Chris O’Dowd: How GAA prepared me for Hollywood

Standing in goals for Roscommon, delivering monologues on a West End stage, the feeling is more alike than you might think. As Chris O'Dowd returns to the pitch, he chats about how the GAA prepared him for Hollywood, parenting, and his connection to Ted Lasso via Cork

Actor Chris O'Dowd at the Boyle GAA club in Boyle, Roscommon. Picture: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

As Chris O’Dowd returns to the pitch, he tells Nicole Glennon about how the GAA prepared him for Hollywood, parenting, and his connection to Ted Lasso via Cork

“I Do think GAA is where it all started,” Chris O’Dowd muses.

He’s talking about being a goalkeeper in the moments before a penalty.

“When your moment comes, it is a moment,” he says.

“You’re there on your own, often with the crowd right beside you, and there is this feeling of being on show, of being exposed.”

It’s one of the first times he remembers experiencing that feeling as a positive. Learning to hold your nerve, use the pressure as fuel, and — hopefully — get that much-sought-after roar of approval.

More recently, it occurred while on stage in Conor McPherson’s The Brightening Air in the West End (which comes to Dublin’s Gate Theatre in July).

“When you’re about to give a monologue... It’s the same sensation. Everything slows down. You’re thinking, ‘okay, I have everybody now. I’ve put some thought into it, I know which way I’m going to dive’.”

Actor Chris O'Dowd with the Roscommon U20's Team at the Boyle GAA club in Boyle, Roscommon. Picture: by David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

We’re chatting — Boyle-to-LA actor, Strokestown-to-Dublin journalist — about playing underage GAA in Roscommon.

I’d barely picked up the phone when he started the classic Irish icebreaker: “Do I know your mother?”

The PR had already relayed that I am from a half-hour down the road from his hometown, and we’re trying to figure out how we’re connected.

“She was in your mother’s hillwalking group,” I concede, “she got a selfie with you once.” I admit I might have slagged her about said selfie.

O’Dowd has spent 16 years in LA, appearing in everything from the box office hit Bridesmaids to a keep-you-up-at-night episode of Black Mirror. He’s also, I admit, the one famous person I cite when people ask where Roscommon is. Still, I like the idea that Irish people leave celebrities alone — that we don’t let them get notions.

County Roscommon actor, Chris O'Dowd, in the Black Mirror episode “Common People" last year.

“That’s gone out the window,” he scoffs, having been home in Boyle the last few weeks. “The door hasn’t stopped going.”

“I had a ‘fan of Puffin Rock’ [the animated children’s television series O’Dowd narrates] in the other day for a selfie.

“He’s fucking three, he doesn’t even know what a fucking phone is.”

When we speak, O’Dowd is on his way to the home of Boyle GAA, Abbey Park, where he’ll be chatting to some of Roscommon’s current crop of underage footballers as part of a campaign with U20 Championship sponsors Dalata Hotels.

For the uninitiated, the actor/writer/director represented Roscommon in Gaelic football from his teen years right up to his early 20s. The highlight, naturally, was his performance as goalkeeper in the 1997 Connacht Minor Football Championship final against our county’s arch rivals, Mayo.

Chris O'Dowd playing in goals for Roscommon in 1997 Connacht MFC Final

“I remember running out to the crowd,” he says. “I don’t know whether that had some effect on what I ended up doing... like, ‘I like the sound of that — give me more, but less running!’”

Though the real joy of underage GAA, for O’Dowd, like many of us, is the moments off the pitch.

“I also remember the bus rides up and down to training, to Castlerea and Roscommon.

“It was an hour and a half, maybe twice a week, where you get to know this whole bunch of people that you don’t see on a day-to-day basis. Strangers who were also just about to leave home for the first time, doing a line with some young girl... It’s like, this is the start of it all.

“Everybody is going through this kind of hormone-induced awakening at the same time, and it’s an extraordinary cocktail of energy.

“I remember the songs and the slagging and the laughing and camaraderie and everybody finding what their place was in the group.”

It’s a kind of magic, we agree, but I wonder how rural life and GAA might have prepared him for the road he went down. For the buzz? Sure. The pressure? The egos?

Actor Chris O'Dowd with the Roscommon U20's Team at the Boyle GAA club in Boyle, Roscommon. Picture: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile

“I think it prepared me very well,” he says. “You know what it’s like down here, everybody’s very down-to-earth, nobody’s overly excitable. It’s been interesting having the kids back over mid-term, doing sports camp. I train my 11-year-old’s soccer team on a Friday night in London, so I’ve kind of got the lay of the land of what that age group are like, and I’ve been asking them what it’s like here, how it’s different. They say everybody’s just so much more relaxed. Nobody’s screaming at each other.”

Creating a culture like that, of course, is as much to do with the adults pitchside as any of the teenagers, and it’s part of the reason he’s involved in this ‘Difference Makers’ campaign, which aims to highlight those who step up “both on and off the pitch”.

