One of Ireland's brightest and most prolific young actors, Peter McDonald found his vocation in life 10 years ago when he went to UCD to study English and became consumed with acting in the college dramatic society. It was on a stage at UCD that he met Conor McPherson, who became a close friend, and they have worked together many times since, on stage, in the movie of McPherson's first screenplay, I Went Down, and now in McPherson's first film as writer and director, Saltwater.
Having featured in seven movies over the past two years, McDonald is looking forward to returning to the stage after shooting his scenes for Paths to Freedom, a comic mock documentary for RTE written by his friend and co-star, Michael McElhatton, and by the show's director, Ian Fitzgibbon.
He goes directly from that series into rehearsal in London for Billy Roche's critically acclaimed Wexford Trilogy, in which he will be joined in the cast by, among others, Hugh O'Conor and Michael McElhatton. "We rehearse in London for a month and a half," he explains. "Then we go to Chester for three weeks and Manchester for another three weeks, and then come back down to London for an eight-week run at the Tricyle Theatre."
It's a long commitment for McDonald, taking him into February, and with the option of a New York run afterwards for three or four weeks. "I just love the play so much, and I've been looking for a way to get back on stage, so this is just the perfect opportunity for me. I've always wanted to do these plays and there's a part in them I've always wanted to play, Jimmy Brady in the first play, A Handful of Stars.
And if I don't do it now I might be too old to play the role whenever the trilogy is staged again." For all the critical plaudits earned by the Wexford Trilogy, McDonald believes Billy Roche hasn't had the level of recognition he deserves. "They are such brave plays because they're about the fire in the belly, you know. The plays were like a kind of a bridge at a time in the 1980s when there were all these established writers like Tom Murphy and Brian Friel, and Billy Roche came along and wrote these very natural, heightened realism plays that were structured like a western and influenced by American cinema, and he really influenced a lot of the present generation of playwrights. I hope this run makes people realise just how good these plays are."
McDonald, now 28, is from Mount Merrion in Dublin. He opted to study English at UCD rather than go to an acting college. "I did want to act, but at the age of 18 I didn't know if I had the confidence to do it, or if I liked it enough to do it, and you really have to want to do it if you're going to act professionally. When I was in UCD, Dramsoc was really active. You could do eight plays in a year. So I was there for a year, working away."
He met McPherson, who was taking philosophy and English at UCD, when they found themselves together on the same stage for a college take-off of the television series, Whose Line Is It Anyway? "I ended up doing this improvisation with this stocky redhead fellow and he was hysterically funny," he remembers. "We became very good friends. After two years I dropped out of college for a year because I realised I was becoming really serious about acting. So I took a year off and worked in petrol stations and did more and more plays in college and some more outside in fringe venues. Then I got talked into going back and I finished off my degree."
In 1992 McDonald and McPherson were among those instrumental in founding the enterprising theatre company, Fly By Night. "We played very fringe venues like the International and the City Arts," says McDonald. "We always put on original plays. That was our unstated manifesto, because we had two writers we thought were very good. So they just came up with plays and we would put them on. We've never put on a production of someone else's plays. The company's still going. We're always trying to work together."
There was a classic showbiz fable that Peter McDonald had accompanied a friend to an audition for Paddy Breathnach's film of Conor McPherson's sharply scripted Irish road movie, I Went Down, and that McDonald, who had no screen experience, walked away with the leading role opposite Brendan Gleeson. Not true, McDonald says: "I was actually doing The Stranger on stage at the time and Conor suggested to Paddy that he should see me in it, which he did and he asked me to read with the other actors who were auditioning for I Went Down. During the course of that I was reading every character in the film, and then Paddy asked me to audition. I realised then that they were in the position where they didn't have to use a star, so I felt good about it and got the part, and that opened lots of doors to me.
"I felt so strongly about the material, and working with Brendan and Paddy was so collaborative and we all got on well, that it was a really nice introduction to film-making, especially when you're in a lead role.
"Doing something like that for the first time, I think you just have to rely on your intuition. Which is what you have to do, I think, most of the time when you're acting, and you build up your craft through experience. I think the great thing about acting is that you can never stop learning from what you're doing. And the main stuff you learn, you probably learned almost unconsciously."
In demand as a screen actor since his winning performance in I Went Down, Peter McDonald has been happy to move between leading and supporting roles. In Atom Egoyan's film of William Trevor's Felicia's Journey, McDonald featured briefly but effectively as the seductive lover who makes the gullible young Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) pregnant.
