The long and the Shortt of it all

From D'Unbelievables to the film 'Garage', Pat Shortt has built up a repertoire of characters recognisable from every Irish town and village. Now he's about to extend his range again, on stage and TV screen, write SHANE HEGARTY

WE’RE ON THE street no more than 30 seconds when Pat Shortt is the target of what he calls a drive-by shouting. A women spinning along Parnell Square spots him and, with her window already down, begins babbling giddily at the top of her voice. The traffic drowns out the words. Our conversation takes a pause. Shortt drops his gaze. We scoot across the street to the safety of the cafe.

Inside the Irish Writers’ Centre we take a table along the corridor, where tourists wander past with no notion of stopping dead and shouting a catchphrase at him. “It’s crazy,” Shortt says with a laugh, “when you’re out in the garden and someone shouts it over the wall.”

He laughs so fast, so heartily and with such regularity that he must have developed a heart the size of a melon. There was a spell when every second person shouted “that’s ri-i-ight” at him. As if they were the first to think of it.

“It is nuts. Because the ad only ran for a few weeks and it stuck with me for years,” he says. “It wasn’t even a TV show that’s in the video shops and keeps getting taken out and rerun on the TV or something. F**king crazy. That’s ri-i-ight. That’s ri-i-ight. F**king constant.”

He laughs again, hard enough that you worry he’ll choke on his wrap.

He is dressed in a faded T-shirt and jeans, hair standing to attention. He is open in conversation, unguarded, great company. He has owned a pub in Castlemartyr, in east Co Cork, for a few years and loves being involved in it. You can imagine him propping up either side of the counter, revelling in the banter. When he gets going on an anecdote there's a flash of every character he's ever created, from D'Unbelievables to his solo stage shows, through Killinaskullyand into his country-detective sitcom, Mattie, a first series of which begins on RTÉ in September.

He is 43 and stocky, but looks fit enough, even though his sporting activity is limited to coarse fishing and clay-pigeon shooting.

“They run great together: fishing season finishes and shooting season starts,” he says. Ever thought of standing over the river with the gun and bringing the two things together? “The odd time I’ve done it,” he says with a chuckle. “With a bag of lime.”

When he talks about fitness it's of a different variety. He is three weeks into rehearsals for a Noel Pearson production of Sebastian Barry's Boss Grady's Boys, about the relationship between two brothers, played by himself and Tom Hickey, to be staged at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin.

“You finish each day in bits and just fall into bed,” he says. “Get up at the crack of dawn to get some lines learned, get some stuff in your head before you go into rehearsal. Then it’s intense all day, trying to work out what’s happening, and then home to learn your lines again. Working on TV isn’t quite as strenuous as the stage – it can be intense, but there are more breaks, more chances to look at lines between takes.”

The “fear”, he says, is starting to kick in, that anticipation of an opening night to come. He’s staying in his brother’s temporarily empty house in south Dublin for the moment. “And the wife and kids are up, and they decided to stay a few days more. But you try and separate yourself. I prefer to live on my own during rehearsals, because you need the time. And there’s no point in apologising to them all the time. You might as well not be there, you know what I mean? It’s demanding on the family as well.”

The role came about earlier this year with a phone call from the producer Noel Pearson, which, Shortt thinks, was the result of a couple of factors. Shortt had been asked to read at Brian Friel's birthday celebrations at the Abbey last year, at the playwright's request, and meanwhile Pearson and the director Jim Culleton were working on Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!Whatever the path, it led to him taking on a role that he says will clearly not be "Pat Shortt jumping around in a wig and playing the guitar – although if it's not going well by the second act . . ."

It is, he acknowledges, thanks to the film Garage that he was even considered for the part. His performance as Josey, a simple-minded and ultimately tragic pump attendant in a small midlands town, exploited his talent for developing wholly Irish characters, but removed all caricature or madcappery, instead reducing the role to a quiet, affecting innocence that instantly earned it a place in the pantheon of Irish cinema. It also won him an award for best actor at the British film awards, a strangeness that will never wither.

