‘A lot of biopics depend on likeness – this is braver’: Gabriel Byrne on playing Samuel Beckett
The actor talks about his new movie Dance First, in which he plays the Irish dramatist, the time he shared a drink with Richard Burton and why he had to leave Los Angeles
Claire Armitstead Friday 22 September 2023
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.
The actor’s autobiography confronts the abuse he experienced at the hands of the church. But he has just as much contempt for Hollywood – and US presidents from Obama to Trump
Catherine Shoard
Sun 8 Nov 2020 14.00 GMT
Forget the pollsters. If you wanted to know the outcome of last week’s US election, you just had to ask Gabriel Byrne. I did, a month ago. I wish I had gone to the bookies.
Gabriel Byrne: ‘I was taught to love reading and it has been one of the greatest gifts of my life.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
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Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’
The actor on preferring girls’ comics, being politicised by fiction and finally understanding The Great Gatsby
Gabriel Byrne
Friday 15 October 2021
My earliest reading memory In the 1960s Bunty and Judy were weekly “girls’ comics”, which had adventures and mysteries like Sandra of the Secret Ballet and the Four Marys, as well as stories of the great ballets and operas. The Topper was for boys and featured cartoons but also serialised writers such as Dickens, Buchan and Walter Scott on its back pages, gorgeously illustrated in colour. I preferred the girls’ comics.
My favourite book growing up The Wind in the Willows: Kenneth Grahame’s blissfully imagined world of adventure, friendship and loyalty among the animals who dwell by the river. What a glorious experience and precious memory that first reading was.
Hereditary review – Toni Collette is outstanding in brilliant fear machine
*****
Collette gives a terrific, hypnotic performance as a harried mother facing down family evil in Ari Aster’s rivetingly shot horror debut
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ereditary tripled my heart rate, prickle-massaged my scalp, cured my hiccups – and pretty much terrified me. It was the first time I’ve heard someone in an audience of hardened critics yelp the word “Fu-uck” in two separate syllables; the first in fear, the second in a kind of immediate, incredulous self-reproach for having lost it in public. That reaction was incidentally triggered – the only appropriate word – by a tongue-click, the sound a child might make to impersonate the clip-clopping of a horse, a once-innocent tic I will from now on associate with pure evil.
This has been described as an Exorcist for a new generation, which isn’t quite right, though it weirdly reminded me more specifically of the Jonathan Pryce “Exorcist” stage Hamlet from 1980, in which he gets speakingly possessed by his father’s ghost. First-time writer-director Ari Aster has really drawn on other inspirations: Don’t Look Now and Rosemary’s Baby, in their presentiments and conspiracies of horror. Hereditary is also like a death-metal version of Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.
The direction, shooting and orchestral score are all brilliant, but it would be nothing at all without the terrific performance of Toni Collette in the lead, her face a mask of fear and anger. She is a scary-movie Medea in extreme closeup. Surely this magnificent actor will get some silverware next February. My own game plan is to write a series of grumpy articles about how brilliant genre movies always lose out to middlebrow ersatz artistry in the awards season – to reverse-jinx Collette and maybe Hereditary itself into getting the big prizes.
Collette plays Annie Graham, a deeply troubled woman who has some renown as a contemporary artist, preparing for a new show, creating miniaturist doll’s house creations of scenes from her own life, tiny lit rooms with Lilliputian human figures, fixtures and fittings all fabricated with fanatical detail and care. Aster may have based her on the real-life American artist Narcissa Thorne, who created the miniature “Thorne Rooms” exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago that fascinated the young Orson Welles. Clearly, this artistic process speaks of Annie’s control-freakery, a need to reduce and render manageable a life that is in some way beyond her, an emotional fetishism or voodooism. She has maybe inherited this dysfunction from her elderly, secretive and abusive mother, who has just died after years of dementia – a woman whose malign influence effectively poisoned the lives of Annie, her easy-going husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and their teen children Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro). This grandma insisted on taking Charlie under her wing, and now that she is dead, her ghost is insisting 13-year-old Charlie release the evil that is encoded in the family’s DNA. Colin Stetson’s musical score establishes a pulse of fear – accentuating the film’s disturbing trick of moving from day or night in exterior shots in a single percussive beat, like switching the daylight on or off with a switch. Grace Yun’s production design and Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography create a dreamlike sunlit bake for the outdoor scenes, and indoors, square-on compositions make the rooms look uncannily like doll’s house replicas with live occupants. There is something inexpressibly scary in believing, just for a second, that the human beings we are watching are in fact tiny animated dummies in some satanic installation.
Hereditary does have, it should be said, some pretty standard-issue genre elements: including the discovery of an old book full of occult descriptions. A lesser film, a film without its stamina and persistence in maintaining the tension, couldn’t have got away with that.
