Gabriel Byrne Has a Passion for Films, but It’s Not From Acting

When Irish actor Gabriel Byrne attended the Oscars last March, his interest in the proceedings was a bit different than might be expected.

Though Byrne established a solid acting career following his screen debut in 1981 (he played King Arthur’s father in the John Boorman film “Excalibur”), and is currently getting glowing notices for his performance as a poor German philosophy professor in Gillian Armstrong’s remake of the Louisa May Alcott classic “Little Women,” he has his sights set on things other than acting.

Producer of last year’s critically acclaimed political drama “In the Name of the Father,” Byrne also brought 1993’s “Into the West” to the screen, and feels himself to be on the brink of a new phase in his career.

“I’ve gotten great satisfaction out of the two films I’ve produced because they’ve enabled me to express things I’m passionate about,” says the 44-year-old actor over breakfast at the pool of a Hollywood hotel. “As an actor I don’t have that opportunity because I’m not a No. 1 box-office star. I don’t see myself as a successful actor, and though I admire great actors, I’ve never been obsessed with acting.”

This isn’t to suggest Byrne is calling it quits on his acting career. Currently in Santa Fe, N.M., shooting “Buffalo Girls,” a miniseries based on a Larry McMurtry novel that co-stars Melanie Griffith and Anjelica Huston and airs in May on CBS, Byrne has been recently seen co-starring with Steve Martin in “Twist of Fate” and with Joanne Whalley-Kilmer and William Hurt in “Trial by Jury.” He’ll turn up in ’95 in “The Usual Suspects,” a low-budget independent directed by Brian Singer, whose debut film, “Public Access,” was a hit on the film festival circuit.

“The script for ‘The Usual Suspects’ was very hip and I really loved it,” says Byrne. “I had a great time on ‘Little Women’ too, but what I’m preoccupied with at the moment is the first-look producing deal I signed with Miramax in September. Last year, I formed a production company in Ireland called Mirabilis Films with Patrick Rainsford and we have three movies on the slate, but Mirabilis can’t deal with all the ideas I have--I have ideas for a dozen projects for Miramax.”

One wonders where Byrne found the time to court Miramax, considering that one of the projects set to go at Mirabilis will mark his debut as a director. An adaptation of Patrick McGrath’s novel “Dr. Haggard’s Disease,” “The Secret of Wyndham Hall” was co-written by Byrne and Rainsford and is slated to start shooting next year.

Byrne also plans to direct “Lark in the Clear Air” sometime next year, a film he describes as being about “magic, a dysfunctional family and the Cuban missile crisis.” Byrne and his wife of seven years, actress Ellen Barkin, were originally slated to star in the film, but that plan was scrapped when the couple separated early this year.

“This is a strange time for me,” says Byrne, picking halfheartedly at a blueberry muffin. “Professionally, I’m happy with the way things are going, but privately I’m going through a separation and that has a big effect on how you feel.”

Though Byrne has been typecast as the quintessential brooding Irishman, he isn’t brooding now. Cordial and intelligent, he dismisses the disparity between reality and what he describes as “his one-dimensional persona” as “part of this business. You have to work to live, and not every actor can be picky about what he does--hence, one becomes typecast.”

It is but one of the reasons that Byrne has embraced producing with such enthusiasm. Describing “The Secret of Wyndham Hall,” which will shoot on locations in London and Cornwall, as “a film that looks at different kinds of human love,” Byrne is excited at the prospect of being behind the camera rather than in front of it.

“There’s the ordinary love that’s between friends,” begins Byrne, outlining the ideas central to the film. “Then there’s romantic love, which is mostly based on the 12th-Century notion of courtly love. What we’ll attempt to say in the film is that people become addicted to the high of romantic love, but ultimately it’s not real.”

In talking with Byrne it becomes apparent that he likes to burrow into any subject that comes up. It was this aspect of his personality that brought him to the attention of Patrick Rainsford, an electronics engineer who sold his company to raise the seed money to start Mirabilis Films.

Born in Dublin in 1950, the son of a cooper in a brewery, Byrne had what he describes as “a 19th-Century childhood. We lived in a land of hay carts and farms on a little road leading to the mountains.” One of six children, Byrne was raised by his father, who lost his job in the early ‘50s, while his mother worked as a nurse. Byrne recalls his childhood, steeped in literature and Catholicism, as idyllic, yet oddly impoverished.

“Children in Dublin in the ‘50s were not brought up to believe they could do what they put their minds to,” he says. “Consequently, the biggest obstacle I’ve had to overcome in life is a lack of belief in myself. One of the keys to my beginning to accept myself was an acceptance of life as it is. Man isn’t here to have fun--he’s here to learn things about himself.”

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This belief squared neatly with a decision Byrne made at the age of 12--to become a missionary. He was to spend the next four years at a seminary in the English countryside, but, expelled for smoking, he returned to Dublin, where a scholarship to University College led to studies in languages and archeology. In 1978 he became involved with a Dublin-based theater group that included actor Liam Neeson, and two years later landed a role in the popular Irish serial “The Riordans.”

His most acclaimed performance has probably been in the Coen brothers’ 1990 film, “Miller’s Crossing,” where he played a stoic ‘30s gangster, a character tailor-made to his minimalist style. In “Little Women” (opening Wednesday he plays the poor but earnest Friedrich Bhaer, who befriends the willful writer, Jo March, played by Winona Ryder.

One gets the impression, however, that Byrne is much more interested in discussing producing.

“Three years ago I produced a play in London about a miscarriage of British justice that involved six Irishmen known as the Birmingham Six, and I’d also organized readings for the Guildford Four,” he says, explaining what led him to produce “In the Name of the Father.” “The concept of justice fascinates me.”

Byrne’s concern with social issues will surface again in “Lark in the Clear Air,” which he wrote and will direct. “The pivotal event in the story is the Cuban missile crisis,” he says. “That was the first time I realized there were events over which I had no control. It was the beginning of global terror and it terrified me.”

Asked if he believes movies have a responsibility to address social issues, Byrne says, “I believe that our views on everything from how we perceive nationalities to how we fall in love come from movies we’ve been exposed to.

“Having said that, I have to say, no, movies don’t have a duty to have a political conscience,” he says. “I often hear people say, ‘I want to go to the movies and be swept away--I don’t want to sit there and have to think about my life’--and that’s a legitimate desire. It’s no good being on a soapbox in the middle of the desert.”