THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:Actor Ciarán Hinds
WHEN CIARÁN HINDS bounds up the carpeted stairway to our meeting point, heads don’t turn; there is no flicker of recognition among the clientele in this smooth Dublin hotel bar. At the next table, a flock of amateur wine tasters, pecking at their bulbous glasses, don’t give him a second glance.
“How did it happen?” Hinds smiles questioningly, when I point out to him that for a quarter of a century now his acting career, whether the general public recognises him or not, has been quietly and gleefully ablaze. “I don’t know. You meet people, they get to know who you are . . . I have no idea.”
“In contrast to the nose, the flavour is quite intense,” says the nearby sommelier loudly, with unyielding certainty. “I don’t know, I don’t know. My career has been . . . fortuitous. Timing – sometimes it’s your own timing, sometimes it’s other people’s.” Our waiter delivers two glasses of wine; fruity, cheeky or aromatic, he doesn’t say.“Cheers,” says Hinds amicably. We clink.
All 6ft 1in of Hinds settles into a fussy little regal chair, the stately upholstery obliterated by his minty green T-shirt, his elbows resting on the knees of his jeans. He’s grateful for the glass of Merlot sloshing about in his hands – it’s the end of his working week and he has just completed a run-through of the Gate Theatre’s next production.
The piece in question is The Birds, a dark, almost gothic fantasy, adapted and directed by playwright Conor McPherson from the short story by Daphne du Maurier. Its world premiere, in Dublin on Tuesday, reunites Hinds and McPherson, who last worked together on the 2007 Broadway run of McPherson's The Seafarer, when the saturnine Hinds played Mr Lockhart, McPherson's sleekly alluring portrait of the devil in a three-piece suit. The pair also recently finished filming The Eclipse, written and directed by McPherson.
Perched over a weary bowl of Bombay mix, we talk about the phenomenon, currently evident in Dublin theatre, of writers directing their own work. Playwrights Enda Walsh and Mark O'Rowe are both double-jobbing on their impending plays at the Abbey, while Hinds achieved international recognition playing the role of Larry in the London and Broadway productions of Patrick Marber's self-directed Tony-nominated play, Closer(for which Hinds won the Theatre World Award for best debut in New York city). Hinds, whose ease and generosity as an actor is well-documented among his peers, leans into the Dictaphone and, while apologising for being a mumbler (he's not), suggests that if a writer can combine his or her intimate understanding of their characters with a strong visual gift, the process can be tremendously rewarding. On the current production (details of which are being held close to the Gate's chest), Hinds beguilingly alludes to McPherson's undoubted talent for probing "common humanity under stress".
But what of Hinds’s uncommon career, I probe. How has this apparently modest and easygoing actor managed to amass such an enviably impressive body of work in theatre, television and film? Well, the way it started, Hinds reveals over the course of a couple of glasses, was something like this: born in Belfast in 1953, he grew up on Springfield Road in a secure family in a mixed, middle-class area, the youngest child of a hardworking GP (his father) and a former Co Antrim schoolteacher (his mother, described by Hinds as “a very beautiful amateur actress”).
By 1972, he was enrolled in Queen’s University in Belfast, where “I was nominally studying law, attending the occasional lecture. I knew I should be somewhere else.”
With the help of a college lecturer who recognised a nascent talent for performing, Hinds’s father was persuaded that his son should audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) and in 1973 Hinds packed his bags and left Belfast for London.
Hinds’s comfortable early years were largely untouched by the Troubles. It was his father who encountered masked youths who tried to disavow the Catholic doctor of the Hippocratic Oath by suggesting he confine his practice to treating only those of his own faith. Undaunted, he continued to serve the communities on both sides of Springfield Road, and his son is a similarly committed believer in integration, particularly in the area of education. Without it, he says, “lies can be spun”.
Leaving home in the early 1970s, “people were scared of this big, bearded Irish student from Belfast, but London was thrillingly open to me”. Hinds attended Rada until 1973 when, after graduation, he did a lousy audition for Giles Havergal, then quixotic and visionary artistic director of Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre.
“I hated the idea of trying to show off and do your thing,” says Hinds, recalling Havergal telling him “that was probably the worst audition I have ever seen” before offering him a job in pantomime (where he doubtless shone as a horse called Albert).
Glasgow Citizens nestles in the heart of the Gorbals and, during the 1970s and 1980s, under the artistic directorship of Havergal, Philip Prowse and Robert David MacDonald, its work was “big, bold and adventurous”, as it probably needed to be.
