Turning over a new leaf

With an extremely prolific CV that includes appearances aplenty in such prominent blarney epics as Far And Away, Into The West, This Is My Father ,The Van and The Magical Legend Of The Leprechauns, Colm Meaney could never be accused of being lazy.

However, despite appearances in such high profile flicks as Con Air and a Golden Globe nomination for his work in The Snapper, it is Meaney’s television work which makes him the most instantly recognisable Irish actor on the planet. Indeed, his role as Chief Operations Officer Miles O’Brien on Star Trek – The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine keeps the fan-mail rolling in still.

Born and raised in Dublin, Meaney began studying acting at the tender age of 14, and became involved with the Abbey Theatre once out of secondary school. He toured with various companies in the UK for eight years before moving to New York, where his career flourished.

Moviehouse caught up with Meaney on the promotional circuit for his latest outing, the critically acclaimed How Harry Became a Tree, an intense and melodramatic (though often farcical and funny) tale set in 1920’s Ireland, and directed by the much-respected Goran Paskaljevic (The Powder Keg). The movie is a very competent affair, but it’s Meaney’s central performance that stands out a mile – Harry, the film’s thunderous anti-hero, is quite clearly a raving nutcase.

MOVIEHOUSE: Does that make Harry, in your eyes, a dream character to play?

COLM MEANEY: Yeah, this was one of the things that really made me want to do it, the way the insanity jumped off the page. I mean it was a great script, but Harry’s obviously the kind of role that gets an actor’s juices going because of the range and how high and low you could take him. He is peculiarly Irish, for sure, he couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

MH: That said, the film’s Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic has stated that Harry was at least partially based on deposed despot Slobodan Milosevic...

CM: Absolutely, I think there clearly is an obvious political parallel which me and Goran talked about quite a lot, I thought of him as being more Ian Paisley to be honest. That kind of blind dogmatic hatred that just seeps into people for no clear reason. He has a passionate love of hatred, and a real flair for expressing the hatred in his language. In a sense, then, that was a way of discussing this before getting around to actually playing it.

MH: Was that a way of accessing Harry’s humanity then?

CM: Yeah, I think the first clue to where we were going was when we had a reading the day before shooting started, and we suddenly realised how funny and sharp he is in spite of being such a volcano. And all the characters began to emerge, all the relationships and interactions became clearer. I didn’t need to ad-lib a whole lot, the script was very strong. Stephen (Walsh), who wrote it with Goran, was always on the set. We did change things, if we felt something was a bit flat or wasn’t working Stephen was there to take it apart and superglue it.

MH: The third day of shooting coincided with the overthrowing of Milosevic – was he nearby at the time?

CM: Well, it was strange because our camera crew were all Serbian as well, so they were pretty distracted all day. They were trying to get news bulletins in whenever they could. It was a huge day for them, it really was. They were thrilled.

MH: Did you dispense much advice to co-star Cillian Murphy?

CM: Here and there – I think he’d never worked with someone like Goran before, so it was a new experience for him in that respect. And Goran is one of the great directors in Europe in the last fifty years, he’s a terrific fella, he’s a very gentle man but he’s also really relentless once the work starts. And he’s very decisive, but he’s inclusive and he listens to what everyone says. I was doing something in Newfoundland in the middle of nowhere when I got this call from him introducing himself, out of the blue, and I had seen Somebody Else’s America prior to that but I didn’t know him personally at all. But he sent me the script and I loved the script. And then he came to meet me for dinner in Chicago, and right from the get-go it was a really easy relationship. He was great to work with.

MH: The Sallygap location work must have been glamourous?

CM: Yeah, it was a really difficult location. Especially up there in November. Only a crazy Serb would want to go up there and shoot a picture! But the openness and the bleakness, I think, had Goran sold right away. So while it was difficult, the rain, the weather and the cold and all that stuff, the actual day-to-day experience of making it was fantastic. Which is an extraordinary compliment to Goran, the fact that he created this atmosphere on set where we almost didn’t notice the kind of misery we were existing in.

MH: Do you check your Star Trek fan-mail at all?

CM: Yeah, well someone checks it for me, because the volume of stuff that started coming through around the time of Deep Space 9 was such that you couldn’t get through it on your own, though it has tapered off again since then. You mightn’t realise it because it’s on all the time, but we finished that show three years ago. I think the last year it really started to drag a bit, but surprisingly it had been enjoyable up to that, and they always let me out to do features, they would cut me loose for two or three episodes so I could go and do something else.

MH: You may be best known as O’Brien, but what do you feel is your career highlight to date?

CM: Well, of the American films I’ve done, Claire Dolan would be the one that stands out, and also there’s Monument Avenue which I did with Ted Demme who died recently, tragically. But sometimes the movies that you like best as an actor aren’t necessarily the ones that people see. Harry for instance has had a very turbulent time. It got a great reception at the Venice Film Festival, and then all of us were heading over for the Toronto Festival and at our stopover in Paris, the World Trade Centre was bombed and the entire industry – just like everybody else – just didn’t know what to do. It was a real deer-caught-in-the-headlights moment. The industry went into convulsions. Nobody knew whether to release anything or whether anyone would want to bother with movies ever again.

MH: And then they re-grouped and released lots of flag-waving, militaristic material...

CM: I don’t like it. But that’s the mood in America – I can testify, living in LA, for three or four months afterwards every car in Los Angeles had at least two Stars and Stripes hanging from it. It’s a very confused time for Americans, because a lot of Americans are now sensing terrible hostility from Europe as well. And I would agree with most of the objections to the US and to US foreign policy, Kyoto etc. – but we have to find a way of communicat-ing that to the ordinary American without making them feel as if we’re just saying ‘fuck you, we hate you’. Because right now the American mood is not inclined to find faults with itself or accept that there are any. Obviously, Bush is an asshole, and American foreign policy for twenty years or more in relation to the Middle East has been very very wrong-headed. But there’s no point just getting their backs up if you want to make any progress.