Conclave star Brían F O'Byrne on his decision to trade Hollywood for a home in rural Sligo

The opening movie at the Cork International Film Festival is the lauded ‘Conclave’. Paul Whitington meets its Irish star, Brían F O’Byrne, and discusses his decision to trade Hollywood for a home in rural Sligo

Brían O'Byrne: ‘You put in hours and gradually you get a break’. Picture: Getty Images

Brían F O’Byne works a lot. Look him up on IMDB and the list of his credits is extraordinary: he’s what they used to call a character actor, and over the years has worked with everyone from Clint Eastwood and Terrence Malick to Sidney Lumet, Ken Loach, Martin McDonagh, Ethan Hawke, Sigourney Weaver, Kate Winslet, and Cate Blanchett.

Since moving to New York in 1990 he has established himself as a commanding and versatile performer on stage and screen. He’s in good company in his latest film, Conclave, a masterful thriller from Edward Berger that feels a bit like All the President’s Men with priests.

The pope has died suddenly, and so cardinals from across the globe converge on Rome for a fraught conclave. Frontrunner for the top job is Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), an affable and unscrupulous wide boy. Right wingers in the church favour Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellito), an old school
Tridentine maniac, while the left’s preferred candidate is Cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci), who insists he doesn’t want the job at all. They all say that though.

Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Lawrence. Picture: Focus Features

Trying to keep order during a fraught sequestered vote is Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), an even-tempered Englishman who was a close associate of the late pontiff. Brían F O’Byrne is his go-between and fixer Monsignor Raymond O’Malley, who during the film unearths disturbing evidence of skulduggery involving Tremblay and others. These dark mutterings in the cloisters evoke Shakespeare but the film is hugely entertaining too, a nail-biting thriller revolving around the outcome of a series of ballots.

When I tell Brían F O’Byrne that Conclave is great fun, he seems relieved. “Is it?” he says. “I haven’t actually seen it myself.”

The man who’s always working is speaking via Zoom from Calgary, where he’s filming a Netflix drama called The Abandons, which is set in 1850s Oregon and probably explains the voluminous beard Brían is sporting.

“That’s really interesting to hear,” he says, “because you work on something and you really have no idea what they’re going to make. But after seeing All Quiet on the Western Front [Berger’s previous film] I was so blown away by it, so I thought this should be really interesting. And some of the locations were incredible. We shot in Rome, nothing in the Vatican of course, they don’t really hire out the hall! They have a set in Cinecitta, the great studio there, a set of the Sistine Chapel. When you’re there in the middle of all that with lots of extras and the camera is very far away, you think, gosh, this is fun.”

Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence in director Edward Berger’s ‘Conclave’. Picture: Philippe Antonello/Focus Features

The shoot was “pretty straightforward really,” O’Byrne says.“Edward is so visually precise and he’s incredibly well prepared, and of course Ralph is always utterly in command of everything. So it was really just one of those jobs that was quite smooth, because also I knew some of the other guys from New York, a lot of them are theatre actors as well.

“And everyone was older, and it was funny but it struck me that there was all these older bald guys making a movie together, and we don’t see that any more, there are no actors under 40 who are bald any more, they’ve all had hair jobs. There will be no more bald actors any more, it’ll be like football players. When we were growing up, guys in the First Division, you’d see a guy going bald. Nobody’s bald any more!”

Almost all of O’Byrne’s scenes in Conclave are one-on-ones with Fiennes. How was he to work with?

“He’s a very, very charming, collaborative actor, a gentle guy, and super-prepared. He is such a theatre person as well, you know, a very curious, well-read person. And of course he has that big connection with Ireland, and I worked with his brother Joseph on a TV show a long time back. As you get older in the business, if you manage to hang around, you have connections with everyone.”

Had he met Stanley Tucci before?

“I had met him in New York, just casually after plays. I had a couple of scenes with him in this, but he was coming and going from London. The night before we finished though, we had a meal and we sat together for a long time talking, and it was a real joy.”

Stanley Tucci as Cardinal Bellini. Picture: Focus Features

This is not the first time O’Byrne has played a cleric. “I’ve played priests loads of times, but this was a monsignor so I am going up the ladder!”

Rehearsing for the part was, he says, very enjoyable.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the Catholic Church, and so when I got a chance to go back to Rome and do this, it was a real gift because I got to just investigate. There’s a Jesuit podcast called ‘Inside the Vatican’, and I couldn’t wait for the next week to see what was going on in the Vatican, and the political machinations of it all.”

Born in Mullagh, Co Cavan, O’Byrne was just 19 years old when he first went to New York.

“I mean I never thought about being an actor or anything, it was a complete circumstantial thing that I ended up acting, and the same with going to America, because I won a Green Card, and the same with meeting Ciaran O’Reilly and Charlotte Moore in the Irish Rep, and that was the way in. I really enjoyed the
theatre, and there was a sense that there was a path as an actor where you stand at the back in the first scenes that you get, you serve an apprenticeship in some ways, you put in hours and you gradually get a little break.”

Ethan Hawke and Brian F. O'Byrne. Picture: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images for Netflix

O’Byrne’s break came in the Broadway production of Martin McDonagh’s Beauty Queen of Leenane, where his performance earned him a Tony nomination, and set him on his path.

Does he prefer working in the theatre?

“Well, theatre, you see, it’s the actors’ medium. With film and TV it’s director and editor, I mean obviously you need good actors, but then they go off and make the film, and the end result might be unrecognisable. On film, our work stops when they say cut. I did a couple of things with Terrence Malick, and as an actor you’re there just watching a guy collecting paints, he’s going to go off then for a couple of years and make his painting.

“Whereas onstage, you walk out on a stage every night, you’re the editor, you’re the director, you have absolute freedom to do whatever the hell you want. But both are great, and I’m very lucky to be able to make a living doing what I’m doing.”

O’Byrne moved back to Ireland with his family seven years ago, and lives in rural Sligo. As a former emigrant myself, I wonder what coming back was like for him? Getting used to being back here, he admits, was difficult at first. “But overall, I love it. I adore where we live in Sligo. We tend to forget all the incredible things that are really good, and how lucky we are in Ireland.”

• ‘Conclave’ will screen as the opening gala of the Cork International Film Festival at The Everyman on November 7 at 7pm, and will open nationwide on November 29.