Listen to the doctor

IF you’ve watched HBO’s “In Treatment,” you’ve seen Gabriel Byrne sitting in a chair, playing therapist to Melissa George’s seductive patient. “Let’s talk about what’s really going on here. Mmmmm?” he says as the camera closes in on his warm blue eyes boring into hers. He raises an eyebrow. Silence. He crosses his legs. He taps his fingertips together.

The central role, with an abundance of close-ups and tiny nuances, could have been an actor’s dream. Or nightmare. For Byrne, perfecting it to his satisfaction was more like toothache -- fine, now that it’s been dealt with.

Byrne’s Dr. Paul Weston dominates nearly every scene in every episode of the five-night-a-week therapy drama. The action consists mostly of talking and listening, and takes place in one room -- either his home office or his own therapist’s home office.

The first season of “In Treatment” draws to a close next week, and rumors abound over the fate of the series, which like the network’s “The Wire,” has a cultish following, but relatively few viewers.

Those who like the series love Byrne’s portrayal of the troubled Dr. Weston, tempted by a severe case of mutual erotic transference with Laura (George). Judging by the lovelorn postings on Internet sites, they also love the 57-year-old Irish actor. Those who don’t tuned out long ago.

In any case, there’s little doubt that Byrne, after a career of small independent films and stage acting, has finally found a star vehicle on TV.

“It’s a delightful kind of surprise that people like it,” said Byrne recently during a short visit to Los Angeles. Even the HBO-estimated 450,000 viewers are more than he’s used to. He admitted he was thrilled to get a congratulatory call from his favorite actress (whom he refused to name) but was also frightened by a New York woman who approached him on the street and sternly admonished, “Don’t you go with that Laura!”

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Something of a struggle

A singular and intensely introspective actor who aims to reveal himself in his roles, Byrne called Dr. Weston and the 12-week shoot on a cramped set particularly challenging. His opinions on how he wanted to play it -- no props, extended silences, totally engaged --eventually prevailed on set, but apparently not without creative debate. None of that matters now, he said. “All that matters in the end is that it got done.”

Settled in a sunlit corner of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont lobby, Byrne matched the California version of Old World elegance perfectly. “I’m overdressed,” he said in his signature brogue, removing a sweatshirt from over his jacket, and ordering a cup of tea. A self-described gentleman who conducts himself with “a certain amount of reserve,” Byrne nevertheless spoke effortlessly for almost three hours on his life and art, quoting actors, philosophers and New Yorker cartoons. He even sang a few bars of favorite songs (Sinatra singing Jobim) and offered some spontaneous impersonations (Max von Sydow and Bill Clinton).

To Byrne, who lives in Brooklyn, Hollywood is like a small village, one he inhabits at the noncommercial edges. After making a splash with “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), “The Usual Suspects” (1995) and his 1999 divorce from actress Ellen Barkin, Byrne said he moved to New York to be close to his children. To get roles in mainstream films, he said: “You have to be in a movie that makes a lot of money. That changes everything. And if you’re not, you go do independent films.”

Anyone who leaves L.A. for New York “might as well be dead,” he said.

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On the bright side

Still, there are compensations. Byrne worked on Broadway (“A Moon for the Misbegotten”) and with a who’s who of indie directors: Wim Wenders, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Bryan Singer, the Coen brothers, Costa-Gavras, John Boorman, Ken Russell and Ken Loach. Even if one of his films was panned, Byrne has almost always received positive reviews in which he was invariably called the “brooding Irish heartthrob.”

He no longer complains about the brooding part (“There are worse things to be told”) and noted wryly that last year he ranked among the last three actors on People magazine’s also-ran list for “The Sexiest Man Alive.”

But in the lobby’s waning light he also appeared tired and sad -- a lot like Dr. Weston, whom critics have labeled “world weary.” In the series, Laura tells him that when they first met, “I thought you looked like a dead man. I wanted to breathe life into you.”

Byrne said he’s always been aware of life’s ups and downs, but after he was offered the Weston role, he said he had a realization about life: It’s all about loss. “The fact of life is, we lose everything,” he said. “People we love. People who love us. I’ve lost people very close to me. And I’ve lost things I never thought I would lose. I have known failure. And I have known success of a kind. What I wanted to bring to that man was a sense of, at the end of the day we’re all united by our common humanity.”

