Chris O'Dowd interview: 'Fame hasn't changed me. But it's changed everybody around me' 

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Chris O\'Dowd interview: \'Fame hasn\'t changed me. But it\'s changed everybody around me\'

Chris O\'Dowd has a thriving Hollywood career and a starring role on Broadway. Why was he wary of returning to Ireland - and the Catholic church - for his new film, Calvary?

\'I was enormous!\' Chris O\'Dowd, star of Calvary and Of Mice and Men Photo: 2014 Michael Friberg

Let’s not beat about the bush. Chris O’Dowd has let himself go. His familiar facial hair has run wild, from hipster beard to tramp-ish thatch. His head has been brutally razored. And he’s piled on the pounds.

That Irish actor who transformed from lumbering schlub in cult Channel 4 series The IT Crowd to handsome love interest in the box-office-trumping Hollywood comedy Bridesmaids? He’s effected an equally remarkable reverse rebrand, going from butterfly (OK, maybe moth) to grub (all right, caterpillar).

“It’s been OK to get flabby around the edges,” O’Dowd says cheerfully while reaching for a cupcake, before adding the cavil, “for a while. I think I’ve probably reached a limit now – I’ve put on a couple of stone.”

Really? The 34-year-old is a big guy – 6ft 3in – but not that much, surely? “I have!” he yelps. “I’ve put on 25lbs. I hide it well!” he laughs. “Where have I put it? Ask my wife!”

But his wife, writer, presenter and novelist Dawn O’Porter, and O’Dowd’s legions of new fans – the ones who love him as a bit of thinking woman’s crumpet in Bridesmaids and in Lena Dunham’s critically acclaimed series Girls – can rest easy. This is not celebrity gluttony at work. It’s the Method. Besides, he’s still as handsome as ever.

We’ve met in New York’s Longacre Theatre. It’s a wintry spring Saturday afternoon, pouring outside, deserted inside. We’re sat in the empty stalls during the three-hour interlude between the matinee and the evening show. With businesslike briskness the big man from the small town of Boyle in Co Roscommon settles down to talk.

O’Dowd certainly has a lot going on. Series two of his award-winning comedy Moone Boy, which he co-wrote, recently ended on Sky. It’s a largely autobiographical show, with O’Dowd playing the imaginary friend of an adolescent boy. He’s co-writing children’s books based on the series, and is readying to make an American version next year, with a Christmas movie involving the same characters somewhere in between. And he’s recently shot another big American comedy, St Vincent De Van Nuys, with Bill Murray.

But right now, O’Dowd is 10 days into a four-month run of the first Broadway adaptation in 40 years of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. He plays Lennie, the mentally challenged, strong-as-an-ox “big baby” in this staging of the classic Depression-era novella. His opposite number is Hollywood polymath James Franco (the Spider-Man trilogy, 127 Hours, Oz the Great and Powerful), playing Lennie’s friend and protector George. The unfortunate character of “Curley’s wife” is played by Leighton Meester, late of Gossip Girl.

These two American actors explain the large huddles of squealing teen and twentysomething girls with whom I queued to buy last-minute tickets this morning. Although, courtesy of Girls and Bridesmaids, O’Dowd can probably claim some of that pop culture “traction” himself.

The play requires O’Dowd to portray mental disability convincingly. The sweetly well-meaning Lennie knows neither his own strength nor social niceties – notably those relating to the opposite sex. As any student of school days literature knows, things don’t end well.

O’Dowd admits that he had a personal insight into the part: his 11-year-old self. At that age he was already a six-footer, towering over teachers in school football team photos.

O\'Dowd with James Franco in the Broadway production of Steinbeck\'s Of Mice and Men

“Dude, I was enormous!” he exclaims. “And you don’t know if you’re gonna stop. At the time I remember thinking, this could be bad. I was like, God, am I gonna be one those weird 7ft people?”

He recalls the discomfort of his body “feeling too big for me. And we discussed this in rehearsals a lot. Because – spoiler alert! – I kill a girl in the play by accident, because I just don’t know how strong I am.

“And I remember hurting people at that age in fights. You don’t know how to control your body, and you’re a big, strong dude compared to everybody else. We were talking about this yesterday, about the fight scene in the play – there’s only one thing worse than being punched in the face, and it’s the feeling of punching somebody in the face.

