Risteard Cooper is amused; there is a poster outside the Gate theatre promoting the current production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. It features a photo of Jeananne Crowley on one side and himself on the other, only Risteard's side has slipped. "It looks as if I have a hare lip, three eyes and a big scar" he grins. "Which kind of puts things in perspective."
This show is the third Gate production in recent months to feature Cooper in the young male lead role - he was Christian in Cyrano de Bergerac, Septimus Hodge in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia and now he plays the languid fop with a heart of gold, Lord Goring. A good resume for any young Irish actor, but one that is all the more impressive considering Cooper has achieved a level of success in another field that would be the envy of many a young comedian.
For Cooper is also one of the three writers and performers behind Apres Match, the best bit of comedy to come out of RTE since Scrap Saturday.
Anyone who tuned into World Cup '98 coverage will be familiar with the face, or faces of Risteard Cooper as he sat in an RTE set with Barry Murphy and Gary Cooke, skipping in and out of the personalities of soccer pundits such as Trevor Brooking and Jim Beglin. Apres Match quickly became almost as essential viewing as the matches themselves, and they were rewarded by regular slots after Ireland games.
"We're all really, really into sport and the programme is more or less how we'd behave in a pub anyway. Sometimes it doesn't seem like work at all." Although they were disappointed when Ireland didn't get through - "because we're Irish but also because we thought people wouldn't see it" - in the end it didn't matter. "Some of the serious football pundits discuss the game as though it's nuclear science. I think Apres Match appealed to all those who thought they took it way too seriously."
Due to his impressive mimicry skills, interviewing Cooper is slightly unnerving. At any moment he not only disappears into the voice of somebody else but, he in some way becomes that person. He acknowledges that it was something that he started first in school days in St Michael's in Ballsbridge, Dublin.
At the end of the school year, teachers used to allow him to take a class in which he would imitate each of the teachers in turn: "I enjoyed that. I was always in on that day."
He first got involved in drama at the age of nine, in the children's opera in the RDS, in which his mother, a teacher, was also involved. "I was the only boy with 300 young girls and I remember this paper coming round to interview us. They asked me how I felt being the only boy and I said I didn't give a shit. Of course they quoted me." His mother's response is unrecorded.
Yet when he left school it was to pursue a career in music, having won a scholarship to the College of Music. He was a classically trained singer of lieders and operatic arias, having been surrounded by music from an early age. "My parents actually met in the RTE singers - my father was a soloist and my mother was in the chorus. She said she was attracted to him but she thought he was a Protestant because he had such clean fingernails." Risteard grew up speaking both Irish and English at home "without thinking it had any significance one way or the other".
After one year, he changed careers to acting and the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College. "I found classical music a little stiff and technically formulaic. While it was something that gave me a lot of pleasure, it was not ultimately where my interests lay." He professes himself very pleased with the time he spent studying drama from 1986 to 1988.
"It was an eye opener in many ways. I think I had always thought that if you were good and talented that would dictate whether you got work or not and it doesn't really work like that. You have to know what you want to do - I think it's like those pre-marriage courses, there are certain questions you have to ask yourself."
After leaving he landed a number of roles in plays such as Michael Scott's Torchlight and Laserbeams at the Gaiety and then the Edinburgh festival, the Druid production of A Little Like Drowning and A Slice of Saturday Night at Andrews Lane. But ard said Cooper says he was not always sure of himself as an actor. "I knew I wanted to do it but I remember that I felt I should be getting work in a period when I wasn't. In retrospect I'm glad because I think I probably wasn't as good as I thought I was."
Yet despite good roles in Frank McGuinness's The Bird Sanctuary and Moses Rock in the Abbey, Risteard decided to start all over again in New York in 1994, following a US tour with Shivaun O'Casey's The O'Casey Theatre Company.
"There was such a fantastic buzz in New York, I wanted to see what it was like to live and work there. It's an entirely different set-up - American actors take themselves much more seriously, and they're very disciplined. Not, of course, that I'm trying to suggest that Irish actors aren't," he grins.
His big break there came when he was messing about in a bar talking in a Deep South accent. "A guy who was directing this play he had written himself asked me where I was from so of course I had to go along with it and pretended I was from the South."
He got a part and, shortly afterwards, an agent. His time in the US culminated in a role in the American premiere of Jez Butterworth's hit show, Mojo with the acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. "That was an amazing experience. They had an extraordinary passion and were a very focused company who really believed in the potential impact of theatre."
If his reasons for moving to the US were professional, his motivation for returning to Ireland was personal - when on a trip home, he met the woman whom he married last September. "Meeting Suzanne put things in perspective." He says with some glee that she is nothing to do with the theatre: "No, she's completely normal. Well, she's not really, but she's not an actress." There followed an incredibly intense year for Cooper - his mother died, he and Suzanne got married and had a baby, the World Cup and Apres Match was on, and he was in a movie.
"I was anxious that I wasn't dealing with it all because I was just so busy - which is a way of dealing with something in itself. But I didn't want to get to a stage where it would catch up with me and I would suddenly realise that I was actually grief-stricken. So I took some time out."
The movie, which has yet to be released, is produced by Uberto Pasolini, producer of The Full Monty, and directed by Scottish director, Aileen Ritchie. Filmed in Co Donegal and dealing with the frustrations and desires of four Irish men, who place an ad in an American paper in search of women, Risteard says he has no fears about it being heralded as the next Full Monty: "I don't really have a huge part, so if anybody should be concerned about that I'll leave it up to the others."
In the middle of filming, Cooper also landed his first role with the Gate. He is aware that he has now developed something of a relationship with the Gate, but is not concerned about being typecast in the role of the young swain. "I'm very, very happy, to go along with it, if that is the perception of me. Of course I'm happy to do lead parts in a theatre with a great reputation, following in the footsteps of such wonderful actors and directors."
Certainly there seems no doubt that Cooper is being groomed as one of the Gate's unofficial coterie of players. Michael Colgan, director of the Gate, says that when he is looking at plays he finds he is looking for parts for Risteard. "I've kind of fixated on him in the same way I have done with Donna Dent or Stephen Brennan before."
For the moment, Cooper would be loath to settle for either straight acting or comedy and so far he has not had to make that choice. "Someday I may have to sacrifice one or the other and that would be a very difficult decision to make. In many ways doing both has helped me in that it has opened doors and keeps reminding me of the different things I'm able to do.
"It's amazing how having a child gives you a whole different set of priorities, even in terms of your career. There was a time when I left Trinity when I was incredibly nervous going into every audition because I was so hungry. I wanted to be so impressive all the time. Now I don't care if I'm impressive or not because I've realised that no matter what you do some people will like you and some people won't."
An Ideal Husband is running at the Gate Theatre