Irishman Gabriel Byrne commands respect in Tinseltown
By BOB THOMPSON
Sunday, March 16, 1997
Toronto Sun
HOLLYWOOD -- Tentative is the best way to describe the feeling you have when
you're questioning Gabriel Byrne about -- anything.
Byrne is menacing that way. He's also Irish, which makes him dangerous by gene-pool association.
Quick-tempered and quick to talk, those Irish. Forget about the lyrical revolutionaries or the good-natured blarney of the Barry Fitzgeralds.
Trust my County Cork grandfather, who used to say, `You can always tell a tough Irishman, but ya can't tell him much.'
So when Byrne grabs a chair, pulls it toward him for his preferred seat selection, there is relief in the air when he actually uses it for sitting, not hurling.
There is hope when the black-haired Dubliner folds his hands in front of him, nods abruptly, then smiles quickly like he just drew lucky for a take-the-pot inside straight.
Just as quickly, Byrne's face reverts to what it does so well on stage, on TV, and in the movies. It broods.
"Hello," he says casually unbuttoning his pinstripe suit featuring no tie but an expensively casual powder-blue cotton shirt.
His eyes are either glaring or very blue, or glaring and very blue, depending on your reason to fear or be near him. Hello?
Uh, right. Let the interview begin.
"Hi," I say, never at a loss for snappy patter. I leave out `How's it goin'?' since that would be unprofessional.
"How are things?" I ask Byrne.
"Can't complain," Byrne says.
And why should he. Since leaving Dublin for the riches of America, Byrne has made an impressive name for himself, without a huge hit, without toadying round the power factions, without doing the smarm charm thing practised with such abandon here.
The really amazing story about all of that is this cynical former socialist Irish rover lives in exclusive Beverly Hills, where the measure of a man is in how long his driveway is.
Byrne shrugs at the ambiguity. "I make movies," says the 46 year old, "and this is where they make the most of them."
And Byrne has made the most of it, since being imported from Dublin's Abbey Players to star in the Coen Brothers' gangster film, Miller's Crossing.
It wasn't even his lucky break. He had already had his fill of those in Ireland, where he was a famous TV star, and in the rest of Europe thanks to his set-upon reporter in the Brit-made Defence Of The Realm, and before that as King Arthur's father in John Boorman's Excalibur.
Even Miller's Crossing wasn't his first so-called American-made movie. He teamed with Jill Clayburgh in Hannah K, with Shelley Long in Hello Again, with Kathleen Turner in Julia Julia, and his now-ex-wife Ellen Barkin in Siesta.
The last three films on the list give him pain, but as a gentleman and former archeologist semi-scholar, Byrne looks pained rather than actually saying he is pained.
Although the Barkin arrangement became rearranged, Byrne has two children from the marriage, another good reason to live in L.A., which is a long cultural way from his former house in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. "My 200-year-old house, on the west coast of Ireland, on the edge of a lake," he is quick to clarify.
Those were the days my friend, just after he couldn't get a job as an actor, working by day as a messenger, a bartender, a kitchen porter on a train, even a teacher. "I even put glass eyes in teddy bears for six months."
But he worked steadily in Ireland when it was discovered the out-of-work actor could actually act.
In America, he can do an odd personality as he has in The Usual Suspects and Mad Dog Time, or he can do leading man, as he will in Smilla's Sense Of Snow which opens Friday and stars his latest female companion, Julia Ormond.
He'll repeat as a love interest after signing as a Madonna conquest in the movie profile of Tina Modotti, an Italian-born silent film star who became renowned for photography. He's written his memoirs "for my children," and he's about to release his first novel.
On his lighter side, Byrne is working on a film comedy about Christopher Columbus with Jeff Goldblum. It deals with Columbus' cockeyed discovery of America. As Byrne explains it, "Columbus didn't know where he was going, didn't know where he was when he got there, and when he got back, he didn't know where he had been."
Sort of like Gabriel Byrne, perhaps. Byrne grimaces. "Yeah," he says, recognizing the moment for what it is.
"I lived in New York," confesses Byrne as a way of rationalizing his landing in America's La-La land. "But I was constantly on planes to get here."
So, he says, he finally said, "Oh to Hollywood with it." And this is where he has been for the last few years, "close to my kids, near my friends, and near the industry."
That doesn't mean he can't get Celtic caustic on the subject of living and trying to breathe in L.A.
"If the people out here spent more time in the library than they do in the gym, it would be a better place to live.
"But they can't. It's all about them. It's all about the movies. It's like living in Detroit, and always talking about cars.
"And it gets really boring, because nobody speaks sensibly or normally. Speaking in a metaphorical way doesn't exist here. Sarcasm doesn't either."
Is it like speaking to hustlers?
"They're not that smart. It's like being permanently exposed to really fast editing," Byrne says.
"I had to stop a guy the other day and say to him, `If you listened with the same intensity as you talk. we'd get along a lot better.'"
So I said to Byrne, and I meant it, "I'm all ears."
I have relatives from County Cork, after all.
THE GABRIEL BYRNE FILE
PRODUCER: He bought the Gerry Conlon book and then found Jim Sheridan to make the movie In The Name Of The Father, his finest package moment. Into The West, which he made and acted in, wasn't.
ACTING: He's also hit and missed in Little Women (hit), Cool World (missed), Point Of No Return (hit), Dangerous Woman (missed).