The Meaney of Life

You’d have though that getting one of Ireland’s most celebrated actors to appear in a Simon Cowell-produced film about 2007 Britain’s Got Talent winner Paul Potts would have been a hard sell but, nope, Colm Meaney couldn’t wait to sign on the dotted line.

“My honest to God reaction when my agent rang up and said he had a script he wanted me to read about Paul Potts was, ‘Oh, the Khmer Rouge bloke,’” Meaney laughs. “And actually it’s a gag in the film; his parents tell somebody his name and they go, ‘As in the Cambodian dictator?’ Living in Majorca – we’ve just built a house there and my eight-year-old daughter is going to a Spanish school – I was blisfully unaware of Britain’s Got Talent and said, ‘Okay, send it over, I’ll have a look.’”
Half-a-dozen paragraphs in and the 60-year-old, who exudes the sort of good health that only comes from living in sunny climes, was on-board.
“The script was delightful; it’s a wonderful story,” he enthuses. “I only got to see the finished film last night, and David Frankel, who’s previously directed the likes of The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me, has done a wonderful job. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry and all that sort of stuff… Britain’s Got Talent isn’t mentioned until probably the last 10 or 15 minutes, so it’s about his pre-fame life growing-up in Port Talbot. I play his staunchly working-class steelworker dad who’s like, ‘Hold on a second, what?’ when his son suddenly announces he wants to be an opera singer. That tension is central.
“There’s this clever device whereby they flash through his childhood within the first three or four minutes and then it’s 2004, three years before the TV stuff happens. James Corden is superb as Paul. Harvey Weinstein, whose company are doing the distribution, was spot on last night at the premiere when he said he deserves an Oscar nomination for it. He really inhabits the character.”
We’ll return to the subject of inhabiting one’s character a bit later. Another reason for Colm wanting to do One Chance is that he got to spend some quality screen time with Julie Walters who plays Paul Pott’s ma, Yvonne.
“I’ve been a huge fan of hers since Educating Rita and it was a real joy to get to work with her. Julie’s one of those people who you can’t help but learn from both personally and professionally.”
Asked who’d previously made him go, “Wow, this is a bit special!” Colm immediately says, “John Huston would be top of the list. I was very young when I worked with him on The Dead – 1987 I think it was – and was just blown-away by his passion and vision. Another would be Tommy Lee Jones who I did Under Siege with four or five years after that. That or Con-Air is still the biggest budget film I’ve been in. Anyway, Tommy’s extraordinary. He’s an Ivy League guy who shared a room at Harvard with Al Gore. He has a very dry, very funny sense of humour and doesn’t take fools lightly. He’s a bit of a reputation, which I wouldn’t blame him for because there are some complete idiots in our industry. Tommy’s an amazing, amazing actor who automatically steals whatever movie he’s in. He’s one of the people who sets the benchmark against which you judge your own performances.”
Did Colm get to compare suntans with Simon Cowell?
“I didn’t meet Simon, no, but Paul Potts is a lovely guy.”
Who rather poignantly said in an interview the other day that, “I never believed that anybody could love me. The bullying I had (growing up) was repeated and sustained.”
“He’s not your standard starry-eyed dreaming of fame character; Paul’s had a lot going on in his life, which is what makes One Chance the emotionally quite complex film it is.”
Meaney’s visit to London is a flying one, with Colm about to start shooting a Pelé biopic, which will be hitting screens next year just before the World Cup finals. Is he just trying to wangle himself over to Brazil for the footballing festivities?
“I wish,” he smiles. “You can’t plan anything in this business. If you decide you’re going to turn right, tomorrow something will push you left. People mention it to me as being a ‘Pelé biopic’ – and, yeah, he’s the lead character in it – but it’s more about the 1958 World Cup and the coming together of that classic Brazil team. It also deals in a very interesting way with the kind of latent European racism directed towards them. The character I play is Sweden’s British coach who says things like, ‘Well, they’re very primitive’ which is code for, ‘Well, they’re mostly black.’”
