Repeated rejection once mercilessly undermined Patrick Gibson’s confidence. In audition after audition, he’d find himself cruelly pipped at the finish line, corroding his increasingly brittle self-esteem. Despondent, he sat down with his agent to figure out the problem. “I had to understand what the f*** was going on,” says the actor, his pale eyes narrowing. “Why am I never the person in the room they have to have? I’d get down to the last two, and it never happened. It went on like this for ages. For so many jobs.”
Any recognisable roles, I ask. “Yeah, loads. So many that I can’t remember.” He scratches ashy blond hair under a green Yankees baseball cap. “Game of Thrones, I went for Joffrey. That was while I was still in school and I know I got close. Not final two, but I got really close.” There’s others, he says, but his memory is stalling.
“I think it had a lot to do with my confidence. I’d be going into these castings and feel like they had the wrong lad, which was my attitude for so long. It wasn’t healthy. And I needed to realise that.”
Shortly after the heart-to-heart with his agent, opportunity knocked. “My agent called and said, ‘There’s this thing, Plan B [Brad Pitt’s production company] are doing it, and this character feels so right for you.’ And she was right, it fell off the page. Often times you have to do lots of work and with this, it was like . . . it was weird.
“I completely understood Steve Winchell. From the outside, he comes across as an asshole but he knows who he could be, who he should be. And I got that.”
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We met in a sunny Dublin hotel foyer shortly before Christmas. Just days before, his performance as Winchell, a conflicted, brutal lost soul in The OA, began to make ripples. The new series crept onto Netflix without any prior promotion or notice, save for a cryptic trailer, and the social media sphere was promptly intrigued. Hashtags soon declared it a lurid, hallucinogenic fusion of comic-book fantasy, celestial existentialism and murky mystery; Stranger Things meets Twin Peaks meets The Breakfast Club meets The Seventh Seal. Many simply characterised it as indescribable.
“I’ve always tried not to have crazy expectations
It was conceived by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, the creative duo behind The East, and Sound of My Voice. Marling plays Prairie, a blind woman missing for seven years who reappears with her vision restored and a mysterious carving on her back, but refuses to disclose her previous whereabouts. Then she amasses a disparate group of locals — including Gibson’s disaffected high school delinquent — to impart her fanciful story and share her spiritual insight.
With side narratives, chronological chicanery and even synchronised dancing, the eight-part series has divided critics and audiences, variously branding it brilliant or baffling. According to the 21 year-old Dubliner, The OA is less to be watched, more to be experienced. “There’s almost two ways to watch it. It’s a mystery drama with answers to every question, and there are a lot of clues. I see people trying to pick it apart online, finding stuff that I didn’t even know about,” he says.
“But at the same time, you can suspend that stuff and connect on a really human level and go along with the ride. Be open to the show as an experience, whether you’re a sceptic or not,” he adds with a grin, almost bouncing in his seat with enthusiasm. His portrait features, smooth in explanatory mode, crinkle and dimple when he laughs. “I’m trying not to sound too pretentious here.”
The youngest son of two actors, performance is in the blood. His mother, Kate, left it behind to work in marketing, but his father, Richard, is still in the business after a memorable 10-year stint in the BBC sitcom ’Allo ’Allo! as the Nazi buffoon Herr Flick. “Though he’d told me to not really mention that side of things.”
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Growing up in Stillorgan, Gibson participated in after-school drama classes, but met with little success. “I wasn’t allowed to stay in them. I remember briefly doing Betty Ann Norton theatre school and my parents being told, ‘This kid is not designed to be in this environment — he’s too mental.’ I had a stint at Billie Barry [stage school]. Same thing, wasn’t for me. I had no interest in group collaboration, I wanted all eyes on me.”
His self-absorption proved fruitful on the audition circuit, however. He landed a Vodafone commercial at eight years old, then a couple of episodes of The Tudors. By the time he attended Gonzaga College, he was a Lost Boy in Neverland, Sky’s expensive adaption of Peter Pan. “That’s where the penny dropped. That’s when I realised, yeah, I really want to do this.”
A year later, a small role in Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did solidified his ambition. “Working with those guys, Lenny and Jack [Reynor], it opened up a new side of acting that I had no idea about.”
Studying philosophy at Trinity, at Abrahamson’s suggestion, Patrick struggled to balance work and academia. “I missed classes, tutorials. I missed my exams, two years running,” he recalls. After landing The OA last year and relocating to New York for five months, his studies were abandoned. “I will go back, some day,” he says, “and I still read those books — Becker’s The Denial of Death; The Singularity is Near. I’m reading a lot of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
“So much of acting is to do with experience and you have to draw from something. Philosophy makes you think in a different way. It makes you consider any option when it comes to any scenario. And that can only be a benefit.”
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In a casual white jumper and trainers, thin gold chain around his neck, bulky and handsome, Gibson is an urban frat bro with an intelligently likeable, soulful centre. His maturity offers a necessary depth to The OA’s Steve, while his energetic humour is charming — particularly so in his frank description of the character’s overtly sexual scenes. “It’s a delicate situation because you and the other person have to be in it together, and I want to always be as respectful as I can,” he says.
“But there’s worse things than taking all your clothes off in front of a working crew. I think it’s gas. Everyone takes it so seriously and they’re all so stoic and respectful and I’m going around wearing a sock saying, ‘C’mon, lads, I can’t be the only one who finds this really funny.’”
Now based with his father in London, travelling back to his mother’s home in Donnybrook as often as possible, “to be given out to for making noise going up the stairs at three in the morning”, Gibson is looking forward to a busy 2017. He’ll next be seen in Idris Elba’s political series Guerrilla, followed by a lead in Starz’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Princess.
“Sword-fighting training on Tuesday; fitting for a suit of armour on Wednesday; horse-riding training on Thursday — that stuff is dope.”
Netflix is expected to green light a second series of The OA, as it tends to do with its own output. There’s another forthcoming project brewing that could push him into the leagues of Fassbender and Farrell. Gibson quietly drops a string of the big names he says are involved, and absorbs the response, chuffed. But then he checks himself. “I’ve always tried to not have crazy expectations. Oftentimes you think something is going to be different to how it is and this job has taught me to enjoy the experience while it happens; don’t be thinking of anything else. Though that’s sometimes easier said than done.”
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The actor gathers himself to head off for the rest of this sunny afternoon and I wonder if he’s being recognised yet? “Yea, a little. It’s weird,” he remarks sheepishly. “I’m hearing, ‘There’s yer man . . . ’ but I don’t think they know where from yet.
“It’s definitely better than when I used to work in this cocktail bar in town and I’d get, ‘You’re the lad from What Richard Did. Aw, shame, looks like the acting isn’t going too well.’”