Owen Roe

“I went on holiday to Sorrento in 2008 with Sebastian Faulks’s James Bond novel, Devil May Care, and the setting was straight out of a Bond novel. Sitting on a balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples, with the blue Italian sky, the sea, it was very evocative reading it there.

“The books are sensual and always exotic, evoking memories of foreign locations. They are really descriptive, too – what people are eating and drinking and so on. You would love to order a bottle of Dom Pérignon like Bond but would settle for a Martini – yes, shaken, not stirred.

“I used to read Ian Fleming’s books when I was a teenager, and since reading Faulks’s Bond I have reacquainted myself with the classics. When I go back to Italy this year I will take Goldfinger with me, as well as the new one by Jeffery Deaver.

“Fleming never really took his novels seriously – he called them the ‘pillow fantasies of an adolescent mind’ – and I do see them as a guilty pleasure, a perfect holiday treat, when you can break away from all the other stuff that you feel you should, rather than want to, read.”

Owen Roe stars in Glengarry Glen Ross at the Gate Theatre in Dublin until July 14th