"I Was Abused - Now I'm Tackling It on Tv': Gabriel Byrne's Had Painful Personal Experience of the Murky World at the Heart of His New Drama

Daily Mail
May 16, 2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2630235/I-abused-Im-tackling-TV-Gabriel-Byrnes-painful-personal-experience-murky-world-heart-new-drama.html

Gabriel Byrne can't stand being described as brooding and intense.

'I'm actually quite the opposite,' insists the quietly spoken Irishman, best known for roles in movies The Usual Suspects and Defence Of The Realm.

'Maybe it's because I play those kinds of parts. People are always looking for labels to stick on others, so maybe those descriptions have been extended from the characters I play to me. Whatever the reason, I don't like it. In Ireland, brooding is a term we use for hens. A brooding hen is supposed to lay eggs. Every time somebody says, "He's dark and brooding" I think, "He's about to lay an egg."'

In his latest drama, Gabriel Byrne tackles issues that are very close to home

Gabriel's latest TV character isn't about to lay an egg but he's certainly brooding. Quirke - we never learn his first name - is the main player in BBC1's new three-part crime drama set in 50s Dublin.

He's the city's chief pathologist and not only does he spend his professional life examining dead bodies but he usually finds such a tragic story behind their deaths that he feels obliged to investigate further, even if it means suffering acute emotional anxiety in the process.

Quirke smokes and drinks too much too. He's mourning a dead wife and he has a closet full of secrets, including an ill-fated affair with his brother's wife Sarah, played by Geraldine Somerville.

'He spends a lot of time in his subterranean office and he's much more at home among the dead than he is among the living,' explains Byrne, who had to smoke packet after packet of menthol cigarettes and drink copious amounts of grape juice - substitutes for the cigarettes and red wine his character gets through - during the five-month shoot in Dublin.

'He has a wounded past, something most people can relate to, and hides his vulnerability beneath an exterior of detachment. But he's determined to find out the truth if he be-lieves there are suspicious circumstances surrounding a death.'

Later stories take in the disappearance of a junior doctor with a racy private life, and an apparent but unlikely suicide, but the first concerns a woman called Christine Falls.

Quirke - starring Gabriel Byrne and Michael Gambon - starts this month on BBC1

'Quirke won't give up on his investigation and it takes him to the very heart of Dublin society and some powerful people within both the medical profession and the Catholic Church,' says Gabriel. 'I think he's to be applauded for trying to lift the lid on clandestine worlds. Openness and accountability are crucial to a healthy society and anything that hinders that has to be questioned.'

One suspects it's Quirke's zealous determination to uncover the truth that appealed to Gabriel.

This, after all, is a man who went through hell because nobody was prepared to take on the Catholic Church and challenge its absolute power in the 50s Ireland in which he grew up.

Gabriel revealed on an Irish TV chatshow in 2010 how, between the ages of eight and 11, he had been sexually abused by Brothers in the Roman Catholic seminary where he was studying to be a priest.

He's since described the Church as 'a tyrannical, evil institution: anti-woman, anti-homosexual, anti-love, anti-condom, totally elitist.'

He went on to say, 'Because of this culture of secrecy, priests - and nuns - could commit crimes against children and realise they didn't have to pay for it. The Church would never hand them over to the authorities. To take advantage of a child's innocence in that way is a crime against the soul of that child. I'm only thankful that now, all the rocks have been lifted and all the maggots have finally crawled out.'

Booker Prize winner John Banville, who wrote the novels on which Quirke is based under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, agrees that the Dublin portrayed on screen is very much of the past.

'Ireland changed in the early 90s when a man called Bishop Casey, who was very popular, was revealed to have had a mistress and a 17-year-old son by her and had 'borrowed' ?70,000 of parish funds to pay her off,' he explains.

'When that story came out the floodgates opened and by 2003, when I started to write the books, these bad people had been exposed. But Quirke is set squarely in 1950s Dublin so they were still doing terrible things.'

Fortunately, there were lighter moments. Gabriel, who's divorced from US actress Ellen Barkin by whom he has a son Jack, 24, and a daughter Romy, 22, says filming the series became a trip down Memory Lane.

'By absolute coincidence we filmed in the very first flat I ever had, on Pembroke Road in Dublin, and later shot scenes in the theatre where I made my first professional appearance. I hadn't been there since,' he says. 'Deja vu doesn't begin to describe it.'