‘The Church is always one step ahead’
Gabrielle Donnelly talks to Gabriel Byrne about the Irish and Freud

25 December 2009

In the popular US show In Treatment Gabriel Byrne plays Dr Paul Weston, a successful therapist who juggles professional dealings with his patients with facing his own demons (PA)

Gabriel Byrne is talking about psychotherapy. "People think that it's an American thing, but in fact it came out of Europe, although it was America that really ran with it.

"There's an interesting story about Freud and Jung that when they came to New York for the first time, they were on the boat about to land, and Freud turned to Jung and said: 'Do they not know we're bringing the plague?' Because he knew that America was rife for introspection, and so it proved. But it did originally come out of 19th-century Austria, which was a very Catholic community, so it had a kind of combination of psychoanalytical study overlaid with Catholic teachings and dogma. If you think about psychoanalysis, it's very much like the confessional, with one person sitting listening to another. The only thing is, the Catholic Church is always one step ahead of everybody else, because in the confessional they forgive you, and they don't charge you any money either!"

It's a subject he's been thinking about lately, largely because for the last couple of years he's been playing a psychotherapist on television. In the popular American show In Treatment, currently showing in Britain on the Sky Arts channel, he plays Dr Paul Weston, a successful therapist who juggles professional dealings with his patients with facing his own demons in his private world. Gabriel is not a particular fan of therapy in his own personal life - "Sigmund Freud once said," he tells me proudly, "that the one race who couldn't be psychotherapised were the Irish" - but in his research for the role he has spoken to many therapists and patients about the process, and, being a good Irishman, has come away with more than a few good stories to tell.

"Most people who have been in therapy say that it was a good thing for them," he prefaces prudently. "But one guy I spoke to had been in it for 29 years, and I said to him: 'When do you get out? When do they give you the stamp that says, You're OK now, off you go?'

"He said: 'No, no, it's not like that, it's not anything you graduate from.' And to tell you the truth, I didn't think this particular guy was the type anyone should be telling he'd graduated soon anyway.

"I said: 'Do you really think that 29 years of therapy has made a difference to your life?'

"He said: 'You should see me without it!' I don't know... It's obviously good for some people, but my idea is, isn't that what friends are for? To sit down with you and say things like: 'Don't do that, you're an idiot' or 'Take off that yellow scarf, it looks ridiculous.' "

He stops, and peers at me anxiously. "You're not wearing a yellow scarf, are you? No, thank God, it would've been just my luck if you were."

Byrne was born 59 years ago in Dublin, the eldest of six children of a laid-off Guinness factory worker and a nurse ("me mother always said," he footnotes helpfully, "she could tell a man who worked in Guinness's by the size of his stomach.") He was educated, first by the Christian Brothers, and then in a seminary to be a priest - he was expelled, he says, for smoking cigarettes in the graveyard. He spent his 20s drifting from job to job - messenger boy, apprentice plumber ("and the world is now a safer place because I'm not a plumber any more"), factory worker, hotel worker, English translator in Spain, archaeologist - until in his late 20s he settled into teaching in a school in Dublin, where he started a drama class to keep the kids interested, put on a play in which one of the young actors fell ill, requiring him to step on as an understudy - "and it was a bit like a Mickey Rooney moment, because I got bit by the acting bug. I left teaching, went down to the welfare office, and set about being an actor."

He wasn't drawing the dole for long. He started out on stage at Dublin's legendary Abbey Theatre, from where he quickly landed a role on the popular Irish television show The Riordans, and only two years later was snapped up to play King Uther in Excalibur, John Boorman's critically lauded film about King Arthur. A few years later - and with a handful of films like Defence of the Realm, Gothic and Lionheart under his belt - he moved himself, and his career, to America. "I was very lucky because I originally only came to America for a week. I wasn't intending to stay at all, but I had an agent here, who said: 'These two guys have written a script, maybe you should read it and go down and see them.' So I read the script and thought: 'God, this is unlike anything I've ever read before.' And I went down to audition, and I was extremely nervous but I got the role. And the two guys were the Coen brothers, who were, like 24 and 25 at the time, and so young, you constantly wanted to be saying: 'Are you sure there's film in that camera?' "But it turned out they did know what they were doing, because the film was Miller's Crossing, which people are now saying is one of their best ever, although it suffered at the time because it came out at the same time as that Martin Scorsese film, what's it called? Goodfellas, right. But Miller's Crossing has stood the test of time, I think."

Twenty years later, he is happily settled in New York and says he regards himself as an American actor. He's kept his Irish accent, though, both off the screen and, for the most part, on it, too, and says, firmly, that he has no intention of losing it.

"The other day I was doing a narration for a documentary, and the person who was producing it suddenly said: 'Excuse me, can you stop for a second?'

"I said: 'Certainly - what's the problem?'

"She said: 'Well... you're beginning to sound a bit... Irish!'

"The amount of times I am asked about my accent by people who don't think they have accents of their own is astonishing to me. I was on a set in Texas once and this guy came up to me and said: 'Heyyy, ah bin list'nin' to yew. Yew got a we-iiii-rrrd ayac-cayent!" The guy was from Texas and thought he didn't have an accent at all! Look, immigrants come to this country from all over the world, and yet people are always saying to me: 'Why do you play this character as an Irishman?' Nobody would ask an American-born actor: 'Why did you choose to play this character as a guy from New Jersey?'

"I am from the place I'm from and I'm not ashamed of it, and I'm going to speak in its accent, and maybe you're going to have to learn to listen to it in order to figure out what I'm saying!'

Married and divorced from actress Ellen Barkin - although he emphasises that they are still friends "and I have the height of respect for her" - he is bringing up his children, Jack, 20, and Romy, 17, to be fiercely proud of their Irish roots.

"I sound like a commercial for the Irish Tourist Board, but everything they say about the magic and the mysticism of the place is true. It's there in the landscape - it's one of the most beautiful countries in the world -_it's there in the pubs, it's there in the way people talk to each other - it's very hard not to feel welcome there. And there's a tremendous artistic explosion going on there now, with films being made, and books being written, and music being recorded. It's an incredibly exciting place to be."

He stops, and starts to laugh.

"Not that I'm biased, or anything," he adds.