little brushes and being shouted at and bumping into people in confined spaces and not finding the lost city, you know?” After several years of teaching Spanish - or, as he puts it, “teaching the present tense and past tense and Don Quixote to totally uninterested 17-year-old girls” - and appearing in amateur theater, he was invited to join Dublin’s prestigious Abbey Theater Company. Television work followed, and he made his first film, Excalibur, when he was 30.

Miller’s Crossing looks to be a career peak for Byrne. The film snared the opening-night slot of the New York Film Festival, by Byrne is cautious. “I’m not even going to think about how it’s going to be received,” he says. “It’s such a roll of the dice.”

Byrne has shot two other movies that haven’t been released yet: the thriller Dark Obsession and the pirate adventure Shipwrecked. While Byrne and Barkin pursue their careers, they lead what he calls a “nomadic existence”: living in Ireland, in New York City or on location. He’s just come from Los Angeles, where Barkin was shooting the comedy Switch, and he is clearly eager to head for Ireland. “You can turn off a road,” he says, “and be in a park, and it’s unspoiled, and 5,000 people aren’t trying to get in.”

Shaking his head, Byrne tells a story about life in L.A.’s claustrophobic film community. The highest compliment people thought they could bestow on Byrne and Barkin’s son was that he was cute enough to be in pictures. Says Barkin: “We told them, ‘Thanks, but he doesn’t want to be typecast as a baby. He was to keep his options open.”