Hot Press meets Richard Dormer

“If you haven’t seen Good Vibrations, you won’t know how awesome and potentially BAFTA Award-winning Richard Dormer is as the hero – and occasionally villain – of the piece, Terri Hooley.

From Q’s “it’s a joy following his every glorious discovery or nutty scheme” to the Guardian’s “terrifically warm and entirely lovable”, the universally positive reviews suggest that Gary Lightbody, David Holmes, Lisa Barros D’Sa, Glenn Leyburn, Colin Carberry et al have a Once/Searching For Sugar Man-style sleeper hit on their hands.
“Film critics have suddenly become my favourite group of people,” laughs Dormer sitting backstage at the Abbey Theatre where in 48 hours the play he’s written but somehow resisted the temptation to appear in, Drum Belly, will receive its world premiere. “Unless they’ve been keeping them from me, there hasn’t been one bad review. The reaction’s been the same in cinemas; people have been standing up and applauding at the end, which hasn’t happened since the ’70s. If England’s so comprehensively getting it, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t take off in the States too.”
Good Vibrations isn’t just Terri Hooley’s story, but also that of its aforementioned producers, directors, scriptwriters and cast whose lives were also defined by growing up in the Northern Ireland of the ‘70s.
“It was like a family thing,” Richard nods. “Everybody cared about each other, about Terri, about the product. The story had to be told right…”
And was it?
“Yeah, absolutely. Good Vibrations is the only film I’ve ever watched about Northern Ireland that rings 100% true. It’s like a great song – when you’ve the right musicians in the right mood and the right environment, something magic happens. If ‘Teenage Kicks’ had been recorded a year earlier or a year later in a different studio, the stars mightn’t have aligned quite the way they did and we wouldn’t be talking about Good Vibrations now.”
Richard was two months shy of his ninth birthday when John Peel famously played ‘Teenage Kicks’ twice in a row on his BBC Radio One show and suddenly everybody wanted a piece of the Good Vibes action.
“I wish I could say Peel playing The Undertones was my Beatles moment or something, but it’s only in the last five years that music’s become a big part of my life,” he confesses. “Lisburn, where I grew up, was eight miles physically and a million miles psychologically from Belfast. It was mainly countryside and, if you weren’t reading the papers or watching the TV news, pretty much divorced from the Troubles. I had a great childhood painting pictures, writing stories and being obsessed with Star Trek and Star Wars.”
So Captain James T. Kirk was his Joe Strummer?
“Yeah, and Darth Vader my Johnny Rotten!” he laughs. “It was only when we went on holiday every summer to my Aunt in Guernsey that I realised all was not right with my world. As soon as I opened my mouth, the other children were taking the piss and going, ‘Paddy’ and ‘Thick Mick’ and, ‘Where’s your gun? Where’s your bomb?’ I became very aware that I was a bit of a leper.”
Dormer felt the same way in the late ‘80s, when having killed it as Jack Clitheroe in a schools production of The Plough & The Stars, a kindly teacher encouraged him to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London.
“Now, that was a watershed moment!” he laughs again. “I remember standing on stage as Jack and thinking, ‘Oh my God, everybody’s listening to me and I’m not nervous. For the first time in my life I’m in control. This is what I want to do!’
“I actually auditioned for three acting schools, was accepted by all of ‘em but took RADA because that’s where Richard Attenborough, Kenneth Branagh, Glenda Jackson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, John Hurt and so on had gone and they offered me a scholarship. Although they had good jobs as a psychiatric nurse and a pharmacist, my dad and my mother didn’t have the thousands you need to train there. “Anyway, I went over aged 17 to London and suddenly felt like a second-class citizen. I didn’t have an English accent. I wasn’t Irish or belonged in the Republic. I was from this world where you were only seen on TV, covered in blood and speaking in a really weird twangy accent going, ‘Oh, they shot me, so they did. Nobody suffers like us!’ I was embarrassed by the Troubles because they painted me; the place I grew up in and everybody I knew in a very, very bad light. And I thought it was going to be like that for the rest of my life.”
A lot of people in those circumstances would have ‘luvvied up’ to fit in, but Richard did exactly the opposite.
“It’s probably not as snobby now, but back then they expected you to change your accent. I said, ‘No, I can do accents but I’m not going to sound like everybody else. I’m a Northern Irishman and I’m going to speak like one.’ I suddenly wanted to celebrate where I was from, which was hugely empowering.”
Dormer’s RADA training was prematurely curtailed when Tim Supple offered him the lead in Billy Budd in the Sheffield Crucible.
“It was a huge big play and the perfect excuse to leave RADA six months early. The main thing I learned from my time there is that I don’t like institutions and the set of rules they come with. I’ve subsequently said, ‘Thank you, but no…’ to the Royal Shakespeare Company and The National in London for those reasons. My instinct whilst at RADA was always to knock the walls down.”
Making Richard a sort of thesp version of the punky types that populate Good Vibrations.
“So the casting was right! It’s taken a journalist to realise that underneath it all I’m a punk rocker at heart!”
Glad to be of service. Richard doesn’t so much play as inhabit Terri Hooley’s body in Good Vibrations, which is confirmation of what David Holmes says about him being the Irish Michael Sheen. How did they hit it off?