Hinds, who was asked to return, season after season, describes the “Cits style”: white faces, a strong European influence, a large, young ensemble who all got paid the same, and actors who were expected to take responsibility for their work and not stand around waiting for direction. The company, which at the time charged a nominal fee of a couple of pence to the unemployed, was credited, during Havergal’s long reign, with revolutionising theatre in western Scotland, especially for a young audience.
It was a controversial arena, and in 1977 the city's lord provost, Peter McCann, called for the sacking of Havergal and co after a performance of Draculathat featured nude scenes and which he described as "kinky claptrap appealing only to mentally ill weirdos".
Hinds, however, survived these avant-garde culture clashes in the Gorbals. A Celt in the midst of thespian Londoners (whose presence apparently cheesed off the Scottish actors), his role was often to interpret Glaswegian taxi drivers for delicate southern ears, or negotiate his colleagues’ flat rentals.
Between stints at the “Cits”, Hinds would come to Dublin to find work, settling for a time with the Sheridan brothers in the Project, where he lent his talents to “earthy work, unlike the camp, operatic work at the Cits”. The 1980s were a time when Temple Bar was a darkened bus park for CIÉ, a time when those foolish enough to attempt to make a living in theatre could never have imagined today’s frenetic restaurants, über-cool coffee bars, twinkling mini-skirted girls on boozy hen parties trailing a learner bride over the cobblestones, their battery-operated headgear illuminating the walk down that cavernous street to the Project – once a small beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak city.
“It was a time before soap operas, before everybody wanted to be an actor. It was a time of lending a mate a fiver and borrowing it back at the end of the week,” he recalls.” We drank in Sheehan’s. The posher actors drank in Neary’s.”
It was casting agent Mary Selway who set up a meeting between Hinds, by this time in his mid-30s, and the great theatre director Peter Brook. Brook was bringing his marathon production of the classical Indian text, The Mahabharata, which had originated in France, on a world tour. He needed English-speaking actors, and Hinds was invited to a day-long workshop in Paris, where, he recalls, he and Brook "sat on cushions and talked".
WHEN HINDS SPEAKS about his time spent working with Brook, one begins to understand, or at least to glimpse, the nature of this quietly understated but brilliant actor's relationship with theatre, and indeed film and television. He speaks with intensity but without pretension about a journey that lasted a year and a half, and which, although he felt "formed at 35", changed him. Working with Brook and actors from 15 different countries, languages and cultures ("It wasn't all Zen. Actors, after all, have egos."), he learned that "the frocks won't do it for you – you have to rely on yourself". Sometimes performing the nine-hour Mahabharatathroughout the night, Hinds was moved by his experience of Brook's "vision and grace".
“You have to surrender yourself, otherwise you have conflict,” he says. He learned that “truth, simplicity, grounded hard work and stamina work to transport an audience”, and after a year and half of travelling the world and being introduced to Australia, Tokyo and the US, he felt he had “been on an extraordinary journey”, after which he did not know what to do next.
But the next, and the next and the next, came looking for Hinds, as relationships forged at Glasgow Citizens bore fruit. Havergal invited him to “return home to play Richard III”, and soon after that he was invited to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company by Newry actor Gerard Murphy.
Although Hinds had no burning desire to join the company, and while he knew that Murphy’s offer was conditional on him persuading other directors within the theatre’s structure to cast him in a type of repertory situation, he went along because Murphy was from the Cits and they were friends. Hinds then found himself working for, and forging relationships with, Sam Mendes, Roger Michell and Danny Boyle, who were all there at the time, serving their apprenticeships with the Bard.
In the serendipitous way of a journeyman actor, Hinds was there for Mendes when, years later, a crisis made the latter phone Hinds one night at his London home to ask him if he could come down to the Donmar Warehouse, where Mendes was artistic director, and revive his portrayal of Richard III. Simon Russell Beale, who had been rehearsing the role, had to leave the cast due to injury, and Mendes’s production was due to open eight days later.
“I couldn’t remember a word of the play – well, maybe one speech, one that I had really understood,” says Hinds. His description of the adrenaline-armoured terror he experienced a few days later on that first night, and of the subsequent enervating fear that held him throughout the show’s early performances, is testimony to a determination and professionalism that have been hallmarks of his career. “There’s a difference between knowing the words and being able to share them in a coherent or emotional way.”
