Actor Gabriel Byrne's subtle portrayal of a psychotherapist in TV series In Treatment has won him awards and made him a heartthrob again at 59
An interesting irony of Gabriel Byrne's career is that despite having acted for 30 years and been one half of a celebrity couple for a decade when he was married to actor Ellen Barkin, he has managed, to his relief, to maintain an impressive privacy ? yet the parts he chooses are, despite himself, highly personal, and even self-revelatory. What public perception there is of him seems to extend little beyond "Irish", "handsome" and ? to use his least favourite yet the most popular description of him ? "brooding". ("I don't even know what that means!" he complains, with ? unfortunately for him ? an expression close to brooding.)
Well, after meeting him, I can exclusively reveal that yes, he is Irish, and, yes, very handsome too, if, inevitably, a little more salted and grizzled than he was 20 years ago as the chilling but heartmeltingly beautiful Tom in Miller's Crossing.
But while he is thoughtful, painstakingly at times, and frequently self-deprecating, he is far from "brooding". He turns what was supposed to be a one-hour interview about a TV show in a cafe near his apartment in New York's SoHo into a four-hour impassioned conversation, funny at some points, searing at others. I emerge from it faintly dizzy.
Yet despite his obvious love of conversation, he does share an instinct common to so many of his characters, from the faintly threatening Keaton in The Usual Suspects, to the brilliant but emotionally battered psychotherapist Paul Weston in the TV series In Treatment: a wariness of self-exposure. He bats away personal questions with rambling anecdotes that often contain everything but the answer ? yet little details escape. When asked, apropos of the antique love ring he is wearing, whether he is seeing anyone, he launches into a 15-minute tale about the first time he gave an interview and how the photographer made him pretend to cook an omelette. It's a funny story with a serious subtext: "I know better now than to give out more than I want." And fair enough. But in the end, his loquaciousness reveals more than he would perhaps wish: he mentions several times a particular "friend" with a female pronoun, who is presumably the actor Anna George, with whom he allegedly lives.
This desire for privacy also partly explains why, although the second series of In Treatment is only just about to air in the UK, the show that has won him a Golden Globe and an Emmy has ended in America after the third series, much to his satisfaction. He absolutely does not want to be the next Hugh Laurie, trapped in the gilded cage of American TV success: "That is definitely not for me," he says. "We stopped [In Treatment] at just the right time."
Once, Byrne, remembers, a Hollywood agent said to him, after he had been cast for a part he can't even remember now: "This is it ? you're going to be huge, say goodbye to your anonymity." This cliched spiel is just what all actors, writers and directors are said to dream of hearing, but Byrne spits it out like a threat.
Yet just as his love of conversation occasionally works against his desire for privacy, so the acting projects that he has chosen, and particularly the ones he loves the most, often relate to a subject that is very personal to him: the abuse of power.
In the undeservedly little known 2006 film Jindabyne, Byrne and his friends find the body of a teenage girl and decide to abandon it so as not to spoil their fishing trip. Byrne's rendition of the monstrous father, Cornelius Melody, in the 2005 Broadway production of Touch of the Poet, by Eugene O'Neill, ? a playwright particularly close to Byrne's heart ? was another memorable examination of this subject, and one that prompted the New York Times to describe Byrne as "the rare contemporary actor who . . . can turn that air of splendour into a sustained gale-force dramatic wind".
But the abuse of power was most overtly explored in the first series of the excellent In Treatment. Adapted from the highly successful original Israeli version, BeTipul, it stars Byrne as Paul Weston, the therapist who can heal others but not himself. Despite surface similarities with House, it has none of the latter's cheesy glibness and feels more like a particularly intelligent low-budget play than a TV show, each scene involving nothing more than Byrne sitting in a chair with a patient opposite (or his own therapist, played by the always wonderful Dianne Wiest). The writing is particularly fine but it is Byrne's ability to act with nothing more than the slightest flicker of his eyes that has really carried the show. And, to his embarrassment, and his teenage daughter's horror, made him a heartthrob again at the age of 59.
The show also plays to the double desire that most of us have to know the secrets of other people's inner lives and also to have someone who will reassure us about our inner life. The production is so small and quiet that the scenes between Paul and his patients feel like confessionals. "Well, therapy is not so different from confession," says Byrne, who has never had therapy himself. "It's that search for reassurance."
One of the main plotlines of the first series was when Paul had inappropriate feelings for a young and vulnerable female patient. Byrne took the story so seriously that he had "huge discussions" on set about whether at one point his character could even sit next to the patient on the couch. In the end, he won and he didn't: "Of course I couldn't sit on the couch ? it would have been breaking that ethical barrier," he says, with as much fervour as if he really were a therapist. It's a subject that continues into the second series when a former patient claims he encouraged her to have an abortion.