“Terri was a bit guarded with me at first,” the actor recalls. “We went for an Ulster Fry and then we had a couple of pints, which was the breakthrough ‘cause I got to see how he was with his friends who were in the bar. The guard dropped and he was like (switches into perfect Hooleyese), ‘Come meet this fella Richard Dormer who’s going to be playing me in this incredible film…’ He must have talked for 15, 20 minutes without taking a breath. I just thought, ‘Wow, the activeness of this guy’s mind!’”
Another thing David Holmes said is that it would have been a lot easier to find funding for Good Vibrations if instead of Richard a Hollywood star had been cast as Terri.
“They were talking early on about the Fassbenders and the McGregors, which would have instantly doubled or trebled the budget, but very touchingly they wanted me. David has been such a good friend; he’s doing the music for another great film I’m about to start shooting, 71, which is about a British soldier caught one night in West Belfast trying to get back to his barracks. What I said earlier about music only coming into my life five years ago; Holmer’s the reason I finally got it. Every time you meet him he’s, ‘Have you listened to this, have you listened to that? Here’s something I picked up in LA, this one I found in a second-hand shop in London. I got a demo sent to me the other day I think you’ll like…’ He’s always trying to soundtrack your life!”
A potentially even bigger deal than Good Vibrations is Richard landing the role of Lord Beric Dondarrion in Season Three of Game Of Thrones, which premiered last week and is destined to make him one of the most recognisable faces on Planet Nerd.
“My character, who’s in five episodes, doesn’t appear until the first week of May so I’m safe until then,” he deadpans. “Being hidden in Good Vibrations under Terri’s vast beard and big hair means virtually no one recognises me in Belfast where I’m back living with my wife [director Rachel O’Riordan]. The one thing Beric and him do bizarrely have in common is that they both have an eye out, albeit on different sides.”
Does losing his anonymity worry him?
“No, but then again it hasn’t happened yet. There are some situations you can’t judge until you’re right there in them. People keep warning me it’s going to be freaky and stuff, but I’m 34 and levelheaded enough I reckon to deal with whatever happens. I hope…”
Did HBO come looking for him or was it the other way around?
“What happened is that I was over in London and my agent just handed me the script – it’s the sixth part I’ve been up for in Game Of Thrones. I was seen for the original castings, the auditions went well I thought but I didn’t get them. I was like, ‘Fine, I’m never going to be in Game Of Thrones, whatever…’ But then this role came along and I just got what this guy Beric Dondarrion is about. I sat up all night learning the script and working on the character, went in the next day and nailed it.”
Aidan Gillen says he’s never been as cold as he was playing Lord Petyr ‘Littlefinger’ Baelish in the show.
“His scenes were obviously in the quarry near Larne, which I’m told is like Siberia. His bollocks might have been frozen off, but mine were boiled in this massive set they built to look like caves in the Titanic Studios. It’s where Beric and his Brotherhood Without Barriers hang out. It was the height of summer but supposed to be winter, so they had bonfires everywhere, which together with the lights raised the temperature to around 50 degrees. I had a flaming sword… the sweat! We had icepacks strapped all over our bodies and somebody spraying us with water. It was ferocious doing that filming.”
Another unlikely coincidence finds Good Vibrations Executive Producer Gary Lightbody cameoing in one of the new Games Of Thrones episodes.
“Yeah, he’s managed to get in there as a strolling mandolin-player! Neither of us have seen the episodes we’re in, which normally means you’d be sat there anxiously in front of the telly but with HBO you know it’s going to be amazing. I had a guy, Alex Graves, directing me in a fight scene who’s one of the creators of The West Wing. Anyone who got the best out of Martin Sheen is okay with me! There were five different camera angles, sets the size of small towns, award-winning make-up artists… the whole epic scope of the thing is mind-blowing.”
The scale will be smaller but the action just as dramatic over the coming weeks as Dormer brings Drum Belly to the Abbey stage.
“I’ve been sitting in rehearsal going, ‘Where the fuck did this come from?’” he reflects. “I wrote pretty much the whole thing, not knowing whether it was a play or a film, in four months which is very fast. This character Harvey Marr popped out of nowhere with the line (does his best mafioso impression), ‘We go to the Moon, we paint the Cistine Chapel, we put a bullet in a guy’s face… it’s work!’ I was like, ‘It’s 1969 just after the Apollo 11 moon landing, man’s greatest technological achievement so far; he’s from New York and engaged in something not entirely legal. Where’s this taking us?’ Then all these other people – Walter Sorrow, Gulliver Sullivan, Danny ‘Antrim’ Malley, Thomas ‘Lumpy’ Flannegan, Willy ‘Wicklow’ Hill, Mickey No-No, Bobby Boy and Johnny ‘The Fox’ Rourke – started talking to me. It’s the first time I’ve worked with more than two or three voices. It was like going from a piano piece to a full-scale orchestra and scary because they kind of wrote their own parts.”
Richard is bathed in a Ready Brek glow as he discusses the cast he and director Sean Holmes have assembled.
“They’re an amazing bunch of people,” he beams. “We’ve got Declan Conlon playing Sullivan, the gang boss. Liam Carney is Harvey Marr, the oldest hitman of the lot of them. Ciarán O’Brien is Johnny The Fox, the 25-year-old hotshot kid. Phelim Drew, Ronan Leahy and David Ganly are these three stupid hoodlum sidekicks. The ‘60s were necessary but a very fucked-up time morally. Vietnam was happening, the US was engaged in a different sort of war with the USSR and you had this shaky truce between an Irish gang and the Italian mafia. Anything can and does happen!”

Drum Belly runs at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin until May 11. www.abbeytheatre.ie