“So, yeah, I draw on that. You’re ignorant about your own capabilities. It’s frightening.”

The play is terrific, the kinship between the two men affecting and believable. Did O’Dowd find it difficult to play a character that could so easily veer into caricature? “I try not to worry about stuff like the idea that it’s hard to play a person with a disability,” he says. “I’m just trying to be as honest as possible. I do have the exact thing in mind of what is wrong with the guy: I think he’s got a mild case of Down’s syndrome. I’ve looked into it and it’s hard to find any real consensus on it – Steinbeck never clarified it. But a lot of the things that he talks about in the novella are so specific that it feels likes it’s somebody he met.

“And autism is, these days, a kind of catchword,” he says meaning, I think, catch-all. “And I don’t think Lennie is. I think he’s completely the other side of that spectrum. He’s just a bit slow. And I know some people like that.”

O’Dowd’s new film, Calvary, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh (The Guard), is a brilliant Irish drama set in small town Sligo and centred on Father James Lavelle (Brendan Gleeson – fantastic, as usual).

He is told in confession by an (obviously anonymous) confessor that he was sexually tortured in childhood by a priest and now, in adulthood, he will have his revenge. That priest is dead, so he’s going to kill Father Lavelle instead. It will cause more public outrage if he shoots an innocent and good priest. Gleason’s character should duly present himself on the local beach on Sunday week to be killed.

Calvary then follows the godly-but-already-wearied Father day by day as he does his priestly rounds of the small coastal community. He encounters a rum bunch of characters including a cocaine-sniffing surgeon (played by Aidan Gillen), an embittered and alcoholic millionaire (Dylan Moran), and a butcher with an unfunny sense of humour and a rumoured habit of beating up his adulterous wife. Any of them could be the killer-in-waiting.

O’Dowd is the butcher. He plays the character for some laughs but he’s patently a man with an inky, shifting, inner darkness. It’s a great performance from an actor best known for comic roles, and should recalibrate the view of those who might assume the man who won an Emmy for the hilarious Moone Boy can’t “do” drama. And there’s more to come in that vein. In Stephen Frears’s keenly anticipated biopic of Lance Armstrong, O’Dowd plays David Walsh, the Irish journalist who doggedly pursued the drug-cheat cyclist for a decade.

Still, even though Calvary is a gift of a role, O’Dowd admits he had reservations about signing up. “I heard John was doing a film about priests, and I thought, ‘Oh f---, that’s gonna be a real hatchet job on priests…’ And I have really positive relationships with priests that I grew up with, and I still kind of know. Really sound old guys in Boyle.”

But then he read the script, and talked the matter through with McDonagh (brother of Martin McDonagh, who wrote and directed the equally darkly comic In Bruges).

“John came from a very similar place. He said, ‘I’m not really into religion, but I have some priests in my life that were great influences.’ So the idea of a story about a good priest who is not being served by the religion that he adores is, I think, a great idea.

“And also,” he adds, “it’s not what everybody is doing. It’s very easy to do a hatchet job on those guys.”

\'It\'s easy to do a hatchet job on those guys\': Brendan Gleeson and O\'Dowd in Calvary

And, I say, in Calvary, the pub landlord (played by Moone Boy regular Pat Shortt) is the voice of that hatchet jobbery. “Right, totally. It’s not blind to the way society is feeling about [the Catholic church] at the moment. But I do think it’s a beautiful piece. It’s an unusual film, it doesn’t have a standard narrative structure,” he says of a film that slowly ticks off the days in a mordant countdown to possible death while incorporating a clever skewing of traditional whodunit? tropes. “And I don’t know if it’ll be hugely successful. But I hope people do go and see it ’cause I do think it will spark debate.”

If it doesn’t, O’Dowd himself has already done that job for Calvary. In an interview with a men’s magazine last month, the Catholic-raised actor branded religious doctrine “a weird cult”. He stands by his comments, but insists that, “I really wasn’t trying to make a big statement.”

Yet he is still bamboozled by the Twitter storm resulting from other media’s paraphrasing of his comments, viz: “ ‘Chris O’Dowd says religion is unacceptable!’ No I didn’t! And people go crazy about that. But what are you gonna do?” he says with a sanguine shrug of the shoulders.

