'It's Willy! You can't say no. Why would you say no?'

He's never quite been a star, but from an extraordinary start in life Harris Yulin has built a great career – and he is most at home on stage, he tells FIONA McCANN

THE NAME Harris Yulin may not sound familiar. But see a photograph of this septuagenarian American actor and it’s instant recognition. His is the face of so many hard-bitten cops in Hollywood blockbusters, of the agenda-driven foil to Harrison Ford’s noble Jack Ryan in

Clear and Present Danger

, or the corrupt Miami cop trying to shake down Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in

Scarface

.

Yet despite having been seen by so many in such a variety of roles, he can still stroll around Temple Bar market on a Saturday afternoon, buying vegetables for dinner – he extols the health properties of cucumber – without being mobbed by star-struck fans or tabloid photographers. “I’m not that high- profile,” he says with a smile, though he is occasionally approached by people who know that face from somewhere.

He has been acting on stage and screen for more than four decades – a lengthy career by Hollywood standards, at least. “I just do the next thing that comes along,” is how he sees it. “Whatever comes along that I want to do or that I feel I need to do. Oftentimes the things one does you don’t think of doing or you have no idea that you’re going to do.”

A case in point is his latest role, that of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, which opens at the Gate Theatre in Dublin on Tuesday. "I'd no idea I was going to do Willy or that I had it particularly in my mind to do Willy. Then it happens, and you say well, it's Willy! You can't say no. Why would you say no? You are an actor, right?"

So how did he end up in a Dublin theatre playing a character he never thought he’d play? “It’s the play, the part. It’s Willy Loman and Arthur [Miller]. I’ve a long connection with Arthur,” he says, having appeared in several Miller plays over the course of his acting life. “I was kind of surprised when it came up, and I thought about all the reasons why I couldn’t do it, and then realised that I had to.”

He has taken on one of the best-known characters in US theatre, a man who has been let down by the cruelty of the capitalist system in which he placed so much faith. Put like that, Miller’s 1949 work seems particularly relevant for our times. “There’s a lot about American capitalism in it, American corporate structure, if you will. But I think besides that the play certainly resonates in the sense that we’re in a situation now where nobody knows what the f**k has happened, essentially.

“Fintan [O’Toole] has written a book about it; there’s a guy doing a play over here at the Peacock, an economist, trying to explain it to people; and even the guys who are the perpetrators are saying, ‘I don’t know, I don’t understand,’ so that certainly resonates in terms of the play.”

And at the centre of it all is Willy Loman, the disenchanted salesman haunted by past promises of a future that never materialised. How much does Yulin identify with the broken man he is playing? How much of his own experience can he bring to Loman? “If you don’t have something to say about a person, then why are you playing them? If you don’t respond to it, then you’re in the wrong part.”

As he speaks in thoughtful, unhurried tones of the process of becoming a man like Willy Loman, it seems such investment must take an emotional toll on an actor. "In this case it feels like a lot of hard work," he says, "but it's not emotionally traumatic. Usually it's emotionally liberating. It's like playing [King] Lear: you think playing Lear is emotionally traumatic, but it's really liberating, and, if you can do it technically and you can figure out certain things in it, it's the audience that's going to have the emotional experience." As for Death of a Salesman, "a part like Willy I think is mostly liberating, because it's so expressive, and Arthur gives you so much. He frees you."

Delving into Loman seems a far cry from some of his previous roles, like that of a sceptical judge in Ghostbusters 2, or the head of a council of vampire hunters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yet, although he has appeared almost as often on screen as on stage, he is clear about his natural home: "I've worked more in the theatre, started there. And also the experience of doing a play, either acting or directing a play, it's usually a more different, a more complete kind of experience than a film. A film is so fragmented."

Yulin has earned critical claim as a director, with projects including Conor McPherson's This Lime Tree Bowerand Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful. "If you're directing, it's something else: you have the whole thing in your mind's eye, as it were." And it's only when he is directing that he ever reads reviews – he swears he doesn't read his own interviews, and says he has never Googled himself. If he did, he'd find interviews with Harris Yulin are hard to come by online. Is this because he's particularly private? Not so, he says, and over the course of our conversation he reveals enough about his personal life to counter such claims.

He calls himself a “foundling”, explaining how he was abandoned as a baby “on the steps of an orphanage”. He was adopted at four months old, the name Yulin taken from his adopted Russian father’s name. Later, he reveals he first thought about becoming an actor at his bar mitzvah. “I think I had a very life-changing experience at my bar mitzvah. It was the fact of being on stage and relating to people in that way; it was so much easier to relate to them in that way. And I enjoyed it so much. And most of my friends had said that they didn’t enjoy it, that it was a horrible thing to have to be up there before all those people, saying whatever they were saying, and I found the opposite to be so.”

He still gets that enjoyment from acting, a profession he can never see himself giving up. “Retiring is not a thought that I can ever entertain,” says the 72-year-old. “You love what you do and feel lucky to be doing it, finally, lucky that other people might want to see it or help you to do it. So it’s great.”

Which doesn’t mean it comes easy – on the contrary, he assures me. Yet still he acts. “You have to find a way, I guess, whether you’re acting or playing, or writing or whatever, to create whatever surface you want to create and just hope that it starts to resonate and, like Glendower says in Henry IV” – here he drops his voice to a deep and penetrating baritone that makes the hairs on my arm stand up – “ ‘Call spirits from the vasty deep.’ And Hotspur says, ‘Why so can I or so can any man, but will they come when you call them?’ ” He pauses. “Will they come when you call them? I guess the whole work is to try and prepare that ground and then hope that they come.”

FILM

Mel Bernstein, the crooked cop from Brian de Palma’s Scarface (1983)

National Security Advisor James Cutter in Clear and Present Danger (1994)

Dr Leeds, the mad scientist in Multiplicity (1996)

TELEVISION

Roger Stanton, head of NSA in 24

Crime boss Jerome Belasco in Frasier

Quentin Travers, head of the Watchers’ Council, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The Cardassian Aamin Marritza in Star Trek Deep Space Nine

Death of a Salesman

opens at the Gate Theatre in Dublin on Tuesday