Ciarán Hinds is standing at the stage door of the National Theatre in London, where he has spent the day rehearsing for
Juno and the Paycock, Sean O'Casey's play about 1920s Ireland. He is wearing jeans, a loose T-shirt and a tweed flat cap. "That's a fitting hat for the play you're doing," I offer, by way of a greeting. "And what's yours?" he shoots back, nodding towards my black bowler with a good-natured smile and a raised eyebrow. "
Waiting for Godot, maybe?"
While waiting to be shown up to the theatre's interview room, Hinds explains how
Juno will travel to the Abbey theatre before returning to London to play in rep with
The Veil, Conor McPherson's new plays. The Juno run-throughs have taken over the National Theatre's main rehearsal space so McPherson and his crew have had to practise offsite. "They might be pissed of," Hinds says with a shrug of the shoulders. "But that's life."
 | . |  |
Hinds is grounded, easy-going and good fun; fitting attributes for an actor who plays character roles rather than male leads in films such as
Munich,
The Road to Perdition and the forthcoming
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, adapted from the espionage novel by John le Carré. Moreover, his relaxed attitude befits an actor who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and is about to star in a politically contentious play about the Irish civil war - which also happens to be the first co-production between the British and Irish National theatres. Decades of distance from "the national question" have given him the first British-Irish co-production such a big deal is that it really isn't one at all.
"I left Belfast in 1973," says Hinds, 58. "I was at Queen's University for half a year messing about and then I went to London. Just the idea stepping off the island opened me immediately in a bigger way than I was thinking about, because we were constricted there, choked. You could have got involved (in the Troubles). It was all happening. It was dangerous, exciting, dynamic. You were of an age.
"Then, whatever it is takes you away, and whether you're brought up nationalist or loyalist, British or Irish, suddenly you come away and meet young people your own age who are fascinated, have no idea and genuinely want to know (about Northern Ireland). Then you realise this is nothing to do with their parents or anything before that. That opened me out. It was important for me at that age."
Hinds studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and then spent 13 years working with the Citizen's Theatre in Glasgow. He had been raised Catholic, was taught Irish dancing, and attended St Malachy's, a Catholic grammar school, in Belfast. Yet when he left Northern Ireland he began to question how important these factors were to who he was, and how much his nationality mattered. Then he went to Galway and learnt how to set dance. The rhythm seemed to connect with his soul.
"That's when I really knew I was Irish, in Galway in the mid 1980s," he says. "It's not that I doubted it, but that cemented it."
Hinds also considers himself European. He lives between London and Paris, and has a French-Vietnamese partner, Hélène Patarot, who he met in the 1980s when they were both appearing in
The Mahabharata, Peter Brook's stage adaptation of the Sanskrit epic. "I was working in a company of 27 (actors) with 15 different nationalities. Suddenly, you go, 'Hold on, what are rules? What are morals? Oh, so that's what you don't do in your culture. That's nothing to us.' You're in another world. That was lucky, too - moving from Belfast to London, then returning to Ireland and finding who you are, and then being brought somewhere else and it's still bigger than London," he says with an accent that is as much of a melange as the cast of
The Mahabharata. "You're travelling around with people who are different colours, speak different languages and you all somehow have to work together and do this 10-hour-piece."
Hinds has been a fixture on the big screen since getting his break in John Boorman's
Excalibur, the 1981 film which also helped launch the careers of Gabriel Byrne, Liam Neeson and the director Neil Jordan, as well as being nominated for an Oscar for best cinematography. Screen work is his bread and butter. When he decided to do Juno, a less lucrative role than starring in a Hollywood movie, his agent wasn't best pleased. However, Hinds says it is important to keep dipping his toes in the theatrical water.
| ... | |
He has heard that Byrne and Neeson were the original choices to play Captain Jack Boyle, his character in
Juno, but doesn't mind being the backup. "Why would I?" he says. "You can't say, 'Bah, humbug.' The world works like that. You've got to unlearn it if you're working on a sense of entitlement or that 'Do you know who I am ' bollocks. Whatever that means." Nor does he mind being one of the five suspected Soviet moles instead of the one spy-catcher in
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The projects he does depend on the script, those involved and usually a touch of serendipity.
"For
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I was asked to go for a meeting with the director, a man called Tomas Alfredson," he recalls. "A lot of people might not have known Tomas Alfredson, but I did, because I'd been working with Conor McPherson on a film,
The Eclipse, and he asked me had I seen this vampire film, and I said, 'I don't do vampire films, I find them overwrought and it's for this young, trendy, flashy generation. It doesn't do anything for me.'
"He said, 'Ah! But this is a beautiful film'. So he put me onto
Let the Right One In (a Swedish movie directed by Alfredson) and it is a beautiful film. Then the next time I come across him, I'm going to meet him to do
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I'd seen this man's work and he asked me to play a small role in it. It's as simple as that."
Hinds, who has yet to see the final cut, believes Alfredson's Swedish origins will leave their mark on a film that is set against the backdrop of the Soviet-British standoff during the cold war. "We're not always aware technically of what goes on behind the camera, but you're aware that Tomas always seemed to be shooting with long lenses. If there was a scene with two people talking, he's have his camera on another roof," says Hinds.
"It was almost as if his camera was spying on spies, just observing. As with that time (the Cold War), it was who was watching who and who was unseen. It was all muted; the style, the production design. He was obviously trying to put something of his own feeling into it - being a Swede, an outsider - talking about what the Brits did, and the Russians."
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy boasts an impressive cast of actors - John Hurt, Toby Jones, Colin Firth - many of whom Hinds had worked with before. He was particularly interested in with working with Gary Oldman, who plays the lead role of George Smiley, the veteran British intelligence expert who is called in to sniff out the Soviet mole. The pair started out together on the Glasgow stage.
It was also in Scotland that Hinds first learnt the line for
Juno. At the age of 30, Hinds was playing the same character as he is now. "They had a young company, so they didn't always cast to age, and sometimes you had to step up and play older than you were," he recalls. "The person playing my son was Lorcan Cranitch, an actor from Dublin, who is about seven years younger than me, so I couldn't really have been his father. But that was the way of it."
"It was an old Victorian theatre in the Gorbals of Glasgow, which has always had a big, heavily accented Irish community - a lot of them from Donegal who came over to get work. They do the great classical plays of Europe, like Goethe - they did Faust one time. They were very fond of (Bertolt) Brecht because it was real and rough, and then suddenly they started doing O'Casey. The people, as I remember 30 years ago, it was like food and drink for them."
He suspects this reaction is far away from that of an Abbey audience, where Juno began and the play is sacrosanct. "We'll see about that," he adds. He says "
Juno still raises topical issues such as feminism, nationalism and what it is to die for your country. This revival is not about fuelling political differences. As with the 1983 production in Glasgow, it seeks to feed and water the audience's soul."
Source: The Sunday Times
Author: Eithne Shortall
Date: September 4th, 2011
The original posting I had placed here of this article included pictures and three or four quotes added by
http://www.ciaranhinds.eu./. As you can see by the comments they took great umbrage. Even though I had included the original article's source, the author and the date, they wanted credit for the three pictures and the four quotes they had added, unknown to me. So here it is. I took out your quotes and put in another picture. Sorry to have offended. He is a wonderful wonderful actor, an admiration for whom we both share.