It is customary to validate horror by looking for the satire, and of course Hereditary is partly about a secret fear and loathing of old people that flowers in middle age: fear of becoming old, fear of the genetic message of weakness they have left us, about which we can do nothing, strive for success as we may. But Hereditary is basically a brilliant machine for scaring us, and Collette’s operatic, hypnotic performance seals the deal every second she’s on the screen – though Wolff is also very good as the cool teen who regresses into a frightened little boy. Collette’s Annie turns into a poltergeist haunting herself: thrashing and contorting with agony, with her anguished but rational need to keep it together, and keep her family together.
The horror of grief: how loss is the ultimate boogeyman in Hereditary
The buzzed-about shocker, starring Toni Collette, is the latest horror film to recognize the devastating effect of losing a loved one Guy Lodge Thu 17 Jun 2018
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few years ago, a friend whose father had recently died, suddenly and prematurely, asked me to go to the cinema with him. Traditional comfort viewing was not on the agenda: he wasn’t looking to lose himself in a pillowy romantic comedy or a hot blast of action escapism. Rather, his choice of viewing was Let Me In, the slicked-up but still largely downbeat US remake of Scandi vampire tale Let the Right One In. “It’s a bit grim,” I cautioned, unnecessarily. “Grim is sort of where I am at the moment,” he replied, and I could hardly argue with that: sometimes, when your heart and mind are in a particularly dark place, it can feel better to submerge them in more shadow than hold them up to the light.
He wouldn’t have been the first bereaved person to massage the raw wound of their grief with the salt of horror cinema: it is, after all, the genre more preoccupied than any other with death, the persistent fear it stokes in us, and the cold void it leaves when it strikes nearby. So many of the best horror films are built around characters themselves in mourning, rendered either vulnerable, invulnerable or a bit of both by the extremity of their pain. To watch Donald Sutherland in Don’t Look Now, haunted by the seeming spectre of his dead daughter, or even the Friday the 13th series, with its grisly chain of grief-motivated massacres, is to see, in a sense, one’s own psychic pain writ large and dripping in blood – you might not feel better for it, but at least you feel seen.
I wouldn’t necessarily prescribe Hereditary, out soon in cinemas, to anyone for this (or any other) reason, though Ari Aster’s magnificent directorial debut is the most skin-prickling demonstration in recent memory of cinema’s capacity to look death in the face and scream. It’s an unsubtle, unforgiving horror nightmare for which not everyone will have the upturned stomach; for those who do, Hereditary plunges about as deep into the abyss of familial loss, ensuing blame and paralysing sorrow as it is possible to go.
Varying in its approach from sleek, serpentine psychological teasing to rattletrap ghost-ride scares straight from the B-movie playbook, it’s a film best approached cold in terms of its plot machinations: if you haven’t seen it and want an optimum first viewing, you’d do best to read little in advance. Aster opens proceedings in a household newly touched by death: the Grahams, a well-off suburban family in one of those roomy American houses so perfect for storing lingering spirits, are preparing for a grandmother’s funeral, though no one seems beside themselves with grief. Speaking to gathered mourners, the dead woman’s daughter Annie (Toni Collette) speaks of her mother in tones of chilly, compromised respect; her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and teenage children Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro) look on with a detachment that borders on relief.
Toni Collette
Something, it seems, has been haunting this family long before the old woman, a secretive believer in the occult, passed away. The mourning process unlocks that trouble in short order, though not as and when we expect: instead, it’s another sudden and brutal death that causes hell to break loose, in more ways than one, as the family is subsumed by more feeling than it can rationally handle. Though Aster’s film would make a fine (albeit nerve-destroying) double-bill with Jennifer Kent’s 2014 sensation The Babadook – another intimate, anxiously escalating study of domestic terror rooted in a loved one’s absence – it manages emotion in very different ways.
The Babadook is a narrative of catharsis: much theory has been written about how its eponymous demon is a mere manifestation of the stages of mourning first denied and then endured by its protagonist, a widowed single mother. In Hereditary, however, grief escapes from a Pandora’s box, forever wounding and changing its sufferers with no apparent possibility of healing or renewal. Collette, in the gutsiest and most wrenching performance of her career, plays a woman quite literally and violently possessed by her own grief.
It’s a canny bit of casting: in another era-leading horror film, The Sixth Sense, she played a young mother whose unresolved emotional baggage with her own dead mum finally links her to the spiritual world only her son can see. Once again, grief acts as a conduit to the abject and uncanny, though M Night Shyamalan’s ghost story concludes with rather more human tenderness and togetherness than Hereditary does. For some, however, Hereditary may resemble their own experiences of loss and emotional displacement: to watch it is to feel trapped in a tunnel with no obvious light source at either end, but plenty of sound and fury and scratching, scarring pain. Hereditary is unlikely to lift a burden from anyone who watches it, but there’s brute emotional honesty to its freaky worst-case scenario: not every tragedy, it reminds us, shrinks or sinks into the past.