It’s the same today with African defences routinely described by rentapundits as being “naïve”.
“Absolutely,” he nods. “They searched in Los Angeles, New York, Europe, everywhere for somebody to play Pelé and eventually came up with these two unknown kids – Kevin De Paula and Leonardo Lima Carvalho – one of whom plays him up till the age of 13, and the other till 17, which was all he was at those finals.”
It’s not the first time that Meaney has got sheepskin-jacketed up, with his The Damned United portrayal of ex-Leeds United and England boss Don Revie among his biggest cinematic triumphs. Indeed, just like James Corden in One Chance, he inhabited the character.
“That’s very nice of you, thanks. I was apprehensive about playing an iconic English figure like that. He was originally from Sunderland, so although he’d spent a long time in Lancashire and Yorkshire there were these odd little Geordie-isms that a very, very good dialect coach helped me nail. We also had a genius hairdresser who’d won an Oscar the year before for the Edith Piaf movie, La Vie En Rose. She was this lovely, elderly, sort of doddery woman who threw what looked like a dead rat at me. It was just a piece of hair to stick on the front, but it immediately gave me the Revie look. Michael Sheehan as Clough, Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor, Stephen Graham as Billy Bremner… that was a superb cast.”
I’d go even further and say, that despite Johnny Giles’ considerable bleating about it, The Damned United is the finest footie film of all-time. When not gracing the big-screen – also coming up is Sean Lackey’s “comedy of sorts” The Yank – Meaney can be found wowing cable TV viewers as Thomas ‘Doc’ Durant in 1865 frontier drama Hell On Wheels.
“We’re just waiting to hear if there’s going to be another season. I really hope there is because the writing on that show’s been great. The creators Joe and Tony Gayton captured the period dialogue and these characters perfectly. When I read the script it was instant, ‘I really want to play this guy!’ I had a wonderful two or three-page monologue in the pilot episode where Doc explains what the building of the railroad will entail and the kind of people you need to do it. There’s a line – “The lion will eat the zebra” – which just captured everything. You don’t often get meaty roles like that where the character develops across, so far, 30 episodes. That’s the equivalent of at least ten movies. We go to Calgary in Canada from mid-April to late August to film, so it’s a big commitment in terms of time, but worth it.
“The thing with cable as opposed to the traditional networks is you get more time to build a series. If you look at the other big AMC hits, Breaking Bad had poor numbers for its first three years and Mad Men, which is successful in so many ways, actually has a smaller audience share in the US than Hell On Wheels. Had those shows been on ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox even, they’d never have made it to a second season.”
Those who’ve died by their numbers recently include Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams whose respective Terra Nova ‘back to the dinosaur age’ and Alcatraz sci-fi prison yarns were both cancelled after an unlucky 13 episodes.
“Yeah, big name or not, if the numbers aren’t there you’re going to get canned.”
Abrams has been far more successful with his two Star Trek re-boots. Having spent seven-years on the USS Enterprise, was Meaney eager to see Jeffrey James’ twist on things?
“I must confess I was never really a science-fiction fan. If I catch it I catch it, but I wouldn’t be running out to see a Star Trek movie.”
Given that you can do degree courses in Klingon, I think it’s fair to say that Star Trek über-nerds have gone sadly gone where no über-nerds have gone before.
“There were a couple of times at conventions when you’d meet some of them and think, ‘You could do with a good wash!’” Chief O’Brien concedes. “That Bill Shatner ‘get a life!’ line from the Saturday Night Live Star Trek sketch would cross your mind from time to time, but most of them were decent, nice and very knowledgeable. They put in their five cents’ worth and then say, ‘Thank you, goodbye!’”
Another notable filmic feather in Colm’s cap this year was his turn as shotgun-wielding DJ Pat Farrell in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. Was he already a committed North Norfolk Digital listener?
