Gabriel Byrne: ‘The Catholic Church has left a black mark’

The Gabriel Byrne who sits for this interview has long since left behind the actor who suffered a panic attack after the successful screening of The Usual Suspects at Cannes in 1995. Terrified, he crawled into his hotel bed in Nice for several days. He is no longer the man who was sexually abused by the Christian Brothers as a child and, soon after, at age 11, by a Catholic priest at the seminary he attended in Liverpool. Nor is he the man who battled alcoholism for decades. He likely achieved peace after writing his second volume of memoirs, Walking with Ghosts (2020), which he adapted as a one-man show for the theater, and faced all his problems.

Now, at 73, Byrne leads a placid life in Maine. The Dubliner travels from the East Coast to shoot and promote films such as Dance First, a flawed biopic of writer Samuel Beckett’s life. But at least its September screening at the San Sebastián Film Festival allowed Byrne to smilingly recall his celebration of Francisco Franco’s death. He was in Bilbao, Spain, teaching English at the time. “I left a trail of English speakers with Irish accents there,” he jokes.

Since he published his memoirs, Byrne has chosen not to answer questions about sexual abuse. But he does speak at length about “the black mark the Catholic Church has left in several countries.” Byrne was going to be a priest, but after his traumatic experience in a seminary, he devoted his life to teaching. He studied Spanish, and to enhance his learning and earn a living, he lived in Bilbao between 1974 and 1975. “I remember very well the discontent prior to the dictator’s death, and the great fear of speaking out. I was with a friend in a bar chatting about politics, and she did this [Byrne gestures at closing his mouth with a zipper], because Franco, she confessed to me, had ears everywhere. Spain suffered from the strong combination of ruthless fascism and Catholicism, [which is] something we understand very well in Ireland. It’s funny, because I left here thinking it was impossible for the country to change, and when I returned four years later I found a completely different Spain. It was spectacular how quickly the fascist regime disappeared. In Ireland we experienced the same thing, with the collapse of the Catholic Church, the eruption of a volcano of freedom, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.” And what does he remember of November 20, 1975, the day Franco died? “Of course I celebrated Franco’s death! We Irish were asked to tone down our party [he smiles]. And right after that I went back to Dublin.”

Byrne is still “revolted” by the memory of “the inculcation of Catholicism in children’s minds,” which he considers “merciless.” He is similarly disgusted that Spain “promoted a silence like the one reflected in the girls of The Spirit of the Beehive, who grow up during that oppression.” The actor recalls having seen it in Dublin: “I thought it was brilliant and subversive. I like the idea of repression in a beehive, and how that subjugation doesn’t let the bees fly freely. I perfectly understood what it means to live in a society that doesn’t allow freedom and individual independence.”

Byrne speaks very slowly, and on many occasions he stops talking to carefully measure his words. His portrayal of Samuel Beckett revisits the writer, similar to how the actor reviewed his own life in Walking with Ghosts: “Of course, there is a parallel. Inevitably, there comes a time in life when you look back. When you’re young you just think, ‘I’m going to do this and that.’ The past doesn’t exist. Until one day the future is less important, and what you ask yourself is, ‘Why did you do that? Was that it? Should I have done it differently?’ I wrote my book because I firmly believe that the people you’ve loved who have passed away are still with us. And we can still converse with them. Native Americans say that our ancestors walk beside us.”

Byrne changes the subject to Beckett: “At the end of the day, revisiting the past is of limited value, because you can’t change anything. And one of the most powerful aspects of Beckett’s work is that the past is not important. It only exists as a form of fantasy. If you go back to your childhood home, it will seem small in comparison to your memories. Because that memory is deeply anchored. That’s why what the Catholic Church does with children is so brutal, instilling deep down inside them pity, shame and intolerance about sexuality. Think of its image of women: [they are] either a temptation of the devil or pure like the Virgin Mary. Ultimately, we are talking about a religion that claims that the Virgin Mary conceived a child, a life, without having sex, through a dove. [Here, he bursts into laughter.] I often think of St. Joseph saying to her: ‘But what are you talking about? What dove? A real dove?’ Ugh, Catholicism was inculcated in me at the age of six through a narrative of terror. They claimed that hell existed. They made us put our finger in a flame and then explained to us that hell was that [feeling] all over our bodies for eternity. You know what was great about Beckett? He said that religion would not give us comfort. He confronted the facts of life in his writings, and therein lies his legacy.”

The dangers of fame

When her husband won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Beckett’s wife said, “what a catastrophe.” Byrne speaks about fame in similar terms. “I like to compare it to climbing a big mountain, reaching the top, looking around and realizing that that’s it, there’s nothing more. It is the beginning of a complete collapse for many people. Fame doesn’t protect you; money doesn’t protect you. They don’t make you happier, because no matter how big and luxurious your house is, the issue is inside you. And if you harbor a clash inside, despair will eat away at you. Fame? It’s like living in a small town where everybody knows you, and in the end you’re bummed out that you went outside to buy the paper and milk [laughter]. And you come home and lock yourself in. A long time ago, I worked with Leonardo DiCaprio and he was no longer the master of his [own] life. I have avoided fame so I don’t lose my identity, so I can enjoy life the way I want to. Unfortunately, many young people think that having a career is achieving fame, having pictures taken. But no, it should be a product of the work you do, not the goal itself.”

Wouldn’t his life have been calmer if he had gone into teaching? “Well, I often ask myself that, because I liked it a lot. I would be retired in Dublin, and I would spend the summer in Benidorm. Look, it wouldn’t have been a bad life. But Ireland is not my home today. I live in the United States, and it doesn’t belong to me either. I feel more comfortable in Spain, France, in Europe....I spent seven years in Los Angeles [when he married actress Ellen Barkin], on the same street. And yet, after that time, I didn’t know a single neighbor. If you passed someone on the street and talked to them, they thought it was weird, even wrong. You know? That happened two decades ago, and now the whole of society behaves like those pedestrians. We live in an epidemic of isolation and loneliness. The feelings of community, of human connection, have disappeared. [It’s] like cinema, where the form of consumption as we’ve [always] known it is almost dead.”

Byrne has spent decades working in the theater, shot dozens and dozens of films and series, but when all is said and done, when he dies, he will be remembered as the actor from Miller’s Crossing and The Usual Suspects. “You never know what will happen. I remember that one night in a parking lot on the set of The Usual Suspects, the sound guy, referring to the director and cinematographer, blurted out, ‘I’m sick to death of working with amateurs. This shit will never get off the ground.’ And, in contrast, sometimes you’re rolling, it looks like everything is going well and in the end it comes out the way it comes out. Miller’s Crossing came out the same week as Goodfellas. And everybody went to see Scorsese’s film. And now, mind you, the Coens’ thriller is considered a huge influence in that genre.” The interview takes place a couple of days after Michael Gambon’s death: as great an actor as he was — and he certainly was — the obituaries remembered him for his portrayal of Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films. Does Byrne fear meeting the same fate? The actor laughs and pulls out his cell phone. He searches and rummages, causing despair among his promotional entourage who want him to go eat, until he finds a video. It’s a sequence from the Quirke series, with Byrne and Gambon. He shows it to his interviewer: “He improvised the whole thing himself. Look, I don’t care. I treasure all these moments with Gambon, with Laurence Olivier, with all the great artists I’ve worked with... What hurts me are those wonderful films have gone unnoticed by the public. What comes after that...”

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