Interview by Brad Balfour

In the dressing room cluttered with mail, dark and like a cozy office with yellow lit lamp, answering machine and the ubiquitous mirror before the vanity table, Gabriel Byrne begins his nearly non-stop exposition of his life. A transplanted Irish Actor whose career has ranged across nearly 45 films, numerous plays a Tony nomination for best actor in a drama for the production of Eugene O'Neills Moon For the Misbegotten and now, a series for ABC Television Madigan Men. Equally drawn to Dublin, Paris and Los Angeles, Byrne now enjoys a more settled life in New York City. From his start as a young actor joining Dublin's young turks theatre scene (which included such actors as Liam Neeson and directors such as Jim Sheridan) to his film debut (John Boorman's Excalibur), he has straddled both sides of the camera as actor (in the acclaimed The Usual Suspects and Miller's Crossing) and producer (In The Name Of The Father), as well as script writer and chronicler (in his book, Pictures in My Head). Byrne continues with Moon - O'Neill's semi-autobiographical last work detailing the travails of broken, desolate alcoholic minor actor James Tyrone, Jr. (based on O'Neill's brother). This tour de force also showcases Roy Dotrice (as Phil Hogan) and Cherry Jones (as Phil's daughter Josie-Tyrone's confessor). Dotrice will join Byrne in his upcoming series as his father. All this effort certainly prompts interest in Byrne.

Even before Byrne settles in, the conversation is off and running, not unlike Byrne's career's when he switched from girls' school teacher to acting. Though he's had some personal bumps along the way (like divorcing actress Ellen Barkin), Byrne has few regrets he expresses publicly. He sits deep into the couch. There's a pervasive air of thoughtfullness behind his expression. We gently joust about a photo shoot which he declines to do. Although I'm disappointed, what he spoke of here is substantial, so I can't help but be appreciative. ALthough he's disinclined towards interviews, this one took on a life of its own. He paces his words carefully yet they roll off his tongue. As the stage manager sends out the first call to get ready, then the second, he continues, conscious of the time while sustaining momentum. As I packed up afterwards, we joked about all the calls he gets from woman asking for house seats. When asked what to do with all the numbers, he says to the house manager with a shrug, "Give them to him (he points in my direction), at least he look a little like Liam Neeson."

You haven't done theatre in a long time. It's a great because you get to have a more of a normal life since you have kids and seem to be a person who has enough of a real life to know how it works.

My kids live in New York and I moved back to NY to be with them. As a convenience I began to consider theatre as a reality. I had done a lot of films but for some years had entertained in my head the fantasy of going back to the stage, because that's where I really began. I started at the Project Theatre in Dublin which was basically a converted warehouse in Essex St. in the middle of Temple Bar before it became fashionable. It was then a ghost town, just warehouses and buildings bearded up. In the middle of this wasteland, which is the center of Dublin ironically enough, was the Project Theatre. We were right beside a tiny little shop run by two women who had been there since 1920 and all they sold was bread and milk.

Liam Neeson, Neil Jordan, Stephen Rea, Jim Sheridan, Colm Meany, we all began in that small little theatre, There wasn't any alternative at that time because theatre was the only way to gain experience as an actor. The Gate and the Abbey were institutions that none of us could ever aspire to because you had to train to get into the Abbey and you had to have a classical drama education to get into the Gate so that didn't fit any of our CV's .We really were part of that first artistic explosion of Dublin in the late '70s and early '80s. U2 were just happening at that time, film was just beginning to happen in a very small way. It was a very exciting time, my memories of theater are very exciting. But obviously once I moved to London I found films very addictive; I loved film and always have. But the stage is really where actors are tested. There's a testing of an actor that just doesn't happen in a movie. When you walk out on stage you have to bring the audience to you and you only have you and the words to do it. Whereas in film a bad performance can be made to look good on screen and a good performance can be made to look mediocre. You are really at the mercy of the director and his team, including the editor, cinematographer, and so forth. But that's not why I came back to the theater. Ijust felt it was time to redefine myself again as an actor.

It's a chance to reassess yourself as a person.

It has been hugely important to me this play: physically, emotionally, artistically, spiritually. There are letters here from people who have come to see the play and have been moved and touched by it in a way that I could never comprehend. It's changed me in very many ways. I'm so glad that I had the courage to do it because there was a time that I sincerely wanted to run in the opposite direction and not do it.

You mean theatre itself?

No, this particular play. Coming back was a big deal, you had to make yourself so vulnerable and you had to expose yourself to the possible humiliation.