For O’Dowd, there were multiple difference-makers in his own life. He cites his English teacher, Tony Conway, and one of his football managers, Sean Young.

“A big Derryman who was a bank manager and my football manager, probably for two or three years when I was 12, 13, 14. He taught me an awful lot, discipline. He ended up being the father of the guy, Paul Young, who set up Cartoon Saloon down in Kilkenny,” he says, in a full-circle moment.

“What I loved the most? When you’re 14, and you win the championship, and those people tie a stereo to the roof of their car and parade you through the town to Tina Turner’s You’re simply the best, and you have kids hanging out car windows, and that sensation of doing it for your town. I suppose this is all about shouting out all the difference- makers we have in underage sport across the country here — the lads and ladies who wash the kits, line the pitches, behave like taxi drivers for three months of the year. I am at the age now where the people I used to play football with, one is running the soccer team, another is running the GAA, and another is up in the tennis court. It’s a beautiful natural progression.”

The difference, he feels, with the GAA clubs is the community.

“It’s all community-based. Nobody’s going to go on to play at Wembley. It’s not going to be a big money-spinner for anybody. There is no extraordinary career path. It’s all about your community, and that’s a very healthy way to go into the world.”

His immediate family — which consists of writer Dawn O’Porter (the O’ was added after their marriage), sons Art, 11, and Valentine, 8, and two rescue dogs Puffin and Meatloaf — recently relocated to London, which is much closer to home than LA, (“Knock is the handiest thing we ever got,” he gushes), but he admits he still hopes a move home to Ireland is on the cards.

“We always knew we’d come back around the time the kids were going into secondary school, and covid pushed us to make that decision quicker. We felt very far away. Our parents are getting old, Dawn had some work in London... I thought it might be a good stop on the way of getting us all to Ireland.”

Chris O'Dowd and Dawn O'Porter attend Choose Love Launches In Los Angeles Picture: by Vivien Killilea

I raise that viral Cillian Murphy quote, where the Ballintemple Oscar-winner said his pre-teenagers beginning to develop “posh English accents” was a harbinger for moving back home.

“A very real fear,” O’Dowd acknowledges. “It’s weird because our kids were born in America, so we are already dealing with that, but for some reason, that doesn’t really bother me. But London...” He trails off.

“Cill had it easier because Yvonne is from Ireland. Give my wife a gig in The Examiner, and we’ll see,” he laughs.

Whether or not he’s primarily resident at home, if there’s one thing we can say about O’Dowd, it’s that he’s never forgotten his roots, and he’s been forward in bringing the often-forgotten Midlands to the wider world. Whether that’s through Moone Boy, his delightful comedy based loosely around his own experience growing up in Boyle in the 1990s, repping Roscommon GAA to late-night US audiences via Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert, or last-year’s six-part comedy drama Small Town, Big Story, for Sky, primarily filmed in Wicklow and Boyle, which he directed and wrote.

There’s a lot of chat at present about Ireland’s booming film and TV scene, but O’Dowd has been bringing crews to our heartlands long before it was in vogue.

“Something I notice when international films or projects come through now, is that they are kind of blown away by the quality of the crews,” he says.

“I think we have always had good actors, but it seems we do have a particularly strong crop at the moment.

“Jessie, Paul, Saoirse, Cill... It’s real quality. And Sharon Horgan! We’re producing seriously good stuff.”

It feels like the opportune moment for a pitch.

“It’s just an idea,” I start, “But Ted Lasso-eque comedy set in the GAA world with Paul Mescal?”

He doesn’t miss a beat.

“I feel like the only bit of that you’re interested in is the last part.”

“I feel like it would be great for you too though,” I proffer.

“It could be,” he laughs, playing along, “I am thinking more Friday Night Lights? I think it should be a ladies’ team though.”

“Saoirse Ronan?” I suggest.

“I can’t see her saying no,” he deadpans.

It’s at this point we start wrapping up our chat, but not before he shares one of his proudest parenting moments of late.

“My eight-year-old told a joke recently, and I think I might have told it to him, but he was playing out in the forest and, I don’t know, they were throwing sticks at a tree or something, and he hit his mate, and his mate was upset, and so he went over and he says, ‘Why does a squirrel swim on its back? To keep its nuts dry.’”

He almost loses his breath re-telling this story, his delight palpable.

“I was so impressed. Not only that he remembered the joke, but that it was exactly the right context.

“He did it, and just kind of walked away. There wasn’t even an arm around the shoulder. It was like, this is the comfort I have for you. I hit you with a stick. I gotta hit you with a joke, and then I’m gonna leave.”

• Chris O’Dowd joined the Roscommon U20 GAA Football team at a recent training session as part of Dalata Hotel Group’s ‘For Difference Makers’ campaign, marking their second year as title sponsor of the GAA Football U20 Championship.
• dalatahotelgroup.com