The man who walked into roles

Brian F. O'Byrne is a rare actor: one who's never out of work. His latestproject is a play by Roddy Doyle, writes Michael Dwyer.

Standing outside the rehearsal room in the middle of Dublin, you can hear Paula Spencer launch into an impassioned monologue about happier times with her husband, Charlo. They met at a disco, where they danced to Frankie Valli. "My eyes adored you," he sang, "though I never laid a hand on you." But as time went on, Charlo laid his fists into Paula time and again, as charted first in Family, Roddy Doyle's powerful 1994 television drama with Seán McGinley and Ger Ryan, and later, when the focus shifted to Paula, in Doyle's fifth novel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. Now, with the director Joe O'Byrne, Doyle has turned the book into a play. It features Hilda Fay, from Fair City, as Paula, with Brian F. O'Byrne, a two-time Tony nominee for his work on Broadway, as the notorious Charlo.

"I'm wary of saying that it's a lot of fun, but I'm enjoying it a lot," says O'Byrne when the actors take their lunch break. The first thing that strikes you about him is that he looks a good deal younger than he usually does on stage or on screen. He is 35. Three years ago, when Disco Pigs was shot, he was cast as the father of Runt, the teenage girl played by Elaine Cassidy. When he was 27, he was playing a 40-year-old man in The Beauty Queen Of Leenane. "I tend to be cast as older all the time," says O'Byrne. "It's funny, because there's such an emphasis on youth at the moment, especially in movies."

His route into acting was accidental and circuitous. He had no acting ambitions growing up in Mullagh, Co Cavan. By the time he was 18, he had seen only about five films, because there wasn't a cinema in the area, and a single play: Hamlet, on a school trip to the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

He returned to the city to repeat his Leaving Certificate. "I didn't really go to school, though," he says. "I discovered movies, and I went to the cinema instead. I thought I might like to get involved in movies somehow. At the time, there was really one place to study film" - DIT Rathmines - "and I didn't get in there. But there was a communications course at Coláiste Dhúlaigh [in north Dublin\]."

There were about 15 of them on the course, he says, "all these people who didn't make it into Rathmines", among them students who would go on to make their marks as a director (Damien O'Donnell), a playwright (Enda Walsh) and an actor (Declan Conlon). O'Byrne became good friends with Conlon and another student, and when they decided to apply for the new drama course at Trinity College, he went along with them for the audition. "I did it just because my best friends were doing it, not because I wanted to be an actor," he says.

"I went and auditioned, and the three of us were called back for this workshop. They didn't know the three of us lived together, so they thought there was this amazing communication between us, and they put us in the same group. From the first day of the course I thought it was brilliant. I finished the two-year diploma, but I felt I would never be good enough to be an actor. I went to London with a girl I was going out with - an actress who was doing incredibly well - and I thought I could live vicariously through her. I stayed there for nine months with no idea of what I was doing."

Then he learned he had received a green card to live in the US. "I didn't even apply for it. My uncle put in my name. So I went to New York to pick that up. I called in to Ciarán O'Reilly, who runs the Irish Repertory Theatre and is from Virginia in Cavan. They were casting a play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, and I got one of the small parts. That was it. It was an off-off-Broadway production, and then moved to off-Broadway, so I got my Equity card straight away, after just six months in New York. I then did four or five shows with them back to back."

O'Byrne started a theatre company with the writer Tony Kavanagh, and they staged plays in bars. When there was a change of cast in Wendy Wasserstein's hit Broadway play The Sisters Rosensweig, he was given a role - and took it in his stride. "I don't get nervous about going on stage," he says.

"I didn't grow up with any views about Broadway, whereas there were two other actors in the show who were also making their Broadway debuts in it, and they were completely thrilled with the whole thing. I felt it was just a job, and I had played a much better role in a bar just before doing that. And I was making good money for the first time ever." O'Byrne stayed for a year, then joined Stockard Channing and David Strathairn in an acclaimed production of Tom Stoppard's play Hapgood.

