Gabriel Byrne is bored. As he busies himself pouring coffee and offering pastries in an opulent room at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin he explains why there are certain topics that he’s not willing to discuss in interviews any more: the Irishman in America trope, his children and the abuse he suffered at the hands of the church, which was documented in his 2021 memoir Walking with Ghosts.
“I just want to be asked about different things,” he says, settling into a chair. “Yeah, I work in this business, but I’m interested in much more than just . . .” He allows a smile as he waves his arm around “. . . this.”
Byrne, who has established himself as one of the great Irish actors, is in laidback form. Over the course of an hour the 73-year-old will prove himself an engaging conversationalist and an excellent raconteur, discussing everything from his career to football, politics, cinema, trans rights and life in his adopted home town of Rockport in Maine.
However, we are here to discuss Byrne’s part in telling the story of another well-known Irish exile. In Dance First he plays Samuel Beckett in James Marsh’s biopic, which explores the playwright’s life through his most important relationships. The film also stars Fionn O’Shea as the young Beckett and Aidan Gillen as James Joyce.
The actor’s relationship with Beckett’s work has matured, he says, having initially not been able to forge an emotional connection. He was nervous about portraying a literary titan on screen, although it’s not his first rodeo, having played Lord Byron in Gothic, Ken Russell’s 1986 psychological horror.
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“You’re nervous about any role,” he admits, his Dublin burr still intact after decades spent in the US. “But I just thought that if I can make him real to me, then maybe that’ll go some way towards people understanding that behind this mythical man there was a very conflicted person: a man who felt very, very deeply about the world, who was filled with doubt and shame and regret and joy and laughter, who cheated on his wife, who was incredibly kind and incredibly cruel. So he could not have written the way he wrote unless he deeply felt those things. It just happened that the form he used was revolutionary.”
Byrne revealed more of himself in Walking with Ghosts, which chronicled sometimes painful parts of his life. The memoir, which spawned a successful one-man show, was more about making sense of his journey than it was about stories from his career.
“Sometimes I think about it and I can’t understand how I went from Walkinstown to working in Hollywood,” he says. “I wasn’t interested in writing a tell-all. I could’ve written one like that and it would’ve been juicy.” He smiles. “I was more interested in seeing myself in the history — or the social history — of Dublin, London and New York. And everybody in the book is dead, so it’s looking back over those people and trying to figure out the influence they had on the formation of who I am. Everybody has that story.
“My story is a little bit different, but there’s no such thing as an ordinary life story. Everybody’s life is extraordinary.”
Byrne always knew that he would leave Ireland, having first left at the age of 11 to join a seminary in England before returning and leaving again at 21 to work in Spain. “I think I probably would’ve gone to London no matter what I’d done. America? No. But London certainly. But I never had any map, or ambition, or anything like that.
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“I look at young actors now and the difference is unbelievable. They have résumés, they’re at the gym and they’re going directly from Dublin to Hollywood. There’s no in-between, there’s no steps of the ladder. And stardom in Los Angeles is now a career move rather than a by-product of a journey, which it was back then.”
Although he is based in the US, Byrne keeps up with Irish literature — naming books by Paul Lynch and Paul Murray as recent favourites — and Irish film. Talk turns to the latter and he notes how An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) was the last film that he really loved. “What a leap forward that was to do an international film in Irish,” he says. “I don’t think anybody would have predicted that 15 or 20 years ago. It’s a fantastic achievement.”
As evidenced by many of his film choices — many of them far from the most lucrative option — he remains passionate about independent film. He uses the streaming service Curzon Home Cinema and plans to see Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak at the Irish Film Institute, citing the director as the “best film-maker to come out of Britain in the 20th century”.
Prime Video and Netflix have moved into the space once occupied by mid-budget films, he says, and that has had a knock-on effect. He has featured in various big-budget TV series in recent years, including War of the Worlds.
“I do miss the days of independent film from different countries that were about things that I could identify with, where the emotion and not the spectacle or the sensation [takes precedence]. Because that’s what I think has happened in a lot of films, at the expense of emotion.
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“You now get younger and younger audiences saying it’s too long or too boring when they can watch TikTok deal with the most complicated subjects in 45 seconds. Our attention spans have gone right down, so the idea of hanging around for character development and emotion is not predominantly what film is about any more.
“I don’t know what the future of independent cinema is. I don’t even know if cinema as we know it is going to last because you’ve got five hundred television stations, the eradication of those middle financial budgets, [a lack of] attention span, the advent of AI . . . all these things are going to impact what we used to think of as independent film. The huge influence Hollywood and corporate America have on independent art can be truly scary.”
