And the audience doesn’t know you’re only doing it for $400 a week.
They don’t know, no. And that you’re spending half of it in the pub afterward too.
You referenced how you discovered the intentions of your character during rehearsal. Was there something in that process you remember thinking “I will specifically take this one thing with me as I go to set and shoot the film”?
I think I found my scenes with Colm, with Brendan’s character, the trickiest, to be honest with you. Because I didn’t really know their relationship, how much she knew him and how close she was to him or how much he knew about her and things like that. So, that was something that we kind of spent a day talking about and kind of exploring. And then you know the scene where she comes to bring back his finger and it starts when she’s sitting down in his house? So [my question was,] was that my first time in his house? Had I been in his house before? All those kinds of questions So, we did a rehearsal where we discovered how did I get to be in that seat? What happened when I knocked on the door? What was the dialogue and did he invite me in and all of that? So, we did a lot of work on that because I wasn’t really sure about how comfortable she was with him and how much she knew him. And so we kind of decided that both her parents had died and there had been a version of the script earlier where Pádraic goes to the grave of his parents and he’s hung over and he puked on the grave or whatever. But I remember on the gravestone it was the same day. The parents died on the same day so it was, “Wow, so what happened to the parents?”
And so the story behind the parents was the lake that she’s standing at in that scene with Dominic, her parents drowned in that lake. And so one of them was kind of suicidal and depressed and so you’d think that one of them commits suicide and then there was kind of whispers that the other one maybe saved, tried to save them and drowned or commit suicide also. But it was a little bit inconclusive as to how the other one died. So then we said, then Colm, Brendan’s character, “The community would’ve gathered round or felt for Pádraic and Siobhán.” They were left. And so Calum would’ve come over to check on them a bit and spent a bit more time with Pádraic and that’s how their little friendship kind of began. And then they started to do their pub thing all the time. And this went on for years until eventually Brendan was worn out from the boredom of poor Pádraic.
Do you think she stayed all these years because she feels guilty? Do you think part of her liked living on the island?
For sure she felt bound to Pádraic and I felt like a kind of mother figure and that there was an innocence to Pádraic that she probably wanted to take care of. And I think probably maybe she was a little bit afraid to leave her familiar surroundings and afraid to go to the unknown. I think the dysfunction starts to escalate to a point where it in a way benefits her because it gives her the inclination. She does get the job offer obviously, but would she have accepted it had things not escalated to this proportion? Maybe she mightn’t have. So I think that she had been thinking about it because she had to apply for the job too. But what we kind of thought about that. She applied for the job, but it was more like wishful thinking like, “I’m never going to get it, but I just for fun applied.” So I think that when she gets it, because of the situation, she decides to go.
And she’s willing to go in the middle of a war. It tells you she’s ready.
Desperate.
I know you don’t have as many scenes as Colin does with Jenny the miniature donkey, but you do have scenes on a small interior set of her moving around. Was that odd? Have you ever experienced anything like that before?
So basically, luckily I had done this job years ago. Do you remember there was this TV show Michael Mann did, and David Milch wrote it and it was called “Luck”? It was on HBO.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
[It was] with Nick Nolte and it was all about horse racing. So, I got the best education in working with animals on that show because I was playing a jockey so all my scenes were riding a horse or being around a horse or whatever. And so I have two, I actually adopted one of the horses from that show when it ended. So I’ve got two horses myself. So, I’m really good around animals, to be honest with you. So I was very comfortable and I knew when you work with animals, you need a lot of patience because it’s going to take a while for them to do what you want them to do and you can’t make them. You have to kind of gently coax them into doing and trying to train them and everything. So I loved [Jenny] being around and it was so cute when she’d come on the set. It was this big deal. Everyone had to be quiet. And then also she had a little friend too because she was quite a young little donkey. She had to have a friend with her because her friend was kind of her pal and made her feel confident. Her friend was called Rosie and it was another donkey. So, it would be two donkeys in the house.
But the other one was off-screen.
Exactly. She was standing in the yard. So as long as she could see Rosie, she was kind of relaxed and O.K. but if she went to a part of the house where she couldn’t see Rosie, she’d have to find her. She wouldn’t like it. So I got very fond of Rosie, to be honest with you because I felt Rosie was making it all work for us and she was the little understudy.
Oh my gosh. Before I let you go, you also just shot “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” with Liam Neeson. Another project in another small Irish village.
Yes.
Has it been fun to make all these films in remote parts of Ireland? Or are you sort of ready to come back and shoot something else on a big sound stage in Los Angeles?
Well, I think going back and doing that movie was exciting because it’s a whole other audience, people who like those kinds of action movies are a very different group of people. And also I was playing a baddie. That was a lot of fun. That was something I’d never done before. That was really relaxing like, “I don’t give a f**k”. It was so much fun. And also just action movies in general. I kind of left going, “Oh my God. I can totally see where you get stuck in these genres because they’re so much fun.” It’s like being a child, it’s totally like being a child. Doing all these action sequences and stuff, I really liked it. It was being in the circus or something and so I really loved it. And that’s the other thing as well, it was another part of Ireland. I was like, “Oh my God, Donegal.” I mean, it was so beautiful going to Donegal. It did make me think about [whether] I want to move back to Ireland because I’ve had such a beautiful time the last couple of jobs that I’ve done there. But I don’t know if I’m ready to move back yet. I do think maybe when I’m an older person I might move back to Ireland.
So just for context, do you live here in the LA area?
Yeah, I’ve lived in America for 15 years now
Oh, wow.
Well, I live in Los Angeles, but I got a farm in Seattle ’cause of my horses and I wanted to have a little animal sanctuary or whatever. But I’ve always wanted to live in America. My whole life, I’ve always felt drawn to America because I’ll be honest with you, I always kind of thought global with my career. From a very early age, I was like, “I’m just going to be global.” And I also wanted to play different characters. I didn’t want to just do Irish ones. So, absolutely, I feel like I want to go back and do more American things now or just vary my resume again and go back to doing other things now.
“The Banshees of Inisherin” is now in limited release.
