Actor Simon Delaney - sometimes better known for his Who Wants To Be A Millionaire disaster than his Bachelors Walk success - is back in Dublin in the award-winning play, Stones in his Pockets. He talks to Shane Hegarty
It all could have been very different for Simon Delaney. Back in 2000 he had just featured in the pilot episodes for two new comedies about to start on RTÉ. He'd been offered a lead role in both shows. What to do? He and his agent talked it through and he decided to go for Bachelors Walk. It was aired and it made stars of the cast. Delaney became famous as Michael, the frustrating but endearing alcoholic barrister.
Not a bad choice when the alternative was to have become "Robbie the van driver" in the disastrous sitcom The Cassidys. "I definitely think I picked the right one," he says.
At 33, Delaney is not quite ubiquitous, but he is verging on it. He has recently featured in the BBC comedy drama Pulling Moves, and has filmed a greyhound caper The Mighty Celt with Robert Carlyle and Gillian Anderson. He is in the new radio soap on RTÉ, Driftwood; he's fresh from five months in the West End with Stones In His Pockets, and preparing for a run in the Gaiety. "I have an awful lot to thank Bachelors Walk for."
He was originally supposed to play a shop assistant in the series, but after auditions he was offered the part of Michael. "Do you know who ended up playing the shop assistant?" he asks. "Colin Farrell. Whatever happened to him?"
Well, Farrell's next move didn't involve becoming a postman. After the first series of Bachelors Walk had brought him a healthy dollop of fame, Delaney took a Christmas job. "I had two months without acting jobs, so I delivered post. No problems. Hat, shades, Walkman on. Started at 7.30 a.m. Finished at 11 a.m. Absolutely brilliant."
It's unlikely that he'll need the extra work any time soon. The 13 roles he plays in Marie Jones's play about Hollywood descending upon rural Ireland showcases a versatility that appears to be in demand.
Ah, the West End. Glamour. Big city. Bright lights. Great audiences. Not quite. "Yeah, it was the West End and I'm very proud of it, but the audiences weren't fantastic. So that's why I'm looking forward to playing to an Irish audience. In the West End, I didn't realise you're playing to busloads of tourists. They go 'cos it's a West End show. Our theatre was beside the one that The Mousetrap was in, which is a bigger tourist attraction than Big Ben. They couldn't get tickets for that, so they go and see Stones In His Pockets. It's won this award and that award ... but they sit there cross-eyed. They just didn't get it. The first matinée I played over there, there were 49 people and 30 of them were Japanese tourists. So to say that they missed the full impact is an understatement. At the weekends, though, there were always full houses, and if there were a smattering of Irish in, it would take off straight away."
Becoming an extra stop on the tourist trail brought about peculiar problems. "The strangest thing was people falling asleep. I don't mean a nap, I mean absolutely gone. They'd just got in out of the rain and it was warm. Or they'd just been up the Tower of London and they were shattered." He stops for a second. "It was magical." He leans in to the tape recorder. "It was magical."
For all the sardonic edge to that comment, there was much that was magical to him. For one, he had been dropped into one of the planet's great showbusiness nurseries. The second series of Bachelors Walk featured a storyline in which Michael sang in a musical, and Delaney proved his singing voice to be quite golden. It was in musicals that he first started out in amateur dramatics 12 years ago. He still directs several musicals a year for the Full Circle Theatre Company. His ideal job, he says, would be directing Cabaret on Broadway or to appear in The Producers.
He's unlikely to get such chances in the dim lights of Dublin's theatreland. It is a great shame, he says, that the size of the productions means that musicals rarely feature in Irish theatres. "The only professional musicals here come from the West End to the Point. And this year we have Mamma Mia! A landmark musical." He's being sarcastic, of course. "But it'll sell out. There's such a huge appetite and it should be tapped into. But they're so expensive to put on."
Before turning professional, he had drifted through various jobs in Dublin. "I have a CV like the Golden Pages. I was a sales rep. I sold everything, very badly. I sold life insurance, office equipment, advertising. I drove a van for a hire company. No job lasted for longer than two months. I was just a working shmoe."
He was driving the van when he got a call from a cousin, who was working as a hairdresser on film shoots. Her husband was making a short movie and would Delaney like to act in it? He said yes, took a week off work and has yet to go back. "I should probably ring my boss and tell him I'm not coming back."
He decided to give himself a year to see if he could make it as an actor. Within a month, he was shooting a US TV production of David Copperfield. "My first scene was with Sally Field in a $12 million budget production, and I was getting paid ferociously good money. And then, of course, it was six months before the next gig."
Every so often, he gets a reminder that there are some who remember him more for a pre-Bachelors Walk appearance on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire than they do for any acting work he's done since. "It sounds very J-Lo when I say I don't talk about that any more, but I'm determined that people forget it because I hate getting told, 'you're the eejit who lost all that money'."
But it's too good a story to let pass. He had told Gay Byrne that if he won a million he'd get engaged to his girlfriend, Lisa. He went for €32,000 and answered wrongly, tumbling back to a grand. But it was too late; he had endeared himself to the nation. A jeweller offered to give them a ring, and when Lisa couldn't find one she liked, one was custom-made for her. They were all over the papers and appeared on the Late Late Show. Then they flew to New York with £1,000 in their pocket and got engaged on Valentine's Day. They plan to marry next year.
Dublin's taxi drivers, it seems, have too long a memory to let it drop. "Feng shui!" they exclaim when he gets into the car, in reference to the question he got wrong. He had guessed that feng shui translates literally as peace and harmony. The correct answer is wind and water. "I tell you, you find out who your friends are," he says. "The amount of feng shui candle sets and books I got that year ... "
With no formal training, he's learning his trade both through experience and from those he meets along the way. "You learn how they approach it and how they prepare for it. Every single actor is so different. I think the biggest single influence on me was Michael Gambon, when I played his son in The Actors. And that's probably one of my happiest times yet. He is without doubt the funniest man on planet Earth. And I learned an awful lot from him about learning lines and hitting lines and camera technique. When I was in the West End, I went to see him in Beckett's endgame, and it was just a mammoth performance."
His ambitions, however, stretch beyond just acting. He is currently writing a script with Ciaran Carney, one of the writers of Bachelors Walk, and he is setting up his own production company. He also fancies directing for television.
As regards the acting, he just wants to keep busy. "I'm happy that I've started to get asked to do a few things, getting film offers rather than being dragged into auditions. It's about getting to that stage where you're being offered good work. I've absolutely no grá with being a Hollywood star, because the likelihood is that I've more chance of being canonised."
Where does he want to be 10 years from now? "I'd love to be on Broadway. In a huge musical. Which I've co-written. And I've got a few quid in, so I'm anexecutive producer. And I've directed it."
He thinks again.
"In 10 years' time, we'll be sitting in this same café and you'll ask me, 'weren't you the guy on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' " u
Stones in his Pockets runs at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin August 30th-September 25th. Driftwood is on RTÉ Radio 1 weekdays at 10.50 a.m.