Super Mario's voices

INTERVIEW:Mario Rosenstock's hilarious impersonations on 'Gift Grub' have led to best-selling CDs, sell-out stage shows and UK offers, but as he tells BRIAN BOYD, he's staying put

CHELSEA OWNER Roman Abramovich is a multi-gazillionaire and a very powerful man. But he met his financial match in Mario Rosenstock – the impersonator best known for his Gift Grub work on Today FM. Rosenstock had been doing some beautiful Jose Mourinho characterisations on the radio show for a number of years. The sketches spread around internet forums with a result that the Chelsea team and Mourinho himself were able to hear them – and be mightily impressed. Chelsea got in touch with Rosenstock and invited him over to perform in front of Mourinho and the entire Chelsea playing squad.

“It was quite bizarre,” says the 39-year-old, originally from Co Waterford. “I was in front of Mourinho talking as if I were him and John Terry and Frank Lampard were sticking their mobile phones into my face trying to record the whole thing. John Terry even asked me for my autograph afterwards.”

Rosenstock didn’t ask for any payment for flying over to do the private show, he did it as a favour (even though he’s a staunch Liverpool FC fan). A few weeks later, Abramovich’s wife got in touch and asked him how much it would cost to hire him to perform his Mourinho impersonation at a special party for her husband. “Considering how rich the man is and how I never asked to be paid for the first one, I asked for a certain fee – quite a large one,” he says. “The answer soon came back that this was too much money.”

With over half a million CD sales in Ireland and a huge fan base for his daily early morning Gift Grub segment on Ian Dempsey's Breakfast Show, Rosenstock is one of the country's most popular entertainers. Because a lot of his impressions concern characters from the English Premiership, his work is frequently imported via internet links to the UK. He further built on his UK profile when he worked on a comedy puppet show on the sports channel, Setanta, between 2007 and 2009. Called Special 1 TV, he voiced the characters of Wayne Rooney and ex-England manager, Sven Goran Eriksson as well as Mourinho. Big money UK offers followed but Rosenstock turned them down. "It's to do with my life here in Ireland. I love it here, I've a great home, wife and child here and the move just never seemed the right thing for me to do," he says.

Currently on a nationwide tour, he is suffering from a weird form of showbiz exhilaration. “Going out and doing the characters live is very different from doing them in the studio,” he says. Coming up with the idea for the show, he knew what he didn’t want to do. “There was no way I was just going to walk out as myself in front of an audience and start to do the Gift Grub characters,” he says. “I wanted it to be a real show, more of a revue-type show which would involve plenty of interaction with the audience. What we’ve done is include a big video screen – so I get to talk to the characters on the stage and the lighting and make-up all provide a context for whichever character I’m doing.”

All his old friends feature: Bertie Ahern, Roy Keane, Michael O’Leary, Daniel O’Donnell, Jose Mourinho, Padraig Harrington and Joe Duffy. The present Taoiseach is also included although it did take quite a while to get his voice. “It was a total accident,” he says. “I was eating a cicken tikka sandwich and suddenly it worked for me. Having my mouth full of chicken tikka was the only way I could get Brian Cowen’s voice.”

Performing live, he frequently gets requests shouted up at him. On this tour, he is asking audience members to text him those requests in the first half of the show so he can arrange for them to be included in the second half. The results have been surprising: "An awful lot of men out there want to be abused by my impression of the character of Carol from Fair Cityhe says.

The performance skills needed to enact a whole live show aren't a problem for him – he's a trained actor. At school, he got himself cast as Willy Lomax in Death Of A Salesmanand after that he only ever wanted to be an actor. At Trinity College he threw himself into student dramatics and on graduation, had a long stint in Fair City. But there was always "the thing with the voices" – his uncanny ability to impersonate anyone and everyone. It began, he acknowledges, as a party trick, a "look at me" device, but when he got the Today FM job he brought a new level to his impressions.

His first big success was with Bertie Ahern, followed by Roy Keane. He has met a lot of the people he has impersonated – once he interviewed Roy Keane while he was in his character of Roy Keane – which was bizarre for both men. “I kept trying to get him to laugh, because he kept telling me the way I did his laugh wasn’t at all how he laughed,” he says. “There was something a bit scary about sitting across from Roy Keane and he’s staring at you and going ‘Go on, try and make me laugh’. Ronan Keating initially didn’t like how I did him but he came around to it and now he has even named his yacht Fair Play after one of the catchphrases I use when I’m doing him.”

‘Gift Grub’ is currently touring nationwide. See raglane.com for dates