As young as 12, Byrne said he had a romantic idea of “escaping from the world” and left his home in Dublin for a London monastery. Eventually, at 29, he replaced the monastery and other dead-end vocations with Dublin theaters. “Acting is also a form of escape from the world,” he said, and, like a monastery, it offers the structure that actors like himself crave.

He never took acting lessons, he said, but learned as he went by making mistakes.

“It’s like if somebody says to you, ‘Here’s wood, I want you to make a table.’ If you were really ignorant, like I was at the time, I had no idea where the legs on the table went. I just went out and started hammering pieces of wood together and people said, ‘Actually, the legs are supposed to be on the bottom.’ ”

Now, he said, his creative process is about “allowing the camera into yourself. . . . What’s important is that you get at the things that can’t really be written,” he said. Rather than “acting” feelings, he said he puts himself into their service. A mysterious and seductive fact about cameras, he said, is that they “photograph your thoughts.”

For the role of Paul Weston, he said he had to study how to make the act of listening interesting and compelling to viewers. In particular, he watched old tapes of “The Dick Cavett Show.” “I looked at the way he interviewed people, he said. “He was never overawed, never judgmental. He was sometimes flustered. He was sometimes awkward. I thought this guy doesn’t have to be perfect, he doesn’t have to have an immediate response. He can actually take a moment.”

Most important, he said, was that he engage with and respond to each of his patients differently. “If you were a detached figure, it’s over, finished, then you’re just watching two people talk,” he said. “I knew what I wanted it to be. I wanted him to be flawed, very flawed. I wanted him to be really compassionate, not afraid to open up to the camera, not afraid to show vulnerability.” He also knew he was a liar and had a temper.

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Creative friction

On set, he imagines his ideas annoyed fellow actors. “During rehearsal I said to I’m sure repressed groans and sniggers of people in the scene, ‘What’s wrong with thinking about Pinter and Beckett? What’s wrong with thinking about how Pinter uses silences? Or how Beckett uses one line to say something that can be conflicted or have another meaning to it? What’s wrong with that?’ ”

He said he was asked to use an American accent. “I said no.” Unless a character has a stated ethnicity, he uses his own voice in effort to promote everyday diversity, he said.

Byrne never watches his own performances because he is too self-critical, he said. The only parts he’s seen of “In Treatment” were the clips shown on a recent “Charlie Rose” appearance. If he doesn’t watch, he said his performance “stays in that place where it can’t be attacked in my head. Therefore it’s like a stage performance. My memory of it is totally protected. As soon as I start to look at it, that shatters. Then I’m full of doubt and say I shouldn’t have done that.”

At about that moment in the conversation, a leggy blond with a cellphone to her ear approached his sofa. The woman, Katya, wanted to make plans to get together, but Byrne said politely that he had to get back to New York for St. Patrick’s Day. She asked for his phone number, complaining that he never answers the one she calls. He promised he would, and sent her off with, “It’s great to see you.”

After a moment, he said, “A friend I haven’t seen in quite a while,” managing to appear simultaneously nonchalant and sheepish.

When asked about his romantic life, Byrne quoted Laurence Olivier: “One gets along, you know.” Pause. “It’s nice and uncomplicated at the moment.”

Like Dr. Weston, he’s gone through his own midlife crisis, or “manopause,” he said, but now cares about other things -- such as politics. (He recently held a fundraiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton at his home.) And continuing to improve his acting. His latest film, “Emotional Arithmetic,” with Susan Sarandon, Christopher Plummer and Von Sydow, will be released later this year.

Looking around at the film world, Byrne thinks he understands why some old-timers like Warren Beatty might have dropped out.

“It’s a very peculiar business. The world of the cinema has changed,” he said. “There’s better writing now in television to a great extent.”

So far, he said no one from HBO had talked to him about a second season. He thought before answering a question about whether he would be willing to take up Dr. Weston again. “It’s a fascinating character and I’m open,” he said finally. “I would never shut the door on anything.”

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lynn.smith@latimes.com