“Not at all, which I’m not sure sat too well with Steve Coogan. If you went online in America you could find Alan Partridge, but it hadn’t been on my radar during the time I was living in LA. It didn’t matter whether I was a fan or not; the script was a worthy stand-alone piece of work that you didn’t need to know the whole back-story to get.
“We spent a lot of time together on that movie and I have to say Steve was a joy. He’s a bit of a control-freak, as I think all comics are, but you only have to look at the film that’s just come out with Judi Dench, Philomena, to realise what a versatile writer – and great serious actor – he is. He’s multi-talented and people like that are complex. They’re not going to be a simple, straightforward, straight-shooting Joe Blow.”
A film he’s less proud of gracing is A Belfast Story, this year’s post-Troubles violencefest, which got minus marks for the balaclava ‘n’ nail-bomb press-kit sent out by its writer-director Nathan Todd.
“I just thought that was idiotic,” he states baldly. “It was no more than I would’ve expected. Unfortunately, what started out film-wise as a potentially good idea didn’t work out very well. Everybody would’ve been better calling it off and going home. It’s a very flawed film. There’s some decent stuff in it, but the narrative’s very confused. I’d have to say I’m not happy with it.”
He didn’t get a call from Keanu Reeves to appear in Side By Side, but Meaney has plenty to say on the subject of digital over film.
“Digital cameras have taken over completely – I accept that but I don’t have to like it. I haven’t seen Keanu Reaves’ documentary, but I’m glad there’s finally debate about what this change has done to our craft. Because you’re not using actual film stock it’s lowered the cost of filming dramatically. A director can use two or three cameras and do as many takes as they like as opposed to the previous method, developed over a hundred years, whereby they rehearsed the scene and figured out what they were doing. Marks were put down for the actors’ different positions and then the Director of Photography was able to light the set. You’d come back, everyone knew where they were at and you did the scene. Nowadays you go in and they roll cameras straight away, so people are bumping into cameras and each other. I just think it’s a horrible, horrible process. The counter-argument is it makes things more spontaneous, but I disagree with that. They say, ‘Colm, you’ve more freedom.’ No. Freedom for me is rehearsing the scene, putting down the mark; I know where I am, I know where the camera is, the cameraperson knows where I am… Now we’re free to do whatever we want because we’re not going to bump into each other, we know where we’re going.”
On the plus side, it means that RTÉ are in a position to make something like Love/Hate without the licence-fee having to go up a tenner.
“I haven’t seen it yet, but I will do. I hear it’s fantastic and has opened doors internationally for the likes of Robert Sheehan and Ruth Negga. It’s enormously important to have good home-produced drama.”
As you would have seen from the RTÉ cameras zooming in on him, Meaney was in the posh seats for Dublin’s All-Ireland smiting of Mayo.
“What a great day!” he beams. “Dublin GAA is the backdrop against which I grew up. I got a call when I was back from Jim Sheridan saying, ‘Are you free for something I’m doing in Whelan’s?’ After a bit of back-and-forth I was able to go, ‘Yes’ and turned up to find he was directing a radio version of The Commitments for a Roddy Doyle season that’s running before Christmas I think on BBC Radio Four. He wrote a part for me, so I’m in it.”
Has he read Doyle’s kind of Commitments sequel, The Guts?
“It’s out, is it? I’ve been in such a work cocoon this year I didn’t realise.”
Would he be interested in re-visiting Barrytown if the novel gets turned into a film?
“If it’s based on something Roddy Doyle’s done, you’re always going to want to read the script.”
Any plans to turn filmmaker himself?
“I’ve no interest in directing but I have produced a film called El Perfecto Desconocido – The Perfect Stranger – which was shot a couple of years ago in Spain, and have a few scripts I’m shopping around trying to get people interested in,” Colm concludes. “I’d never profess to having had a master-plan, but because I’ve done film and TV of every conceivable budget, I can pick and chose what I do and have fun with it.”

One Chance is in Irish cinemas now.