Ciarán Hinds: ‘A sex symbol? If that's the way you want to put it, OK'

Telegraph

2 days ago

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is one of the most viscerally challenging novels ever written about war. Set among a group of Australian POWs who have been forced to work on the construction of the Burma railway in 1942, the Booker Prize winner is unsparing in its depiction of violence, starvation and never-ending toil.
A new adaptation, which starts on BBC One on Sunday, is equally graphic, and The Telegraph's critic Tim Robey said that one ' would need superhuman stamina to consider binge-ing it '. Yet perhaps the most devastating moment comes at the end when Ella Evans turns to her husband Dorrigo and tells him: 'You're the loneliest person I've ever met.'
It's a damning comment after decades of marriage, but Evans is a man still carrying the weight of guilt and failure from his time commanding the POWs, and is also haunted by a doomed love affair. When asked by a journalist to be interviewed about the Second World War, Evans (now a respected-if-maverick surgeon) shuts down.
'There were people who just saw too much,' says Ciarán Hinds, who plays him. 'They'd been through hell. And you don't want to share hell with anybody, do you?'
We are talking over Zoom because Hinds is filming in Dublin. He looks fit and relaxed, with those large, slightly sad eyes still penetrating. His voice is warm and rich, his Belfast accent still resonant.
While viewers may find his latest project harrowing, Hinds says it is necessary to show such horrors, 'to try and understand the brutality that humans can inflict on each other, and also the suffering that people go through. All that is part of the same life package to me. It's not about indulgence or grossness, it's elemental.'
The young Evans is played by Australian heartthrob Jacob Elordi, best known to UK audiences as the Byronic, indolent aristocrat in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. Is he flattered by the casting?
'I was quite surprised,' admits Hinds. 'But poor Jacob Elordi. Look what he turns out like! The horror for his future!'
Hinds is perhaps being somewhat disingenuous. At 72, he is still considered a sex symbol. 'Oh, if that's the way you want to put it, OK,' he says, waving the comment away.
'Some of my bones feel old, but my spirit feels kind of lively, just let down by the physical attributes. People tell me I look much younger, [that I am] a much younger spirit when I'm on screen.'
It was probably the role of Captain Wentworth, smouldering and secretly sensitive, in Roger Michell's 1995 take on Jane Austen 's Persuasion (considered by many Austen fans as the best adaptation of any of her novels) that set the tone. 'I think it was rather short-lived, but you put any guy in a sailor's frock and people's heads will turn, no matter what.'
You would imagine that Hinds has been turning heads since arriving in London from Belfast to study at Rada in the early 1970s.
'I arrived with a bit of a chip on my shoulder just because of what was happening over there [during the Troubles]. It was 1973, it was mayhem. I was at university for a few months, ostensibly studying law, but I applied to drama school in London because there weren't any in Northern Ireland, or I might have stayed.
Hinds paints me a picture of a young man 'with flared jeans and really long hair, going round in sandals – Irish hippies were always a bit behind the times, what was hitting London in the late 1960s, we were getting in the early 1970s – but there was a look about me that made my friends a bit scared of me.
Why? 'They said it was because I came from Belfast. 'You were different, you just had this hair, you're going like, 'Who wants it?'' But I was lucky because they were very open with me, asking seriously about what was going on back home because they knew there were problems, but they didn't really understand them.'
Hinds tells me that as he started to grow accustomed to London life, he began to understand the English. 'I saw the goodness in people. And I was hearing about things like divorce, which didn't happen in Ireland – people suffered each other. I was amazed to hear that parents could still be friends despite it. It was a great revelation.'
Hinds doesn't live in Northern Ireland. He has a home in London and one in Paris, in the shadow of the Père Lachaise cemetery, which he shares with his French-Vietnamese wife, actress Hélène Patarot (their daughter, Aoife, is also an actress and appears in the Dune: Prophecy series on Sky). His home in the French capital represents relaxation.
'You know when you go home at the end of the day and just want to put the kettle on? That's what I do when I get to Paris. You know, I have a box of Barry's tea bags. I don't do the cafe life that you should do in Paris, but it's because I live there.'
Hinds is relaxed and charming company, yet there is still a residual sense of the 1970s firebrand. When we talk about returning to the country of his birth, he does not rule it out, cheered by what he sees as its evolution.
'I see a lot of changes, in both north and south. I go back a couple times a year to see family, and thank God, it's just a lot more open,' he says.
'I mean, there's still too many flags, and there is still the dark underbelly, but at least it's contained.'
It is clear that coming of age during the Troubles (he starred in Kenneth Branagh's award-winning Belfast and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor) have left their mark on Hinds. Raised as a Catholic, he tells me he was fortunate enough to do dance and drama out of school where there were no religious boundaries. Yet he also had to endure a segregated education system, and today supports the Integrated Education Foundation charity.
'It's so important that you don't separate Catholic and Protestant kids at the age of four and educate them separately, filling them with versions of 'them' and 'us'. I think [integration] has been happening – very slowly – over the last 30 or 40 years, but it'll take generations to really happen.
'A positive move to integrated education doesn't mean to say that you can't have religion.'
It's strange to consider that Hinds has been on our screens for half a century. (He thinks so too: 'God, have I? I haven't been counting!') But then his career has been a slow burn, gradually building up credits in the 1980s in high-profile films such as John Boorman's Excalibur, as well as some meaty theatre (notably Peter Brook's celebrated 1987 staging of The Mahabharata). Today, he is one of a small selection of actors who carry weight in big-budget blockbusters (Frozen, Justice League, Game of Thrones) and high-end passion projects such as a Broadway revival of The Crucible opposite Saoirse Ronan and Ben Whishaw. His performances are all, however, marked by a thoughtfulness, his characters always rooted in a psychological reality.
Hinds will soon be seen in a new adaptation of John Steinbeck's East Of Eden for Netflix. I wonder if quality roles such as this are getting harder to come by.
'I think there are still roles out there,' he says carefully. 'It depends on how you look at things.
'If you set your sights high about what your pay grade is or who you expect to be working with, that then obviously narrows your choices and closes doors.
'Things have changed since the big corporates have come in, you know, Netflix and Amazon and Apple,' he says, alluding to the amount of money such companies have at their disposal. 'But it's not about the amount of money they need, because usually they can make them on relatively sane budgets, it's about how much you need to tell the story with authenticity and truth, as opposed to what we made with these special effects. Much of the cinematic universe is turning into one big PlayStation.'
Hinds does, however, feel optimistic for the future. 'There will always be space for storytellers and great filmmaking. Maybe the adventure is still on.'