You 're playing a failed actor, an alcoholic. It's a classic Irish thing. You have all these burdens on you. It's fascinating how you pull it off creatively and visually. It's a very measured, understated role, compared to how Roy can be so broad and Cherry so dramatic.

Yes the dramatic are of this character is a very subtle one. In that the ultimate emotional climax that you have to hit every night can't be by necessity quick, it has to unfold gradually. I'm playing an actor, but what's interesting about playing anything is that what you are really playing is a person. What that per son actually does for a living is really incidental, you play the person. I felt an enormous sympathy and a tenderness for this man who is based on a real person. He really did live a lot of a things he says in the play, that climatic last emotional scene really did happen. So in a way, you have a responsibility to embody as well as you can this man's crippled life, death and Eugene O'Neill's benediction of him. So in a couple of strokes I establish him as an actor, once the audience is told he's an actor, the audience will believe he's an actor. Actors, weirdly enough, are like everyone else in that they have the same emotions, needs and desires.

More or less, as human beings, we share the same vocabulary. Yes, it is a different style of playing to the way Roy and Cherry play. I don't know if that's a result of my work in film or my instinctive need for understatement. As an actor I'm very much a minimalist, I don't like to do to much, I like to suggest and let the audience fill in as much as possible. Any part you are playing, you are try ing to capture the spirit of someone, and this wounded man who is desperate for forgiveness is someone we can all identify with.

O'Neill's is an amazing playwright and perhaps the most honest of all the American playwrights because he rips open the body and pulls out the guts, saying 'this is what we are.' He doesn't dress it up in any fancy idealization to be a human being. But at the same time all his characters are shot through with a compassion and honesty the audiences identify with. In a way he holds up a mirror to who we are as human beings first and foremost. If he was just specifically an Irish playwright, or an American playwright he would have a limited kind of appeal. I've always thought of him as a universal playwright in the same way Shakespeare is. O'Neill is not Catholic or Irish or American. He is a universal commentator on the human condition.

There is a connection between alcoholism and the Irish but I have to point out that it's a very common assumption that the Irish and alcohol go together. The reality is that on the table of the correlation between alcoholism and nations per capita head, we are seventh down the line. The stigma is no longer true.

People have a misunderstanding there. It's being re-examined.

Yes, I hope so. There are certain assumptions made about Irish people, like that ridiculous quotation by GK Chesterton where he said the Irish were the race that god made mad for all their wars were merry and all their songs were sad. I mean that's a ridiculous quote, but I've seen it used seriously by people as a definition of what the Irish character is. The Irish are prone to melancholy, they are poetic, they foam at the mouth with literary epilepsy, they are the great storytellers, the greatest talkers since the Creeks, they are war-like, they are always fighting about religion, they are drunks... There are more labels attached to being Irish. Now there's a new one that's crept in that they are cool and hip.

See what you guys did, you, Jim Sheridan...

When I came to America I had a real problem, and still do to a certain extent, with being Irish in America. There are very few European actors who work in Hollywood in the top leagues because European actors are regarded as outsiders. And once you have an accent you are regarded as being different. If you look at American films, not only are there very few Irish or English people in them but you rarely see a Korean just playing a Korean, or a Hispanic just playing a Hispanic. They are always labeled or typecast in this culture of labels. The immigrant view is excluded from a great deal of mass culture. When I look out at the audience in this theatre, I don't see one Hispanic or Chinese and I only very rarely see anyone from the black community. Theatre here appeals to a white, upper class- moneyed audience who can afford to go. Mainstream American culture in movies is basically formulaic and is also geared towards the predominance of one cultural view. Although it's a multiracial society, it's not reflected in the forms that we associate theatre with. One rap song is more relevant to the vast majority of young people than theatre is or movies are. Being Irish is to have a label around your neck which is misleading. I know a hundred different Irish people in NYC who have a hundred different personalities.

You 've played within the Irish and European frameworks and at the same time do all kinds ofdmer'can work-independent and commercial, like The Usual Suspects. What allows you to make those transitions?

I've always chosen projects I feel say something about something, I've never actually chosen a bad script, but the amount of scripts that turn into great movies are in the minority. That goes for every actor, you look at Robert Mitchum's biography, there's maybe ten great movies there and there are a hundred that aren't memorable. I've always tried to do films that have a little bit of risk in them and I've always tried to stay out of the mainstream where there is a huge trap. Ironically one of the worst things that can happen as an actor is to have a huge hit. When you are associated with that hit they don't want you to be anything else. What I've tried to do isjump from genre to genre. I believe this business is about longevity and variety. I don't want to be a guy playing the same role over and over. I'm not trying to have another hit that makes more money than the one before. I've always refused to be pigeon-holed so I'll turn up in something that's totally unexpected. One of the things that Liam has talked about is the importance of retaining your Irishness, and at the same time if they want you to play an Israeli or a Frenchman, you can do it.