"He was essentially a cad and a womaniser," says McDonald, "and he sees this beautiful young girl who becomes his prey, in a way. He believes things in his own head and that's how he lies to people. When he's with her he believes that he loves her and he feels incredibly romantic with her, but it's different when he goes. I love Atom's films and he really likes working with actors in terms of characters, in much the same way Conor does."
In Pat Murphy's recent Nora, dealing with the volatile relationship between Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, McDonald played Joyce's brother, Stanislaus. "It's the only time I've played someone who actually existed," he says. "I love Joyce and there was a lot to read, and Stanislaus wrote some stuff himself, so there was a kind of blueprint behind us all the time of these people we were playing. "There was one point in my research when I discovered I could get my hands on a radio interview Stanislaus did, and I was overjoyed. But I thought again and felt I shouldn't listen to it in case I got some silly spiral going in my head about trying to sound authentic to a voice that nobody knows. My job is to give people an idea of Stanislaus Joyce, not exactly who the man was."
McDonald had acted in a BBC Radio 4 production of Conor McPherson's play, This Lime Tree Bower, before being cast in the pivotal role of Frank in McPherson's screen adaptation of the play, Saltwater. There is not a trace of its stage origins in the assured film McPherson fashions from his play, which consisted of three overlapping monologues. It's set among an Irish-Italian family running a chip shop in a Dublin seaside town. The older brother, Frank (Peter McDonald), decides to intervene to help his father (Brian Cox), who is heavily in debt to a local bookie and loan shark (Brendan Gleeson), while the younger brother (Laurence Kinlan) is unsure how to respond when a rebellious new school-friend takes unscrupulous advantage of a girl after a disco.
`The setting of the seaside town and especially the sea - which was like the off-stage character in the piece - lent itself to film because the play is so descriptive," McDonald says. "For me, the play was always about perspective, how these three characters looked at the world and what their logic was, and I think that did translate to the film, even though the audience is pulled in different ways by the film because you're seeing things as they're happening.
"I think my character, Frank, is a control freak - the way he dresses, how he does his hair, how he orders his day - and he's someone who has assumed the responsibility for the family and the family business. He gets everyone up in the morning, he cooks, he does the laundry, because the father drinks. So he's like a nagging wife and parent, and even though he's a very male character he's left in this kind of middle ground where he doesn't know where he is. He's always in an apron and he doesn't know how to handle women. But he feels in control and can deal with things that come his way."
What significant changes has he observed in Conor McPherson since they first met back on that UCD stage? "I don't think he's changed at all," McDonald says. "He's extremely prolific. He works very hard and he just gets better and better. He's not remotely precious about his place or his status as a writer, and he enjoys what he does, and I think he's going to go on and become a major film director while still writing his own material, which very few people do consistently."
Asked how working with Conor McPherson compares to working with Roddy Doyle, McDonald says: "They're pretty similar in the way they deal with other people and how unaffected they are for successful writers - and how interested they are in what you're going to do with their work and how encouraging and enjoyable it is to work with them. Roddy's screenplay for When Brendan Met Trudy is very different to his other stuff - it's more surreal and he plays around with cinema a lot more. I look forward to seeing it."
We can also look forward to seeing Peter McDonald in three further completed movies. In the New York-set The Opportunists he co-stars with Christopher Walken. "It's essentially me and him in the film. He's a brilliant actor. He's extremely funny, and he improvises very naturally. And it was great for me to do a film with Christopher Walken and for me to play the bad guy. He plays this really normal guy and I'm the guy who screws up his life in the film."
In Some Voices, which features Daniel Craig as a schizophrenic character, McDonald says he has only four or five scenes. "I loved the play it's based on," he says. "I play this Glaswegian living in London and abusive towards his girlfriend. Daniel's character meets the two of us when we're having a domestic out on the street. I end up hitting Daniel's character, and their love story begins to happen at that point."
And Peter McDonald is reunited with director Paddy Breathnach for the imminent hairdressing-competition comedy, Blow Dry, which stars Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman. "Myself and Michael McElhatton play the Kilburn Cutters, a hairdressing team of brothers who are among the main competitors in the competition. We got to design our own wigs and wear our own costumes. I got a mullet wig right down the back - permed, copperblonde highlights - and constantly wearing leathers."
Saltwater opens at selected cinemas in Ireland next Friday. The Wexford Trilogy opens at the Chester Gateway Theatre on October 24th, is at the Lowry in Salford from November 14th and the Tricycle Theatre in London from December 6th to February 4th