Chris O’Dowd tells Jimmy Fallon: ‘Gaelic football is very rough, brutal but beautiful’

The actor Chris O’Dowd has been telling a bemused American audience about Gaelic football, The Late Late Show and other aspects of his typical Irish childhood.

"I love the World Cup, and I like soccer," he told The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, but "I was more of a Gaelic football guy." He explained: "Gaelic football is a sport they just play in Ireland. It's played a lot by farmers, people from the countryside. Very rural, very rough, brutal but beautiful. Like a big wave, or having a statue fall on your nuts."

O’Dowd went on to list his GAA injuries, from a broken nose to uneven fingers. “I have the skeletal structure of a very old giraffe,” he said. “But great sport. You should try it – if you like wrestling or death.”

The actor said he was happy to see France win the Fifa World Cup last month. "It was good. The last time they won was in 1998, and I was living in Paris." Fallon asked how he had come to be in the city. "You know, it was odd. I went on a show not unlike this. There's a show in Ireland called The Late Late Show, which is a really long-running talkshow. And they do this thing where the host does kind of an Oprah throughout the course of the show, where he is, like, 'Oh, and we've got, like, this stuff, and everybody in the audience can have one' – you should do that, by the way . . .

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“They did this thing where they said, ‘Okay, we’ve got tickets for this ferry that is going from Rosslare, in Ireland, to France, to Cherbourg, and we’ve got four tickets for everybody in the audience,” O’Dowd said. “And we were kind of drunk students at the time. And so 16 of us headed off on a ferry to France for a day.”

O’Dowd, who was on his first trip abroad, left the group to explore Paris. “I was probably 19. And I thought, Oh, it’s nice: they’ve got bread and wine and cheese. I went to Paris on my own and ended up staying for five months.”

After a typical Irish run-in with “a girl that I knew from home”, and a wild night at a cocktail bar on the Champs-Élysées, he bamboozled the bar’s manager into giving him an appointment to come in the next day for a job interview.

Before the manager arrived at work the following morning O’Dowd tricked one of his colleagues into hiring him. “I said, ‘I’m supposed to start work today,’ and she said, ‘Oh, God, he never tells me anything.’ ”

When the original manager arrived O’Dowd told him that his colleague had already assessed and hired him.

“Dude, you’re a genius!” Fallon said. The audience appeared to agree.