This issue of responsibility and moral transgression is one Byrne returns to repeatedly over the four hours: "If a person in authority morally transgresses they should be called to the book. Bankers, priests, politicians ? people who betrayed trust. They should be punished, and I don't mean that in a vindictive way, I think it's important as part of the process of moving on to say there is a system of justice," he says, his voice quiet but his eyes bright.
It is an issue that Byrne himself experienced personally in the most awful way imaginable: between the ages of eight and 11, he was sexually and physically abused by the Christian Brothers in Ireland and then again in England.
Byrne first talked about this three years ago in a radio interview, describing a school system in which abuse was a "known and admitted fact of life". The abuse, he said, happened at a "very vulnerable time for him" and left him "deeply hurt".
Today, that hurt is still palpable but the anger more so:
"When a person in authority says something is right, you want to believe it," he says haltingly at first, moving from the first person to the safer distance of the second person. "Particularly when you're a child: when a person in authority embraces you, you feel reassured. When that relationship is used to abuse the child, the child doesn't question it because it is what it is. A child doesn't understand. The seeing of the big picture, that comes later."
(Although, he adds wryly, that need to please authority figure never really goes away: just the other day he went to the doctor and "I found myself trying to give him the right answers.")
"The healing process, for want of another word, takes years," he says, and as an adult, Byrne suffered from alcoholism and depression. He quotes ? word-perfect ? an article that appeared recently in the Guardian about a man who was among the thousands of child migrants shipped to Australia from Britain between the second world war and 1967, was also abused by the Christian Brothers and felt, for the rest of his life, "an emptiness". "It took a while for me to finish reading that piece," says Byrne quietly.
The abuse is not a subject that Byrne wishes to dwell on: "Not", he says carefully, "because I don't want to talk about it, but because I don't want to be known for it." But even as soon as he says that, he proceeds to spend the next hour and a half talking about his anger towards the Catholic church and the abuse that was, he says, his voice thick with fury, "an epidemic that was covered up and the victims were made to feel responsible for the crimes perpetrated".
Byrne now describes himself as "extremely anti-Catholic" and "very much an atheist". He talks about "the craziness" of many of the beliefs but it is the sadism and irresponsibility of those in charge that makes his voice drop down a notch:
"The Catholic church is repressive of women and minorities and repressive of its followers. It victimised people through propaganda and kept them in line through primitive fear. The first step that has to be taken is the abolition of celibacy. The church that is supposed to be about love denies its followers the most sacred expression of love. It says, you can't do that because you'll go to hell for it. You can do it if you're married but even then you can only do it on certain days of the month."
Byrne was born in Crumlin, Dublin in 1950, the eldest of six children. He grew up in a world where mothers with prams would walk in the street to make room for a priest coming down the road. His parents were "religious people with a limited understanding of the world and had a childlike belief in the authority of the church", he says, with no anger, only sympathy. As a child, Byrne wanted to be a priest, not because he was particularly religious but because: "In a way I didn't then understand, the church tapped into my love of theatre." Despite the abuse he suffered at school, he decided at 11 he wanted to go to England and train as a priest, and he was, shockingly, abused there again.
At 15, Byrne happened to walk behind two miniskirted girls going up the stairs on a bus and realised there were some requirements of the priesthood he'd never be able to follow, and so he returned to Ireland. After finishing school and jobbing through his 20s, he began acting and moved to London, where he palled around with fellow struggling actor Liam Neeson, and joined the Royal Court theatre. It was not the best time for a young Irishman to move to London: "Rupert Murdoch was trying to destabilise the British press, Margaret Thatcher was destroying the unions: it was impossible to be Irish and not notice that and it must have been difficult for people in England to not respond in a way that they were being manipulated into by the press," he says, with typically careful phrasing.
The one upside, though, was that at the Royal Court he realised that maybe he could make a career as an actor.
In 1988, he moved to New York to marry Ellen Barkin, whom he met on a movie set, and they have two children, Jack, 21, a musician, and Romy, 19. Jack is currently touring with Bob Dylan, which makes Byrne tap his heart with pride. He worries about his daughter, though: "We live in a paternalistic society still ? we all know that," he says, his face crumpling a little. "So just by being a woman, her choices are limited." He and Barkin divorced in 1999.
Aside from a brief stint in LA, Byrne has remained in New York and some of his vowels are now truncated with American inflections. Yet with the loyalty of an expat, he buys the Irish Times and the Guardian every day, plus "as much as I don't want to buy it, The Sunday Times". He also maintains a link to the past: the Bible, which he reads "for the fables". What's his favourite message in it? He raises his eyebrows: "Beware false prophets."
? This article was amended on 26 April 2011. The original referred to Crumlan, Dublin. This has been corrected.
? The second series of In Treatment begins at 10.15pm on Friday 29 April on Sky Atlantic
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/26/gabriel-byrne-in-treatment
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