the star of Miller's Crossing shines in Gangster
By Nancy Bilyeau Gabriel Byrne is not the type you'd expect to do Bogart impressions for the
hell of it. A forty-year-old Irish actor with black hair and penetrating blue
eyes, Byrne plays serious men, passionate men, brooding men. But he was
shooting a scene in Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing, a tale of
intrigue and betrayal among mobsters set in 1929, and while it's not a parody of
crime movies like The Maltese Falcon, it is teeming with hard-drinking,
double-crossing gun toters.
The scene, Byrne says, was a tense confrontation between his character, Tom,
and Tom's round heeled lover, Verna, in a doorway at night. "For a joke, I
did my really bad imitation of Humphrey Bogart," says Byrne. "Ethan
just said, 'Thank God you don't really play the role like that.'" ¦ Byrne
smiles at the memory of his prank; he clearly relishes good stories and tells
them with self-deprecating wit. Between sips of mineral water in a Manhattan
restaurant, he notes that Bogart really wasn't much of an inspiration in playing
Tom, an Irish immigrant who is the shrewd right-hand man of Leo (Albert Finney),
a political boss in an unnamed American city. "I looked at all those movies
from the Twenties with Bogart, James Cagney and Paul Muni, and there was really
nothing I could take from them," he says.
To gain insight into Tom, Byrne says, he headed for a SoHo cafe to watch chess
matches. "The intensity with which these guys play was interesting because
it's about working from in here," he says, tapping his head. "That
helped me a lot." Then there's the mysterious man who Byrne says always
appears with the pope in public: "You know nothing about this guy, and yet
he's the one who knows to the last cent what the Vatican is worth. Then there's
a guy named Richelieu...."
Chess players, the man behind the pope and a cardinal of the seventeenth century
may seem uncommon role models for a guy playing a gangster. But then, Byrne has
made uncommon choices throughout his career. "I've always tried to pick
films that are interesting and offbeat," he says. Byrne's roles include the
lusty father of King Arthur in Excalibur (1981), a glowering DA in Hanna
K. (1983), a relentless journalist in Defense of the Realm (1985), a
hyperdecadent Lord Byron in Gothic (1986) and a sexy trapeze-artist
instructor in Stesta (1987). In the last film, he played the lover of
Ellen Barkin, whom he married in 1988; they have a one-year-old son, Jack.
There's a big risk, however, in going for unusual roles. Byrne has appeared in
more than a dozen films in the last decade, yet he's never starred in one that's
succeeded both artistically and commercially. That could change with Miller's
Crossing. As visually stunning as the Coen brothers' two earlier films, Blood
Simple and Raising Arizona, it is more emotionally complex. And
despite the presence of actors like Finney and John Turturro, Byrne carries the
picture. He turns in a subtle yet forceful performance as an impassive man
concealing deep pain.
"I've known people like Tom -- totally in charge and totally unhappy,"
says Byrne. But portraying someone who tries to stay two steps ahead of his
enemies didn't come easily. "He was a difficult character to play, because
he's enigmatic, mysterious." Byrne says. "How do you know how much to
give and how much to leave to the imagination? I used to say to Joel, 'Is the
audience going to buy this? Are they not just going to say, "Oh, we don't
care what he does"?' And Joel said, 'No. this guy is a thinker, a plotter
and a man who knows how to use power.'"
Of working with the Coen brothers -- Joel directed, Ethan produced and they
co-wrote the script -- Byrne says: "The script was watertight. There was no
improvisation on set. They're meticulous. Having said that, they're also the
most down-to-earth, unhassled guys you could meet. And they're very funny."
Byrne, his Bogart impression notwithstanding, would like to be funny, too --
onscreen, that is. Says Byrne: "This is like the ninety-eight-year-old nun
who's been in an enclosed order all her life and is asked, 'Is there anything
that you regret?' Yeah, I guess that I'd better admit it, I would love to do
comedy." But the closest he's come is playing the straight man to Shelley
Long in the forgettable Hello Again. According to Marcia Gay Harden, who
plays Verna in Miller's Crossing, Byrne has real potential for comedy.
"He's charming and full of yarns about Ireland," Harden says. She
adds, though, that Byrne was a trifle aloof during the film's shooting in New
Orleans: "There was a contingent of people always going out who would say,
'Oh, there's still one restaurant we haven't tried yet,' and Gabe wasn't a part
of that. He and Ellen were enjoying their time together. I don't want to say
he's enigmatic. He's the strong, silent, sexy type, and that's what Tom was
like, too."
One reason for Byrne's reluctance to play the Hollywood game could be that he
came to acting comparatively late. His first career choice, one he practiced for
a short time after graduating from Ireland's University College, was
archaeology. "The whole idea of someone who just goes off to a totally
exotic climate and discovers a lost city, that to me is absolutely
fascinating," Byrne says. "But I found that my romantic expectations
as an archaeologist and the reality clashed greatly. It was rain, mud and
scraping things with little brushes and being shouted at and bumping into people
in confined spaces and not finding the lost city, you know?" After several
years of teaching Spanish -- or, as he puts it, "teaching the present tense
and past tense and Don Quixote to totally uninterested seventeen-year-old
girls" -- and appearing in amateur theater, he was invited to join Dublin's
prestigious Abbey Theater Company. Television work followed, and he made his
first film, Excalibur, when he was thirty.
Miller's Crossing looks to be a career peak for Byrne. The film snared
the opening-night slot of the New York Film Festival, but Byrne is cautious.
"I'm not even going to think about how it's going to be received," he
says. "It's such a roll of the dice."
Byrne has shot two other movies that haven't been released yet: the thriller Dark
Obsession and the pirate adventure Shipwrecked. While Byrne and
Barkin pursue their careers, they lead what he calls a "nomadic
existence": living in Ireland, in New York City or on location. He's just
come from Los Angeles, where Barkin was shooting the comedy Switch, and
he is clearly eager to head for Ireland. "You can turn off a road," he
says, "and be in a park, and it's unspoiled, and 5000 people aren't trying
to get in."
Shaking his head, Byrne tells a story about life in L.A.'s claustrophobic film
community. The highest compliment people thought they could bestow on Byrne and
Barkin's son was that he was cute enough to be in pictures. Says Byrne: "We
told them, 'Thanks, but he doesn't want to be typecast as a baby. He wants to
keep his options open.'"