‘A lot of biopics depend on likeness – this is braver’: Gabriel Byrne on playing Samuel Beckett | Film

rewrite this content and keep HTML tags In 1969, Samuel Beckett and his wife learned that he had won the Nobel prize in literature in a telegram from his publisher. “Dear Sam and Suzanne,” it read. “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Both were notoriously celebrity averse. Suzanne described it as a “catastrophe”. Beckett declined to give a Nobel lecture, and refused to talk when a Swedish film crew tracked him down to a hotel room in Tunisia, leaving them with a surreal mute interview.Into this temporal void, a new psychological biopic has poured a monumental reckoning, in which the 63-year-old playwright scrambles out of the Nobel ceremony to find himself in a rough-hewn underworld. In Dance First a small masterpiece that premieres next month at the San Sebastian film festival, Beckett confronts the events and the people that shaped him, from his domineering mother to his experience with the French resistance, his brief dalliance with James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, to his later inability to choose between Suzanne and the radio producer and translator Barbara Bray.“You know this is going to be a journey through your shame,” he solemnly informs himself. “Isn’t everything?” he replies. It’s interior monologue played as dialogue, presenting an unusual challenge for the actor Gabriel Byrne, who found himself in an old quarry outside Budapest for three days, speaking to a broom.“Well yes, that was difficult,” he says over video from his farmhouse in Maine. It wasn’t that the idea of speaking to himself was alien – far from it. “I’d spent my entire life talking to myself: even when I was a child in Dublin, I used to walk around the streets doing it, and if somebody walked past me, I’d pretend I was singing. But technically it was difficult because you had to do one guy here. And then you had to turn around and become the other guy. So the brush was standing there and you had to talk to the brush. And then you stood where the brush was and talked to … a brush.”‘I was really happy when I read the script’ … Gabriel Byrne as Samuel Beckett in Dance First. Photograph: Kata Vermes/Sky UKIt’s as if the ghost of Beckett himself is hovering over Byrne’s shoulder as he describes the scene, a genuine desire to explain meeting the comedy of exasperation, as he realises that the only way to get his meaning across is to repeat the word brush. It is a small failure of verbal economy that is rendered both funny and telling, in an entirely Beckettian way, by a momentary pause. These things matter to Byrne, who proved himself a writer as well as an actor with a lyrical memoir, Walking With Ghosts, followed by a solo show he based on it, which transferred from Dublin to London’s West End last year.I didn’t have to do it with wire glasses, and grey hair standing up on end, and lose maybe 30 poundsApart from a “thrice broken nose”, which gives him a passing resemblance in profile to beaky Beckett, the genial, award-winning actor looks nothing like the creased and gimlet-eyed seer that the playwright had become by the time of his Nobel win. “I was really happy when I read the script, because it’s not trying to present a cradle-to-grave biography. I didn’t have to do it with wire glasses, and grey hair standing up on end, and lose maybe 30 pounds,” says Byrne. And yet such is the power of the storytelling that within minutes you believe in him entirely.“Gabriel was the first choice I made. He’s had a very interesting career and hasn’t pigeonholed himself at all,” says director James Marsh, who began following Byrne’s career years before The Usual Suspects made him a Hollywood star – starting with his role as an ambitious young journalist in the 1985 parliamentary conspiracy thriller Defence of the Realm.‘Speaking from the depths of his soul’ … Beckett in 1977. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesDance First takes its name from a line in Waiting for Godot that has passed not quite correctly into literary lore as “Dance first, think later.” (The exact formulation, articulated by the tramp Estragon about the titular Godot, is “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards.”) It is the first feature of Scottish screenwriter Neil Forsyth – best known recently for the TV heist series The Gold – and arrived, unsolicited, on Marsh’s desk, during the pandemic.“As soon as I read it, I saw Gabriel in it,” says Marsh, whose Oscar-winning biopic The Theory of Everything, concerned another chewy genius – Stephen Hawking. “Obviously to play Beckett is quite daunting for an Irish actor, because he is so much part of their literary canon, but he didn’t need persuading and immediately approached it with great seriousness. He was a very nice presence on the set.” Sandrine Bonnaire joined Byrne as Suzanne and Maxine Peake as Bray, with Fionn O’Shea as the oldest of Beckett’s three younger selves. “It is a small art movie, but they all came with ideas and enthusiasm,” says Marsh.All but the last of the film’s five episodes are played in statuesque black and white, echoing and – in one memorable scene in which Beckett is stabbed by a pimp with a wall of prostitutes looking on – directly replicating the work of Brassaï. The Hungarian photographer snapped the playwright at the height of his fame for Harper’s Bazaar, but it is his earlier pictures of Parisian nightlife that set the tone, capturing Beckett’s wayward early years, and his shadowy life with the French resistance, when he met up with Suzanne and life took a more dangerous turn, albeit often characterised by the enemy’s failure to turn up as expected.In all his decades as one of Ireland’s most successful acting exports, this is the first time Byrne has had anything to do professionally with Beckett’s work, and he is dismissive of some of the productions he has seen, notably ​​Waiting for Godot in New York in 1988, starring Robin Williams and Steve Martin: “There was one moment when I thought, this is meant to be funny. Yet here are two of the funniest men on the planet, and they haven’t raised a laugh between them.”Beckett was not speaking from the top of a mountain but from the depths of his soulThere’s a reverence for Beckett that gets in the way of the humanity of his work, he believes. “It happens with Eugene O’Neill too” – whose plays have been something of a Byrne speciality. “People are so in awe of what they represent, that they surrender to that awestruck notion that these men are speaking from the top of a mountain. But Beckett was not speaking from the top of a mountain but from the depths of his soul. And the way he expressed himself was through this pared down, essential simplicity of language, expressing the deepest and most complex of feelings and thoughts about what it means to be human.”He wouldn’t have done the film if it had been a conventional autobiography, he says: “How do you tell somebody’s life in an hour and a half? It’s not possible. A lot of these biopics depend on the likeness of the actor to the person they’re playing. And it becomes about an impersonation, structured around the highlights of the person’s life. There’s nothing wrong with trying to do a film like that. But I think the braver course was to do something that tried to encapsulate what Beckett was as a human being.”He applied the same principles to his own life in his memoir. “Memory is so unreliable,” he says. “It doesn’t have a structure to it. It doesn’t have a linear quality. It comes for a couple of seconds and disappears. And you’ve no idea when it’s going to come again. The present and the past are always overlapping. I was interested in finding out: what were the moments? What were the feelings that I felt defined the journey of my life?”Crisis of fame … Kevin Pollak, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne and Kevin Spacey in Bryan Singer’s 1995 film The Usual Suspects. Photograph: Polygram/Spelling/Kobal/ShutterstockOne such moment was at the Cannes premiere of The Usual Suspects, which threw him into an existential crisis from which he awoke in a…

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