“I mean, it would almost be considered an art-house film, yet you’d be surprised the people who have seen it,” Shortt says. “It’s amazing the amount of people who come up and want to talk about it, because they knew that character from their village or town, that type of person. It’s huge. It’s nearly five years now since I did the film. Sometimes I wish I could do another film to get away from it.”

Again there’s the laugh, but it doesn’t blow away the sincerity. Is it just that he would like to change the record? “You always feel like that. I’m very proud of it, so it’s not that I want to run away from it or anything. It’s not like a bad catchphrase where someone shouts it at you.”

He features in the upcoming film SoulBoy. ("I'm one of the older actors. My first role like that. I'm slipping into that category.") But he was beckoned to Los Angeles immediately after his success. "The reality of it was I might have gone to Los Angeles, but my sister was dying at the time – she died that summer – and I stayed around for that," he says. "I was kind of busy with the television, and you have decide to stop all that and go off and chase the other thing. And I talked to a lot of producers and other people, and they said: 'You'd be mad in the f**king head. You're making a good living as it is – what do you want? Do you want to go off and make films? Do you want to go off and make money or whatever?' I've a very interesting career, so unless you want to go off and become a multisquillionare and hope that that sticks at some stage . . . I don't have that love-interest look about me; I'm not going to fool myself."

He has, though, been back and forth to London – “you’re absolutely nobody over there” – and casting agents have watched him here. “The funny thing is, they’ve all been huge jobs in London, but nothing’s really stuck yet.” When he says “actor” he actually uses air quotes, but he agrees that he’s always been an actor even as he’s always been known as a comedian.

"If you look at Killinaskullyit's comic acting and it's comic drama, even if it's off up in a different world. Mattieis not as heightened as Killinaskully, and there's only one character, because all those characters nearly killed me – but it's acting. And I never considered myself a comic or a stand-up, because all I've done has been comic acting. So when people say, 'Your man is a comedian,' I'm not. Niall Toibin is similar in that way. He'd always say he considers himself an actor and does lots of plays and things like that."

Does he suffer from that funnyman condition of wanting to be taken seriously? "No, because I'm very confident in what I do, and always was. I know what I'm about," he says. "I'm aware that not everyone will be into what you do. That's fair enough: you can't always win over all the audiences, and nor should you ever want to. So, no, I'm confident. And I know it's a role: it's not Pat Shortt, it's a character. And if you don't like what that character's doing, that's fine. It's a long way of saying I don't need to prove anything to anybody. And another thing: when you've done something like Garage, why should you have to?"

Killinaskully, with its broad humour and slapstick, didn't entertain everybody. There were notes of dismay in the complaints of some critics (including this writer), but the viewing figures were, as Shortt puts it, "ridiculous", or more precisely 500,000 for an average episode over five series. That figure means he can reject the idea that its success is as much part of the urban-rural divide as the time of the day people have their dinner.

"Everyone in Dublin is only a step away from the country," he says. "So there's a connection always with the country. And people used to say the same about D'Unbelievables, but we used to have huge audiences in Dublin. I still get huge Dublin audiences." (As we talk, a man approaches for an autograph for his daughter, and says he loves Killinaskully– he is a Dub.)

With Mattieand his live shows, Shortt continues to build a repertoire of Irish caricatures, characters utterly recognisable from every town and village in the country. He claims, though, not to be involved in some quest to get to the marrow of the Irish funny bone. "It's what I know, more than a conscious thing," he says. "It's really very much from what I know and growing up and my memories of people. And, I don't know, without getting too much up me hole about it, someone said that instead of trying to be global, if you're parochial about something then that becomes global."

He knows, though, that every town has characters that go beyond anything he could conjure. He was filming in a town recently “and as we were driving down we saw a fella walking though the town carrying a handbag, and with red lipstick and woman’s coat with men’s loafers on underneath. And he must have been in his late 50s, early 60s and he’s walking down the town. And we saw him two or three days while we were there. And, f**k me, that was amazing even in this day and age. But brilliant to see it”.

Interview over, we head back out and walk the two minutes to the rehearsal space. There are no drive-by shoutings, but as he chats he laughs almost loud enough to drown out the traffic.

• Boss Grady's Boysis at the Gaiety, Dublin, from August 31st until September 11th. Mattiebegins on RTÉ1 on September 5th