One
of the most respected character actors around, Colm Meaney has built
up a formidable body of work on stage, and on both the small and big
screens. The 54 year-old Dubliner is perhaps best known for his role
as Miles O’Brien on, first, the immensely popular TV show Star
Trek: The Next Generation, before transferring the character to
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In all, Meaney played O’Brien
for over a decade, appearing in more than 200 episodes and endearing
himself forevermore to Trekkers everywhere. He has also appeared in
numerous television shows, on both sides of the Atlantic, including
MacGyver, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Stargate:
Atlantis and Z Cars, which marked his very first small
screen appearance back in 1978.
Meaney’s movie career has been equally memorable, with strong
turns in the likes of Con Air, Intermission and Layer
Cake. His most notable movie roles, though, have all been in adaptations
of Roddy Doyle novels – The Commitments, The Van
and The Snapper, for which he won a Golden Globe in 1994. In
Three And Out, Meaney plays Tommy Cassidy, a big, brash, burly
Irishman with a fiery temper to match his red hair. When Tommy finds
out that he’s terminally ill, he decides to end it all by leaping
off Holborn Viaduct, but is stopped by Paul Callow (Mackenzie Crook),
who offers him an interesting proposition: money in exchange for jumping
under Paul’s train on Monday morning, thus qualifying Paul for
a major windfall under London Underground’s little-known ‘three
and out’ policy.
Accepting Paul’s offer, Tommy then journeys to Liverpool –
and the Lake District – to find his estranged wife, Rosemary,
and daughter, Frankie, so he can say his goodbyes – all with his
reluctant new friend in tow. But with initial hostility giving way to
genuine warmth, will Paul be able to kill Tommy when the time comes?
And will Tommy even want that to happen?
We caught
up with Colm on the set of Three And Out for a chat...
This
is the last day of filming. How’s it been for you?
It’s been a tough one in many ways. But it’s a great script,
a wonderful, wonderful script and great characters and a wonderful cast.
I think everyone’s really pleased with the quality of work.
You
seem to flit a lot between TV and movies of all shapes and sizes, from
this to Con Air. Do you have a preference?
I suppose it would be films like this in that I like the pace. We’ve
been shooting maybe five, six pages a day and that’s a good pace
to work. You mentioned Con Air – the big ones can be
such a drudge because you sit around for endless months. I don’t
think that’s conducive to good work. When you get a bit of momentum
going, you want to keep it up and keep it running.
So
was that the appeal of Three And Out for you?
Well, you can tell people what it’s about in three sentences.
‘Train driver finds out that if he kills three people in a month,
he’ll get the golden handshake. He’s already killed two,
so he goes looking for a third. Finds this guy who wants to commit suicide,
so they go off on the road together to sort out his life and try to
put things back in order in his life to an extent before he jumps under
his train’. And that’s it. But within that, the characters
are so well written and so well observed. Very often with dialogue you’re
playing with it and trying to make it this, that or the other. People
often say to me, what do you do in terms of research? With good writing,
you don’t need to do that. With good writing it’s all there
on the page and that was very much the case with this. It’s an
absolute page-turner. They first sent it to me and I hadn’t heard
anything about it and nobody in Los Angeles knew anything about it because
it’s a London production, so I started reading it and it was a
real page-turner.
What
kind of guy is Tommy Cassidy?
Tommy’s a guy who’s totally fucked up his life. He was very
happy-go-lucky in his younger days, probably, and he was a gambler and
a drinker and messed things up badly. He basically walked away from
his family, because he knew he couldn’t go back having done one
nasty thing too many. For the last eight years, he’s been living
alone, living pretty much hand-to-mouth, taking odd jobs, that sort
of thing. But there’s still a spirit there, there’s still
a kind of wisdom about life. In a funny way, Tommy is very accepting
of the fact that he’s fucked up. He doesn’t think it could
have been any other way, almost. He’s not a guy who’s going
around beating himself up constantly because he’s fucked up. He’s
got one shot at it and I fucked it up and I’m sorry I did, but
shit happens.
Why
is he suicidal?
