The new Dylan

Whilst doing research on the career of Dylan Moran ahead of my recent encounter with him in the Westbury Hotel, I became aware that, over the years, the Navan native has developed a reputation for being a somewhat difficult interviewee. In article after article (usually taken from the arts supplements of broadsheet newspapers), adjectives such as “sullen”, “evasive”, and even “strange” were routinely employed in descriptions of the comedian.

Merely a few minutes into our conversation, however, I found myself wondering why so many journalists have seen fit to depict him in such an unflattering light. Moran is most definitely laconic, and his general unease with the interview process remains, but once engaged in the flow of discourse he reveals himself to be an eloquent conversationalist, with a Peter Cook-like gift for finding humour in even the most mundane subjects. For instance, when we get talking about the government’s new crackdown on smoking, Dylan amusingly – and unselfconsciously – ponders its chances of success.

“I just don’t see it happening myself,” he drawls, in that trademark deadpan style. “How can you tell people not to smoke in, say, McDaid’s? Government officials will be found dead all over the country, covered in cigarette burns. They’ll be ashed into an early grave.”

Smoking may not be conducive to good health, but some would argue that prolonged touring isn’t either. Moran has undertaken his latest reluctant jaunt onto the promotional merry-go-round in order to talk up his new live show, Monster. Does he generally enjoy life on the road?

“Well, you become very intimate with particular stretches of motorway, and sets of traffic lights,” he answers. “Bill Bailey said to me, ‘You know you’re not living your life right when you actually recognise people in service stations’.(Laughs). I suppose it’s the classic thing of enjoying the gigs themselves, but finding the other 22 hours of the day a bit of a drag.

“The whole experience is like walking through one huge hotel, where the rooms are divided by miles of motorway. And it’s strange, because when you’re following the same routine every time – pulling up to the hotel, checking in, checking out – you expect that when you arrive at the next place, the staff will automatically recognise you. You walk in and sort of feel like saying, ‘It’s me, I’m back again!’ But you forget that you’ve travelled two hundred miles and that these people have no idea who you are. You just live in this very weird bubble.”

If Dylan expresses reservations about the attendant hazards of touring, then he could be forgiven for failing to remember what he was letting himself in for. The Monster shows are in fact his first foray into stand-up comedy for a few years, during which time he co-wrote and starred as irascible book-seller Bernard Black in the under-rated Channel 4 sitcom Black Books, and, most recently, acted in playwright-turned-film-maker Conor McPherson’s sophomore directorial effort, The Actors. How does acting compare to stand-up?

“I suppose acting is more like real work than doing this,” Dylan considers. “Especially in film, you get up early in the morning and go to bed late at night, usually feeling very tired at the end of the day. That’s a big difference to just doing the hour on stage.”

Is it hard letting go of the total creative control of your live shows, and submitting yourself to someone else’s directorial vision on a movie?

“When you’re an actor, you’re basically just a glorified drone,” Dylan nods. “Because you have to be a boat one minute, a house the next, then a sheep taking a piss the next. Film-making is very heavily influenced by external factors, so depending on what the day’s like, you can find yourself in a different part of town, with different demands.

“All of a sudden, you’re required to jump off the wall, hit the guy, talk to the girl, say something else to the guy, then wave the gold watch in front of the child’s face… It entirely depends on where you are and what you’re filming at the time. There’s no set pattern particularly. But, you know, it gets you out of yourself, that’s for sure.”

Basing himself in London in the early ’90s, Moran has since moved on once again, and now resides in Edinburgh. Dublin these days must seem a very different place to the recession-crippled town he grew up in back in the ’80s.

“I’m used to twelve comics eating out of the same bag of crisps,” Dylan reflects. “And everything being about the next pint, and the next twenty quid towards the rent. It was kind of rainy and scangy and everything felt illegal. But it was great fun at the same
time. Completely desperate as well, occasionally… But being twenty, and actually not having to work some shite job, just trying to do this and having a good laugh, and that feeling of getting away with something, that was all brilliant.”

Finally, we return to the tricky subject of those newspaper profiles. One of the character traits most frequently cited in Dylan Moran interviews is his putative miserablist, self-loathing streak. I mention this to Dylan and he hits me with a classic retort:

“I wouldn’t get animated enough about myself to bother loathing myself. It’s not something I particularly concentrate my energies on these days, y’know? I think it’s fairly safe to say we all tend to over-analyse ourselves. So now I stay away from it.”