Byrne holds passionate views about corporate influence on art, sport and politics. He remonstrates about the English Premier League. “I don’t want to look at a team that’s been bought by Sheikh Mansour,” he says. “And at the risk of offending Manchester City supporters, I never want them to win because it’s the most expensive team in the world — that idea that you can now buy your way to league success. It’s the same in music and politics.
“I mean, it’s the Democrats and the Republicans [in US politics] and whether you see a huge difference between them any more, I don’t know. But it’s not the Republicans any more, it’s the Trumpists. There are some people who would say that in America it’s a corporatocracy not a democracy. So I look at the influence of corporations on football and sport and it’s so changed. That’s one of the great things about Irish sport — people play for the love of the game and the love of their county.”
The conversation takes another turn to discuss one of the issues dominating the news today. Byrne is open about his views on trans rights. “I really feel an empathy with people who are desperately trying to establish an identity that they believe is absolutely inherent and essential to them,” he says. “And the avalanche of hate that they are met with . . . it’s unforgivable in my opinion that we cannot embrace the idea that people should be free to live the life that they want.
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“It used to be gay people,” he adds, noting how he travelled back to Ireland in 2015 to vote in the marriage equality referendum. “This idea that everybody has to be like everybody else in the tribe, that if you don’t think like everyone else — that’s an extremely repressive and dangerous society. And I think the next step in censorship is self-censorship, where you think, I’d better not say that.
“I understand the perspective of people like the writers Graham Linehan and JK Rowling — that is their opinion and they should be free to say it, whether one agrees with it or not — but it’s the easy jump to hatred that I can’t stand.”
At home in Maine, where he lives with his wife, Hannah, and their young daughter, Byrne (who also has two grown-up children) enjoys a leisurely life. “Very slow would not describe it,” he says, laughing. “Very, very slow. But I love downtime. I really value it.”
He likes to read and “wander around and take photographs. And I like not being in LA. I like not talking about films. I’m very, very grateful for the fact that I have the luxury of saying, ‘Well, I’ll do this, but I don’t want to do that.’ I think as you get older the reasons you do things change. To me it’s not so important now to be a part of the frenetic business of film-making.”
What’s left to do, then? Over the course of his career Byrne has played a farmer, a priest, a psychotherapist, a sheriff, a musketeer, King Arthur’s father, a Mob consigliere and even Satan, to name but a few roles. He has conquered Broadway and has penned a successful memoir. Writing fiction? It’s a possibility, he says.
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“I’m tremendously curious about people and tremendously curious about the world and where it’s headed,” he admits. “But people, individually, fascinate me — more so than any movie or any play. And if I can find a form for all this stuff that’s going around in my head, I will write it. Everybody has their story, so I would like to do that because I feel like that would fulfil me. And you would also be talking about reality as it is, which is more compelling in my opinion than anything fictional . . . unless you happen to be a Sebastian Barry, or one of these great Irish writers.”
He has unsuccessfully attempted scriptwriting, he says, but directing is something that he has toyed with, having directed the play James X in New York more than a decade ago. “Direct? Yeah, because I’ve worked with a lot of bad directors. Really awful directors,” he says. “You’re a week into a film and you think, how did this person get to be a director? Who is buying this guy? And that’s dispiriting.
“But to make a film . . . it’s probably too late now because it takes two or three years and I don’t know that I want to spend three years trying to get the money to make a film that may just appear for a week and then disappear. The reason for doing it is what’s important, of course, not what kind of reception it gets, but you’re much more in command of your creative self when you’re writing something.”
With the extensive and impressive body of work he now has under his belt, I ask him whether he thinks about legacy.“I don’t think legacy is important at all,” he says firmly (although he will later get in touch to clarify that he is proud of developing the New Irish Arts Center in New York).
“When you’re dead you’re dead. I read an interview that this woman did with dying people, about the things that they regret. Very few of them said, ‘I wanted to make a movie.’ And very few of them said, ‘I wanted to write a book.’ It was always, ‘I should have spent more time with the people I love,’ and, ‘I should’ve been more present.’
“And honestly, I’m not being self-effacing about this, but I don’t think I’ve done anything that deserves a legacy. But if someone says, ‘Y’know what? He gave me a dig-out when I needed it, he was a nice bloke, he was kind.’ That’s the legacy, nothing else.”
He shrugs again, half-smiling. “I don’t think I’ve sculpted a David, or written a Ulysses or a Waiting for Godot. Now that’s a legacy that will go on and on and on. But even Beckett would say, ‘What the hell? It’s only a play.’ ”
Dance First is in cinemas on Nov 3 and on Sky Cinema in December