We learn that he has a terminal illness. It’s unspecified. He
obviously has kind of had enough. He sees there’s no way back
to the life he had before. He’s very much in love with his wife
still, I think, but he can see there’s no way back to that. His
life really is not very pleasant and he doesn’t want it to go
on anyway. I think what really triggers the desire to end it all is
this illness. He’s pretty low when we meet him and I think he
sees it going inevitably lower and lower and lower. He doesn’t
want that. He still has enough of the spirit where he wants to be the
one that says ‘enough is enough’.
His
relationship with his wife is intriguing.
I think he knows there isn’t any way back even if he can reappear
driving a Mercedes and a nice suit and doing all those things he never
could have done before. He still knows deep down. When he gets there
and he sees Rosemary, initially she just throws a lot of missiles at
him, but he gets through that and there’s still a connection there.
Imelda, who played Rosemary, was wonderful. It was wonderful working
with her. I think we both played it where she has made a decision where
she’s moved on with her life and she’s having a better life
without him than with, and she realises this. She’s maybe tempted
for five seconds, but she realises no, that would be a huge mistake
and Tommy realises that, too.
But
the movie hinges on the relationship between Paul and Tommy.
There’s a wonderful relationship between these two guys. Tommy
almost becomes Paul’s mentor and Paul himself is a fuck-up. Paul
is not exactly Mr. Together. It’s like the blind leading the blind,
it’s like Dumb & Dumber, and Tommy has his way of
operating which is shocking to Paul. He calls the shots, he doesn’t
mind breaking into a house occasionally or doing whatever is necessary
to achieve whatever he wants to achieve and Paul is shocked by this.
But Paul is learning a lot from Tommy as he goes along. So I think most
of the humour is between these two characters who come from very different
backgrounds with very different levels of experience and types of experiences
behind them. Tommy becomes almost his mentor in crime.
And
of course, Paul becomes attracted to Frankie, Tommy’s daughter…
There’s comedy material there. Tommy doesn’t mind Paul and
he’s telling Paul to go out there and screw some lass, but not
my daughter, thank you very much, you know?
How
much were you helped by the fact that you and Mackenzie are, on the
surface anyway, very different people?
I think we are different. Mackenzie is a very introspective, calm, quiet,
sensitive man. I think I’m probably none of those. (laughs) It’s
not about our individual personality traits, necessarily, it’s
more to do with I think that even though we’re both very different
people, as actors we both recognised the material and recognised the
comedy in the material and responded to it. We didn’t have to
talk or rehearse that much with each other. We looked at it and we read
it and we got it and that’s again a testament to the good writing
and what a good actor Mackenzie is too. It’s just there, you know?
It’s
been quite a tight shoot across a number of locations. How did you find
that?
Yeah, we were up in the Lake District. We had a lot of locations. I
feel like every day when I go to work, even we’re shooting in
London for about four or five weeks, like we’re driving to Leeds
or somewhere! The locations are all over the place.
Would
you say there are any films that can be compared to Three And Out?
It seems like there are elements of Withnail & I in there.
I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose there are similarities. What
happens to you as an actor – ‘he’s an older Sean Penn’
or ‘a younger this’. I never liked that pigeonholing. If
you went to pitch Withnail & I, or Four Weddings And
A Funeral to a studio head, they’d tell you to fuck off,
but as soon as Four Weddings is a success, everyone is scampering
around trying to find the next Four Weddings And A Funeral.
It’s a stupid way to work. You don’t find good original
material by looking for something similar to what’s been made
before. I always resist that. I think this has a very unique tone to
it. I think that’s what attracted us to it – it wasn’t
like anything we’d read. This has a lovely tone and it’s
got a wonderful bittersweet quality to it that I haven’t come
across before, that works on this level as successfully as this.
It
is a comedy, but it goes into some dark places.
I think we were all a bit surprised at the table reading by how emotional
it gets. It’s an extremely emotional film, which I don’t
think you had in Withnail & I for example. You care about
these people and they’re in such a predicament, I think we were
all taken by surprise by that.
Jonathan
Gershfield is a first-time director – how was it working with
him?
He’s great and technically he has everything mapped out and laid
out and he knows exactly what he wants and lets Mackenzie and I get
on with it. We had a good rehearsal period and we talked about the characters
and we knew we were on the same page in that department. I think he
was very happy with where Mackenzie and I were coming from so he felt
he could trust us.
Three
And Out
Mackenzie Crook interview
Imelda Staunton interview