The irony of you playing the devil and a God--driven man; you 've really covered the spread.

Three or four years ago I decided I was going to start making commercial, studio pictures, but smaller ones. I had worked in the independents up till then, more or less. I decided to do StiRmata, End of Days, Enemy of the State, I enjoyed those pictures. I'd never done an action picture, I enjoyed that, I'd never done a horror or a costume picture like The Four Musketeers. I enjoyed all of them but for my own reasons. If you're gong to play a villain you might as well be the devil. I always wanted to play a priest to see what I look like in the Roman collar.

Did your family say you should have been a priest?

Nobody actually made a comment, but I thought I looked ok with the collar, I could have passed through as a priest. Now I walk through the streets and guys with baseball hats turned backwards all say "Yo, Satan." It just depends on what they've seen on video the night before.

You've worked with some amazing directors.

I like to work with directors that have a passionate perspective on the world. I've been really lucky to have worked with some great European directors like Ken Russell who is a complete nutcase, but great fun to work with. I've worked with some of the leading actors of the past thirty years from Laurence Olivier, Albert Finney and John Gielgud to Ralph Richardson and Kevin Spacey. I've worked with some really great actresses like Vanessa Redgrave. For someone who never went to drama school, it's pretty amazing that I got to work with these people and see how they operate. Still waiting for the hand to tap me on the shoulder saying 'hey you, you're out', because there's always that danger that actors feel that they will get caught out, you know?

You enjoy attending and socializing at events but it almost seems like you put a mask on. While you're not shy, you 're not a crowd person.

No, I'm not a crowd person at all, I treat people with respect when I meet them unless they aren't respectful to me in which case I ignore them. I do find it pres surized and difficult at times to shake a thousand hands, wake up in bad humor and have to talk to people in the street.., it's just human. I'm respectful to people and I hope that they are to me. Ninety-nine percent are but I'm not by nature a crowd lover. As a kid I used to hide under the bed when people would come to the door, there's still a part of me that would look to hide under the bed. I was never one of those people at the center, I was always extremely shy, and still am. But then again they say acting is the shy man's revenge.

I see you working more behind the camera.

I find that fascinating too. There's very little that I wouldn't want to try. I'd be happy to work in publishing, I'd be happy to go back to teaching. I'd really love to teach again, and have had a couple of offers. I'm thinking seriously to take some time out to do that.

You mentioned publishing, I can see you doing more writing or at least working with writers, you have already published one book.

Yes, one book, I'm writing a second at the moment, and I'm going to be finished fairly soon. I'm really looking forward to finishing it. Getting the idea and finishing it are the two most exciting parts.

As a writer, I want to go beyond interviewing. When I have ideas I ask myself should this be a movie, novel or a play? How do you decide?

That's a very good question. You wait and it comes to you. Trying to force a Form on something never really works, it reveals itself to you as the incarnation. It wants itself... this should be a small movie, that should be an article in a newspaper, the other a collaboration. I don't rush the process. I enjoy the process of waiting, finding out and being illuminated.

Who are your realfriends in this business or life, somebody you canjust drop in on?

I suppose my best friend is from Dublin. We still talk all the time after 25 years. I still have wonderful conversations and affections for people I worked with in Dublin theater. I don't think those days will ever be recreated in terms of the excitement and laughter we had, so there's great mutual affection there between us all. I make friends wherever I go. I am a shy person but am open to the moment of friendship. To me that's terribly important and I'm so blessed that I have such wonderful people in my life.

The difficult thing is to meet people you think might be cool to know, but you just don't have the time.

That's true, time is against you and of necessity you can't have thousands of friends. People come into your life for a reason and they go out of your life for a reason. I see it as one long path. People come down side roads and join you for a bit and then they go off on their road. None of us can walk anyone else's path so we must all walk our own path. The best that we do for each other as human beings is help each other along those paths. There's no dictum that says we have to walk the same path forever and ever.

I know you are divorced. Being in the spotlight you must want your kids to have a normal life; at the same time you want them to benefit of this experience. Do your kids share in this much, do they understand or appreciate it?