He’s less sanguine about other elements of the magazine cover story. This youngest of five from small-town Ireland is narked by the fact that the story incorrectly states that his parents – mother a psychotherapist, father a graphic designer – are divorced. Yes, they separated shortly after he left University College Dublin (he studied politics). “But they’re not divorced. A lot of people will be like, ‘What’s the difference?’ Well, it’s a big f---ing difference if you’re a Catholic,” he says forcefully. And he says that as an atheist.

He insists the familial upheaval didn’t upend his studies, even if he didn’t quite get his degree. It seems extra-curricular activities may have got in the way: drinking, girls, drama. Still, prior to going off to university, he’d harboured no acting or comedy ambitions.

“All I’d done was a bit of a part in Grease at school. So I really had no idea. I did politics ’cause I thought it would be cool to be a political speech writer. I like orators. I liked listening to Churchill, or Kennedy. And there’s loads of Irish ones – Larkin and all those guys, or the rebel guys. The idea of a being a rabble-rouser is something I’ve always been attracted to. And then in my first week in college I went to support a friend at an audition for a play and that was it – I just fell in love with it.”

Post-university, O’Dowd studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, then began working his way up the acting ladder. Drama roles (Vera Drake, The Crimson Petal and the White) mixed with comic ones (Festival, The Boat That Rocked). But the emphasis was on comedy, and his career was stoutly grounded in Britain and Ireland.

Then, five years ago, he decided to take a flier and move to Los Angeles. He’d not long met O’Porter (they married in 2012), and at a party shortly after their arrival, they were introduced to Judd Apatow, the writer/producer/director behind Knocked Up and The 40 Year-Old Virgin. He and the director Paul Feig then cast him as the nice, handsome cop in riotous, $300 million-grossing comedy Bridesmaids (2011). An obviously impressed Apatow subsequently gave him a part in This is 40 (2012). Factor in his recurring role in the none-more-hip series Girls, and it was fair to say that O’Dowd had broken Hollywood.

Chris O\'Dowd with his wife Dawn O\'Porter (Rex)

But don’t just take my word for it. As O’Porter recently reportedly lamented to a British tabloid of the couple’s early days living in LA: “I was waking up in bed with someone who had broken Hollywood, and my lack of career consumed me. I was on red carpets feeling like a complete fraud.”

When I read this to him, O’Dowd laughs. “Oh wow, that’s harsh!” Then he quietens. “No, I can imagine her feeling like that. We’ve talked about that – not at the time but since. But yeah, it must have been a weird time for her.”

He says they mostly manage to mesh their careers and schedules. “We make it work. And it’s been great, all that, so far. ’Cause we don’t have kids, it’s a lot easier. And if we’re ever lucky enough for that kind of s--- to come around I guess it’ll be a harder thing to manage.”

Has O’Porter forgiven him for tweeting last year a picture of her in her underwear? “Eventually!” he laughs.

How long was he in the doghouse? “It wasn’t so bad,” he insists, not entirely convincingly.

What, in turn, gets his goat? Is O’Dowd as supremely affable and easy-going as he seems onscreen, and when he’s talking to journalists? “Um… God, I don’t know if anything does p--- me off…”

What about the fawning that must surely go along with a career in Hollywood? “You know what? I get freaked out when you go out there,” he says, gesturing to the front of the theatre, “and there’s all the screaming. I do just want to shake everybody and say, ‘Just f---ing calm down! We’re actors – go and get excited about people who do something proper. Everybody just f---ing relax!’

“And on Twitter and stuff like that – one thing that does really make me think, ‘Oh, f--- off, then’: there’s a certain thing that once you’re on TV or famous in any way, you’re no longer allowed to complain about anything, ever. Like if you say: ‘Somebody just rear-ended my car – what a d---.’ On Twitter everyone will go, ‘Oh, shut up, you can afford another car!’ That’s what the response would be.”

He tuts and shakes his head. He’s on a roll now. “Everybody asks: ‘Do you think fame has changed you?’ Well, for me it hasn’t – but you know what? Everybody around me has. The way they look at me. I can be as normal and exactly the same [as I was], but everybody has altered their opinion of me based on what I do now.

“And that’s unusual,” he says, frowning slightly. “You’re no longer allowed to be part of the human race because you’re on TV.”

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