For all his great height and mighty beardedness, Chris O'Dowd is just a well-brought-up fellow from Boyle with an excellent line in casual banter, writes DONALD CLARKE
A MINOR TECHNICAL hitch delays the beginning of this interview with Chris O’Dowd. After poking fruitlessly at my unresponsive smartphone, usually a tip-top recording device, it’s time to employ the idiot’s gambit: “Sorry, I’ll just have to turn it off and on again.” A tolerant but weary look comes over the actor’s face. “Yeah, yeah. I believe that can work,” he drones.
It takes me another 10 minutes to realise the roots of his mock ennui. O’Dowd thinks I’m doing his catchphrase. He imagines me as the sort of person who, after spotting John Inman in the frozen-food section, might have bellowed, “I’m free!”.
Impressively tall and biblically bearded, O'Dowd is perhaps best known as one half of the comic duo at the heart of The IT Crowd. Graham Linehan's situation comedy, a slow starter that gradually became a cult sensation, concerns the socially maladroit staff in the IT department of an obscure conglomerate. O'Dowd plays the perennially annoyed Roy. Richard Ayoade is the more eccentric Moss. Their first response to any problem tends to be: "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
“I find that people shout at me on the street a lot less than [you might] think,” says the 31-year-old after I explain myself. “People are always so nice. Mind you, the fact that I am a big bearded dude helps.” Does he think people are frightened of him? “I hope so.”
O'Dowd, raised in Boyle, Co Roscommon, first attracted the attention of domestic viewers in 2004 in the RTÉ series The Clinic. A year later, he gave a superb performance as a conflicted stand-up comic in Annie Griffin's unfairly overlooked film Festival. But it was The IT Crowdthat gave him real traction. Nobody is better at combining flustered bewilderment with a benign class of anger.
For all that, he never seemed an obvious candidate for a Hollywood crossover. Isn’t he a little too Irish? Aren’t his good looks a little too rustic?
Apparently not. Late last year he turned up opposite Jack Black in a fitful take on Gulliver's Travels. Now he appears opposite a swathe of talented women – Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Ellie Kemper – in the superb comedy Bridesmaids.
O’Dowd plays a police officer who charms Wiig, maid of honour at an out-of-control wedding, away from her latest frightful boyfriend. He retains his midlands accent.
“I think they liked the idea of it sounding a little odd,” he says. “And the Irish accent is a charming accent. I don’t find it in any way patronising when people say that. It’s f**king wonderful. That would be the weirdest complaint in the world: to have someone say your accent is charming and then be offended. When, as an actor, you spend your entire life trying to impress people, having something like that do it for you unconsciously is a real gift.”
For all his great height and mighty beardedness, O’Dowd does not come across in any way as frightening. He seems like a well-brought-up fellow, with an excellent line in casual banter.
Born in Sligo, he grew up as part of what he describes as “an arty family”. His mother is a psychoanalyst and his father is a graphic designer. Chris dabbled with acting in a local theatre group, but until he went to University College Dublin he never seriously considered launching himself into the profession. At college, he was drawn towards Dramsoc, and in his last year he found himself running the Irish Student Drama Association.
“That was a stressful thing to run during my finals. So those went well,” he says with an ironic snort. “I didn’t think I was good enough to be an actor. Then a friend was auditioning for drama school in London. I thought I’d go with him for fun. It was 100 quid to audition, and I thought, okay, I’ll do that. When I got it I thought I should take it because it’s hard to get in. Also, I had no other options. What the f**k else was I going to do?”
O'Dowd was not overly impressed by his time at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He found the tuition fees crippling and was disappointed by the school's bias towards theatre over film and TV. He left before graduating and began mopping up small roles on TV and film. Look closely and you will spot his droll cameo in Mike Leigh's Vera Drake.
When did he begin to feel confident that he could make a living in the business? "Probably around six years ago when I got The Clinic," he says. He got the call for Vera Drakewhen he was working in a call centre. "And that was the last proper job that I did."
As is always the case with Mike Leigh projects, the script emerged through a process of improvisation. “I had no idea what the film was about,” he laughs. “I just did this funny bit and I still had no idea what the film was about. Somebody went to a screening later and said, ‘It’s cool. You’re really funny. But the film is so dark.’ Is it? ‘Oh, yeah, all that abortion stuff.’ The what stuff?”
The IT Crowdwas not an immediate smash. Initial reviews were tepid, and it was not until the second or third series that it began to amass a significant following. Thinking back, he says his acting in the first season was a tad theatrical. The camera made his big gestures seem positively gigantic.
At any rate, the series eventually clicked. Anybody who has seen Graham Linehan, its writer, in full flow will suspect that Roy is something of a self-portrait. “To a huge extent!” O’Dowd nearly bellows. “Graham says that I’m him in his mid-20s and Moss is him as a teenager. I think that’s probably fairly accurate. I am delighted that the show has had that trajectory. We had a hard time when it came out, and it’s got better and better. I think, as it’s progressed, Roy has become less like Graham and more of an Everyman.”
Did he see himself as a comic actor before becoming Roy? “No. Not at all. To be honest I was barely an actor when it started.”
The script paints Moss and Roy as buffoons, but they are decent people who rarely display anything like malice, and the show has played well with computer boffins, with companies bussing their IT departments to screenings. “They love it,” says O’Dowd. “They do. I get nothing but really nice comments from those guys. The bigger companies do really arrange tickets for their IT guys. When you watch the show, a lot of the laughter is actually from IT guys in the audience.”
Even the biggest O'Dowd fan must have been slightly surprised when his face turned up in the trailer for Gulliver's Travels. In the space of five years the Roscommoner had gone from working in a call centre to appearing in a Christmas blockbuster.
The picture was not well received and didn't fair well at the US box office, but with Bridesmaids, a critical and commercial success, under his belt, he has another three American films in various stages of production or post-production.
He now spends a great deal of time in Los Angeles. He and his girlfriend, Dawn Porter, the journalist and TV presenter, have a cosy little apartment with their much-loved dog. It’s hard to imagine O’Dowd prowling the streets of downtown LA. The Californian sun must play havoc with his complexion.
“I like LA a lot,” he says. “I’ve been there for much of the past two years. I was surprised by how normal it is. You get very domestic. We have a dog and we still have to pick up the dog s**t like anybody else. I don’t really understand why people slag LA off. I think they are slagging off the idea rather than the place itself.”
What about the perception that everyone at industry parties will insist on telling you how wonderful you are? Is that notion of a town driven by insincerity an unrealistic caricature?
“You have to not be an idiot. Anybody who is an actor knows that there’s so much insincerity and you don’t get caught up in it. Those people aren’t people you hang around with. They’re work people. You don’t trust producers. That’s just rule number one.”
Pausing for a moment to consider the LA lifestyle, he comes to this conclusion: “I also like the fact that it’s a low-rise city. You can wake up and see the sky. In that way, it’s more like being in Boyle than being in New York is.”