My kids don't really care what I do, nor should they, nor am I interested in explaining it to them. They understand exactly what I do, we hardly discuss it. They are more interested in the things that kids are interested in. I take fatherhood very, very seriously, my relationship with my kids is the most important thing in my life. My work is secondary. It feeds my work and my work feeds my relationship with them in a strange sort of way. it's a precious time when children are growing up. You have to be their teacher, but you have to be open to being taught by them. My job as a father is to allow them to grow in a way that they need to and not to impose my value judgements on them. If a tree is growing you don't bend it to make it grow into something else, you let the tree grow. Therefore, my job is just to be there and let them grow, and be there when they need me, it's a very beautiful thing. I don't take it lightly ever. This morning I was at my son's graduation ceremony from lower to middle school. It was a touching ceremony, and I'm glad I saw it. He didn't think the ceremony was important but it was very touching and moving to watch my son walk down the aisle with a blazer and tie.

Did you take pictures?

I resented that the church was full of people with video cameras and photographs. I just thought--the church isn't the place for that. Just let this be the moment, why does everything have to be photographed and recorded? Can't you just experience the moment and let that be your memory? It was just a massive paparazzi line. I was thinking if I was the parish priest I would ban all video recorders from the church. There's certain places that should be sacred and off limits.

What's the one film you want to make even if someone else has made it, is there something in mind, some book that you would adapt?

I'd love to have made Amacord, but I couldn't have made it because I'm not Fellini. I'd like to make a really great comedy.

That's a difficult thing, comedy.

Well, me and Roy are going to do a comedy next, for ABC. That's what I've wanted to do. Whatever movies I make, or whatever I do are all my things. There are no roles I would like to play that I haven't played. I've heard young actors say 'I'd love to make a movie like The Usual Suspects, 'I'd love to make a movie like Miller's Crossing, and I say, 'God yea, I made those movies'. Did I make a war movie? No, I'd like to make a really good anti- war movie. For science fiction there's a great book, Time and Again by Jack Finney, great book, New York then, now, that's the one. Except I think Robert Redford has optioned the rights for forever and a day or that Universal has them, but that's a great one. That will be my life's work.

Tell me about the TV series so I don't forget to inform the audience.

It's called Madigan Men. I'm producing and starring. I took the idea to ABC because I wanted to stay in New York with my kids and because I haven't done comedy for a very long time. People don't associate me with comedy. We've already shot the pilot, it's been picked up and we start shooting in August. It's about three generations of Irish men living in New York who explore the secret emotional life of men. I play a divorced architect and Roy plays my father who comes from Dublin to live with me. We live with my son who's 17 years of age. It's about women and men, but mostly about the secret life of men, from an Irish perspective. I'm the executive producer of the show and I'll be able to ride a lot of hobby horses. Each week I'11 have a theme to explore. It will certainly be very Irish in that all the main characters are Irish but it will be Irish people being that universal person as opposed to that Irish-labeled person that we talked about earlier.

It's a very interesting challenge because you haven 't done TV here.

Well years ago I did TV in Ireland. I want to use it to break down Irish stereotypes here in America. One of the preconditions was that I got to stay in New York and they said ok. Its a comedy, it's in New York, I get to be near my kids, be executive producer- it's all my hobby horses. What more can I say? I get to do a movie or a play as well if J want.

You 've been through a lot in your personal life. I hate to refer to you as, but willfor lack of better word, a sex symbol. You are a different kind of sex symbol that attracts a better grade of girls.

Well believe me I get all grades, I don't confine myself to high-grade girls hitting on me, I've been hit on by all grades. Being in movies and being well known as a male actor you become like a woman. You can't sit in a restaurant for very long before people will come up to you and start talking to you. It makes you see the world from another perspective. It's like being a girl, you get stopped, you get whistled at, you get phone numbers, which I must say, at my stage of the game is a great compliment and I won't deride it. Nor can you take it seriously. It's just a pleasant fact of life. And although I denied it for along time, it's something that I really enjoy but don't take seriously at all. I've met some wonderful people because of being an actor. I'm a sex symbol as long as people call me a sex symbol. What am I going to say, that I'm not? I'm really happy that some women think of me that way. I really am.

You've hit 50 and look good. Have you had a mid life crisis and are past it?

Ironically, I find myself at the happiest time of my life. I'm really content. it's not that I can predict anything but I have an equanimity that I didn't have before I went through my mid life. Some people have a great time in their 20's and they don't have such a good time in their 40's. My 20's weren't so good, so it's been the reverse for me. I'm happy to be the age I am at this point in my career and have the future looking like this. Of course no one can see the future, but today... I have a lot of very good days, I feel very blessed that I was given these opportunities. This career has allowed me to develop myself as a person, not just artistically but spiritually as well I really know who I am now, and that has made all the difference. Not just who I am but accepting who I am. That's the key, when you accept who you are then nobody can tell you what to be.