Aidan Quinn on family history, personal projects, and his fond memories of West Cork

Aidan Quinn stars in ELEMENTARY on CBS Television Network. (Photo by Patrick Eccelsine/CBS via Getty Images)

Aidan Quinn has fond memories of a family trip to West Cork as a teenager.

He visited some of the region’s most striking spots, and would return to work in the county a number of times over the course of his successful acting career.

But this weekend Quinn is making his first visit to Schull, for the Fastnet Film Festival. The festival features a vast programme of Irish and international shorts as well as several public screenings, workshops, and events. 

The actor will be the subject of a public interview with former head of the BBC Greg Dyke, while four films starring Quinn will also be screened.

“I was here 45 years ago down in Baltimore, and I went to Cape Clear on a trip with my mother, so we’re talking about 1978,” says the actor of his early memories of West Cork, adding that his career has brought him to Munster several times.

“I’ve worked in Kenmare, Ballyvourney, in and around Cork, Cobh, and Midleton, but I don’t think I’ve been to Schull, this is my first time.”

Aidan Quinn in Songcatcher, 2000 - one of the films being screened at Fastnet Film Festival

When we speak, he has just arrived at the harbour town, and is looking forward to spending time at Fastnet, which continues today and tomorrow.

“I’ve heard wonderful things about it. I’m looking at the programme and it’s very exciting, lovely to be here.”

Starring in over 80 movies in a career that spans four decades, Quinn is one of the screen’s most charismatic stars.

In fact, he’s one of four members of the family to have fostered a successful film career. The night before, he had dinner in Dublin with his sister Marian, who has just finished directing her latest feature film in the city. His brother Declan is an acclaimed, award-winning cinematographer, with numerous film and TV credits. His late brother, Paul, wrote and directed This is My Father, a very personal family project set in 1930s Ireland, working with his siblings.

It’s not a surprise so many of them work in storytelling — growing up in Chicago as well as in Dublin and Birr, the Quinn children were surrounded by stories, says the actor.

“It all comes from the storytelling thing that you just are so imbued with in Irish families. My father was an English professor, so you’d be stumbling over Yeats and Beckett books, Frank O’Connor’s short stories. It was always in the house. Literature, storytelling. And so I think that’s where it stems from.”

Aidan Quinn attends the 49th International Emmy Awards on November 22, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

BIG BREAKS

As a young actor, Quinn got his first big break on stage, being cast by Byrne and Joyce Piven — parents of screen star Jeremy and filmmaker Shira — in a production of The Man in 605 by Alan Gross.

“They had an acting school and I just started doing a thing there. I got to co-star with Byrne in a new play, where I was the narrator, and one of the lead roles. That was a heady, heady start.

“And then I thought: ‘Oh, this is a great job. All you have to do is pretend that you are the character and you say the lines and people like ya and you get paid,” he smiles, before coming to the realisation that fostering an acting career was anything but simple.

“I didn’t work after that for two and a half years,” he recalls. “I had to get real serious and disciplined and take classes and figure out how to get an agent. So I had a glorious start and then a few years [where] I really had to kind of work it out.”

By the 1990s, Quinn was a bona fide movie star, mixing up roles in such high-profile movies as Desperately Seeking Susan, Benny & Joon, and Practical Magic with historical dramas and supporting work. 

They included a starring role with Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall, and in Aisling Walsh’s powerful drama about Catholic Church abuse, Song for a Raggy Boy, filmed in Cork and Kerry.

Alan Rickman as Eamon de Valera in the 1996 film Michael Collins, having escaped from Lincoln Prison dressed as a woman, beside Michael Collins (left), played by Liam Neeson, and Harry Boland, played by Aidan Quinn

Among his many other Irish features is Neil Jordan’s 1996 historical epic Michael Collins, one of the most successful Irish films of all time, in which he played Harry Boland.

The four features that are screening at Fastnet this weekend show the range of performances Quinn has given us throughout his career. “Many of them were special. The one I did with Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, and Julia Ormond ( Legends of the Fall), that was a great experience. Jim Harrison is one of our greatest American novelists.

“It was a thrill to be part of that epic story and that cast, 30 years ago or more now. We were in Alberta, Canada at the time shooting on an Indian reservation for most of it. We had the mountains in the background and we’d go off camping when I had days off, and it was just a magical experience.”

Also screening at Fastnet this weekend is the period drama Songcatcher. “That’s working with the great Janet McTeer and Maggie Greenwald, who’s a woman director that my brother Declan had actually done a couple of her films [with] before. That was a story about the roots of traditional country music in America, and how connected it is through the musicologist study where they find it so connected to the old Scottish and Irish folk songs.

“It’s about the conflict of gentrification and people moving into the mountain areas and trying to sophisticate the country people.”

Aidan Quinn and Liam Neeson at the Michael Collins press conference at Silversprings Hotel, Cork. Pic: Dan Linehan

PERSONAL PROJECTS

Fastnet is also showing spy thriller The Assignment, which saw the actor play dual roles.

“It was incredible to work with Ben Kingsley and Donald Sutherland. To work with those two gentlemen was just a great thrill.”

This is My Father screens as one of the most personal projects of his entire career, working with brothers Paul and Declan and sister Marian on a touching period drama.

It’s been a remarkably varied career — and Quinn, now 64 and married to fellow actor Elizabeth Bracco, remains a busy screen actor to this day. As he prepares to talk about his career with Greg Dyke at Fastnet tomorrow, he says there have been many people who were important and key to the roles he worked in along the way.

“So many people have been influential in my career. When I got cast as Hamlet as a young man by one of the best theatre directors in America, Bob Falls, in a very kind of rock and roll, avant-garde production, that was a thrill. I was on Broadway at 28.

“Even in the last four or five years, I’ve done a couple of parts that were just amazing. I played Teddy Roosevelt in a six-part mini-series where I had to put on 10 kilos and wear bifocals and moustaches, and work in a Brazilian jungle for six months. There are always different adventures to get involved with.”

Aidan Quinn attends the premiere for Hulu's "Dopesick" at Museum of Modern Art on October 04, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images)

Given Quinn’s heritage and love for working in Ireland, it comes as no surprise that he’s been observing the remarkable number of Irish actors and filmmakers seeding new successes both at home and internationally.

He was particularly thrilled to see Irish talent front and centre at this year’s Oscars, where we landed a record-breaking 14 nominations, amid much talk of a ‘green wave’ of Irish stars and storytellers establishing themselves in Hollywood.

“It’s unbelievable, I mean the place is exploding,” he says. “I mean, we always knew there was an incredible amount of talent on this island, you could feel it, you could go into any pub and any family gathering.

“You’d have two or three relations that seemed to be better at telling stories than most actors that were doing it professionally. That was never a question, but to see it, the confidence now that comes to the fore.

“You know, when I was a young man in and around Dublin for the years I was there, there was very little in terms of training there. But I was completely turned on back then by what was going on in The Project Arts Centre with Gabriel Byrne and Jim Sheridan and Ciarán Hinds, who has become a friend.

“All the stuff that was going on back then — it’s always been there, but I think there’s more international recognition now, which is fantastic.”

• Fastnet Film Festival continues through this weekend with a wide programme of shorts and features screenings, workshops and events, see fastnetfilmfestival.com