But he had yet to work as an actor in Ireland. "When I came home and people asked me what I was doing in New York, I was too embarrassed to tell them I was an actor, because people would say they hadn't seen me in anything. It's easier now, but it doesn't really matter to most people unless you're on television. I still find it difficult to say I'm an actor, because people either give you a look of sorrow or bewilderment, wondering if they know you. When they make the decision that they don't, it feels like you're not worth talking to any longer."

Joe O'Byrne, who is directing him in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, saw him in the New York production of The Drum, Kavanagh's intense Dublin-set drama, and invited him to act in the play's Dublin production, at City Arts Centre. "It got a great review in The Irish Times," he says, "but nobody came to see it, which was a shame, because it was a really good play."

O'Byrne had acted in several productions in Dublin when he began the "six-year journey" of The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, the first play in Martin McDonagh's Leenane trilogy. Again, he was in the right place at the right time. "The actor who was to play the part got sick just as the play went into rehearsals at Druid [in Galway\], and Garry Hynes, the director, called me," he says. McDonagh became one of his best friends. "His main love is film, you know. He's so knowledgeable about films, just like his brother John, who wrote the screenplay for the new Ned Kelly film."

When O'Byrne acted in the original production of Beauty Queen at Druid, he had no idea it would bring him back to Broadway. "It was a funny thing. I had been on Broadway, but I knew nobody would take a risk on me. I'm not the kind of good-looking guy they would want. I was 26, and I felt I needed to go back to Ireland, get bigger parts and grow in different ways. I wanted to work with new writing, and I've been lucky, because nearly everything I've done since has been new material. I love that, because the writer is involved at that stage, and I've great respect for writers. Once you work with writers, they include you much more in the creative process. That's the best."

Acting in McDonagh's eloquent trilogy - as a quietly affecting suitor in Beauty Queen, a blunt-witted garda in A Skull In Connemara and a furtive, obsessive brother in The Lonesome West - presented O'Byrne with a terrific showcase for his versatility, earning him his two Tony nominations, the Broadway equivalent of the Oscars, as best featured actor in Beauty Queen and best actor in The Lonesome West. "That was good," he shrugs, "but it's like a subway token that gets you on the train. It doesn't really matter at the end of the day, because I'm still an outsider over there - I'm still an ethnic actor. As production costs go up and up and up, people are willing to take less and less risks, and they are going more and more for actors who are known from movies and, especially, television."

O'Byrne has appeared in more than a dozen films and television series, on both sides of the Atlantic, from the BBC adaptation of John McGahern's novel Amongst Women to the HBO series Oz, in which he played an IRA bomber, and from Johnny Gogan's films The Last Bus Home and The Mapmaker to Barry Levinson's An Everlasting Piece and Bandits. And he recently featured in John Crowley's Intermission, written by Mark O'Rowe.

"I don't know about movies," he says. "I think I want to do more. I'm not happy with my film work so far. I love rehearsals, which you rarely get on films. Certain things can happen and develop in rehearsal, whereas whatever you do the first day on a film sets the tone for what you do. Film is a director's medium, to a great extent, and an editor's medium. No matter what we do as actors, they still have the final say. When I'm on stage I direct and edit. It's much more creative."

Two months ago, O'Byrne had just come to the end of his off-Broadway run in Enda Walsh's intense Bedbound when he was asked to call Joe O'Byrne in Dublin. "It was the first time in nine years that I was finishing in something and I wasn't set to go into another part, and then there was this message," he says. Joe O'Byrne asked him to play Charlo in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. "I hadn't read the book or seen the TV series," he says. "I heard about them, of course. I know Seán McGinley and we would be walking around Galway and people would be calling him Charlo all the time. But this play is about Paula - Charlo is a secondary character. She's talking about him all the time, and he's there, but it's all about her presence, her life, her language. Hilda does all the work. It's a brilliant adaptation. It exists very much on its own, away from the TV series and the book. People will come in with perceptions or - which would be more dangerous - people will stay away because they have perceptions. But it's hugely theatrical.

"It's got everything in it: singing, dancing, black comedy, farcical elements, mime, slow motion, combined with huge pathos and horrible, horrible violence. It's heartbreaking, gut-wrenching stuff. It's an incredible combination of elements, and it works."

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors opens at the Helix, Dublin, on Thursday with previews tomorrow and Wednesday.