Meet The Misfit

The first thought that occurs when Killing Bono star Robert Sheehan walks into the room is that he really is exceptionally pretty. The second is that he’s surprisingly tanned. And the third is that I should have had a lot more coffee.

“Look at you!” the Portlaoise native exclaims, when I comment on his bronzed complexion. “You’re so wonderfully pasty. You’ve got skin the Japanese would embrace!”
Before I have time to decide whether I should laugh, swoon or cry, he’s bounded to the other side of the room, plonked himself down on a chair and put his booted feet on the coffee table. “I’m going to sit like this because I’m a rock and roll rebel, baby!”
Except he doesn’t sit. He’s immediately on his feet again, admiring the Killing Bono poster behind us and talking at the speed of light.
“God, Ben Barnes is a good-looking bastard, isn’t he?” he says, looking at the man who plays former Hot Press writer Neil McCormick in the film. “Yeah, the tan, I was over in Cambodia for a month. I had some time off so I went over. No work, no self-progression, just lots of heavy drinking. Would you like a drink by the way?” And he’s over to the other side of the room again, pouring a glass of water. If he keeps bouncing around the place like this I’m going to get whiplash – I already feel like a spectator at Wimbledon.
Robert plays Neil’s brother Ivan McCormick – the man who might have been in U2. Ivan attended the original rehearsals for the world’s biggest band. The way the film tells it, Bono informed Neil that the nascent U2 wanted Ivan in on rhythm guitar. But, in a piece of brotherly manipulation, Neil kept the news to himself and set about the task of competing with U2 in the race to stardom. Guess who wins? Well, Robert doesn’t seem to want to talk about that. Yet!
Thankfully he does settle down when I ask him about his acting debut in the hard-hitting drama Song for a Raggy Boy, slumping in his chair and closing his eyes. “Oh we’re going to talk about my childhood are we? Okay, as long as you don’t ask me when I first had sexual feelings towards my mother – well, fine, I’ll answer that one. I was seven.”
After that, asking him about his role in a film about priests sexually abusing young boys seems strange, but we must persist.
“Yeah, that’s such a fun pitch for a film, isn’t it! I don’t think I even registered what it was about. I think the novelty of being in a film far outweighed the subject matter. But there was always a feeling that we were in safe hands. I did get a lot of slagging about it, even though I wasn’t even raped in the film. You did get all the ‘You got done by that priest!’ comments. And we did slag Chris, the lad who did get raped in the film. It’s not fair really, he put in a wonderful performance. I was 15 – slagging’s what we did!”
Sheehan attended Galway Mayo Institute of Technology. The filmmaking course there didn’t grab him, and he left after a year. “I really didn’t embrace the course,” he remembers. “I just went up to Galway and partied my ass off. I saw college as an opportunity not to do proper work or anything of any academic worth. It was kind of do that, or stay in Portlaoise for a year. It wasn’t a difficult
choice really.”
Leaving the course didn’t do his career any harm. On the contrary, after several parts in small films and on TV, he landed a role in E4’s hit show Misfits. Playing Nathan, a cheeky loudmouth young offender who gets super-powers, Sheehan’s profile soared.
“Yeah, I guess I have fans now,” he admits. “It’s bizarre. Mainly because kids have far too many cameras these days. Most people I meet carry a camera. Everyone’s very snap-happy and when you’re in the pub, or whatever, it gets a bit overwhelming that you’re constantly being snapped or interrupted and you never get to finish that sentence you started half an hour ago to your friend. But it’s just a pleasant side-effect I guess.”
He may have acquired a fan-base and be acknowledged as the comic genius of the show, but the adulation comes at a price: Robert has had to partake in some of the most cringe-worthy sex scenes ever, one of which was with a 76-year-old woman.
“Yep, I’m a lucky, lucky man!” he laughs. “She was 76, playing an 82-year-old. But you know what, she had seriously good boobs. They had to age them, and draw wrinkles on them and stuff, bless her! But you just have to joke about it. I was just sidling up to her going ‘I can’t wait to climb on you!’ She was so well-spoken, she had this very posh voice and would say things like ‘I hate when people use the word icon, because it actually refers to religious iconography’. She’d be all knowledgeable while I was standing there like a twat in a cock-sock.”
Joking on set seems to be Sheehan’s trademark. However, he met his match in Nicholas Cage, on the supernatural thriller Season of the Witch.
“Nic was the biggest messer of all! We were around a campfire in one scene and we all just got really hyper, getting furious bouts of the giggles. And Cage just could not stop laughing, even though he had to have a straight face for the scene. So the campfire was roaring, and he suddenly just goes ‘Aw man, I gotta straighten up!’ so he puts his hand in the bloody fire! It was insane, but in a wonderfully childlike kind of way – well, you know, like a wonderful self-harming child…”
Sheehan also worked with the late, great Pete Postlethwaite, who plays Karl, the gay landlord of wannabe rockstars Neil and Ivan McCormick, in Killing Bono. Postlethwaite’s performance is wonderfully camp, made all the more impressive by the fact that the actor was already battling pancreatic cancer. It was his last film.
“What can you say? He was amazing, such a wonderful person,” says Sheehan, suddenly quietening down. “He was this face I grew up with – and knowing that this film was really the last chance to work with him… well, I feel privileged, in a very surreal way. And I love him in this role. It’s like you’ve never seen him before, as this flamboyantly gay character, based on Derek Jarman I believe. And we wrapped about nine months before he died, so I only heard about his death on the news, which was kind of horrible. We were shooting in January and February 2010, and he was already really ill at that stage, doing his chemotherapy full-time. It really was a tragedy. He was such a magnificent actor.”
And what of his foil in the movie, Narnia star, Prince Caspian himself, Ben Barnes?
“Ben was great to work with. He’s very funny. In this film we obviously had to play at being rock stars, and my character is often bemused by Neil’s actions, but Ben made it very easy! For the concert scenes, he came on throwing all these mad poses, going mental and so it was very easy not to ‘act’. You’re just kind of looking at him thinking ‘You are bloody mental-looking, what the fuck are you doing?’ He was brilliant, he just threw caution to the wind!”
How did he feel when Ivan McCormick finally arrived on set for a cameo appearance?
“It’s quite nerve-wracking playing a real person! I’d read I Was Bono’s Doppelgänger of course, but I hadn’t met Ivan until he showed up on set, which was very near the end of filming. It’s during a scene where Ben and I are in a strip club, and of course we’re acting like complete twits. But Neil and Ivan were sat right there, playing really smarmy geezers, and I just kept thinking ‘Ivan, this is how I’m representing you in this film, as a complete eejit. Hope you don’t mind!’”
Killing Bono is out this April but irrespective of how it does at the box office, Sheehan’s upcoming schedule is hectic, with a World War II movie starring Cillian Murphy in development and another series of Misfits set to film this summer. There’s also speculation that he might return to the acclaimed Irish drama Love/Hate, though his character was shot in the dramatic finale of the last series.
“Oh there’s loads of stuff floating around, but I’m not supposed to talk about them,” he moans, bouncing in his seat again, like a five-year-old eager to tell a secret. “I hate keeping secrets, but I’ll get in loads of trouble so I really shouldn’t say…”
Our time is up and he bids me farewell. “Lovely to meet you, you pale little vampire woman! Go hit a sunbed!”
Yup. Charming.