I ask him if he experiences nerves now before a performance, before he “offers up a bit of soul and allows the story to happen”, and he answers: “Sometimes, but you have to remind yourself that your job is to share the story. You have a responsibility towards other people.”
HINDS'S CAREER SEEMS to unfurl like a hand-sewn tapestry. Each of his many jobs links to another, professional relationships lead to friendships forged, success leads to success. Even if we leave his theatre work to one side for a moment, his output is phenomenal. In recent years his film work has included roles in Stephen Spielberg's political thriller, Munich("it was fate, or chance – other actors were booked . . . Spielberg was going to do it a year earlier, but when it came to final casting I just balanced out the rest of the cast"), in Michael Mann's Miami Vice, in Martin McDonagh's In Brugesand in Mendes's Road to Perdition. He will soon be seen in the next Harry Potter film, playing none other than Dumbledore's brother.
On television, among countless credits, he has memorably appeared as Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen's Persuasion, and as the sandalled Gaius Julius Caesar in the massive HBO/BBC co-production, Rome. Of Rome, Hinds says: "It just was like being in rep – lots of familiar actors in togas.
“It’s about the work, its always about the work,” he adds. “Of all the things I have done, there have maybe been three things that have been unpleasant experiences. I don’t know, maybe I have a very high tolerance level, maybe I have a good antennae. There are people [in the business] who believe in their work, and you’re thrilled to be invited in, honoured to be asked to interpret the work.”
In that context, Hinds speaks about his break into film in Thaddeus O'Sullivan's glorious December Bride, with Saskia Reeves and Donal McCann.
"We were asked to camera test," he says, laughing. "McCann and I, on either side of Reeves, we were supposed to be brothers. I had long hair and a beard, I looked like Jesus; McCann was playing Fluther with a little brush moustache, he looked like Hitler." It was December Bridethat led to a role in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. "I got in on Michael Gambon's coat-tails," Hinds claims modestly. "They wanted him, and we had the same agent." And so the gossamer trail of the actor's life continues.
“I’m going to meet Ciarán Hinds tomorrow,” I told a female colleague. “What do you think I should ask him?” “Is sex out of the question?” she replied with startling rapidity.
Now, at the less amusing end of his fifties, Hinds is a good-looking man who carries his calm intelligence lightly. Since 1987 he has been living with his partner, French-Vietnamese actress Hélène Patarot, whom he met on Brook's Mahabharata. The couple, who now live largely in Paris, have a teenage daughter, Aoife, who can be dismissive of her father's French. We speak a little about the difficulties of having two actors in the one family, and how the telephone always seems to ring more for one person than for the other. Patarot, however, is currently back working behind the scenes with Brook.
"If I didn't get a job, I would do something else," Hinds says simply. "Life is about more than you acting/me acting." The other great and sustaining friendship in Hinds's life is with fellow actor Liam Neeson. "Ballymena boys – we just laughed together under our suits of armour in Excalibur," Hinds says. Tentatively, I mention the funeral of Natasha Richardson, Neeson's wife and Hinds's friend (they appeared together in Marber's Closer), whose coffin Hinds helped carry. "He is my friend," Hinds says simply, closing off any conversation about Richardson's tragic death.
The bar is filling up. The wine tasters, pleased with their evening’s education, are packing up their noses. We stand. Hinds finds his jacket, thanks me for the hospitality. Dumbledore’s brother is about to vanish.
“I have doubt about most things,” says Hinds, “but we all have to arrive, whatever happens, with the same intention, on the same evening, at the same time. There is no one way to do it — acting is a mystery.”
The Gate's artistic director, Michael Colgan, says that Hinds and Sinéad Cusack [his co-star in The Birds] "are on the top of every director's wish list, actors at the very height of their careers, consummate in their skill and professionalism."
“I don’t know,” Hinds shrugs. “I suppose I didn’t f**k up too much down the line. I suppose I didn’t bump into too much of the furniture.”
BORN
Belfast 1953, the son of a GP and a teacher
TURNING POINT
In 1987 he was cast by Peter Brook in his marathon production of The Mahabharata, which toured the world. Subsequently, along with a prolific theatre career, he has appeared in more than 40 films and numerous television series
WHAT’S NEXT?
He opens in Conor McPherson's adaptation of The Birdsat the Gate Theatre this week. He'll soon be apparating on to a screen near you in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows