There is a moment in the current production of Juno and the Paycock at the Abbey Theatre  when Juno (Sinéad Cusack) suggests Charles Bentham should give his hat and stick to her husband Jack Boyle, played by Ciarán Hinds. Hinds’s face expresses complete bewilderment at the request. The actor’s facial expression is slightly exaggerated – theatrical enough to provoke laughter, but nuanced enough to reveal the ill-feeling of a man whose authority is challenged. It is the gap between mask and humanity, type and character – which Hinds expresses magnificently on stage and on screen.

Having graduated from RADA, the Belfast-born actor started his theatrical career at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow, one of Europe’s most creative theatres throughout the seventies and eighties. Engagements followed at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Lyric Theatre, the Druid Theatre, the Royal Court, the Donmar Warehouse and other theatres in Ireland and the United Kingdom. He was the only Irish actor cast for the world tour of Peter Brook’s Mahabharata. In 1983 he played the male lead in Juno and the Paycock in a Citizens production directed by Giles Havergal. He returns to the Abbey Theatre where he was cast in 1989 as Cuchulain in Yeats’s five short plays about the mythic hero (directed by James W. Flannery on the Peacock stage).

Since the early nineties, Hinds has turned more and more towards film and television productions. He was one of the two male protagonists in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s December Bride (1989), featured in Spielberg’s Munich (2005) and won the Best Actor award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 for his sensitive performance in Conor McPherson’s The Eclipse. The role of Julius Caesar in the HBO/BBC-series Rome (2005) introduced him to a wider audience. His television work includes several leading roles in adaptations of English literature classics such as Persuasion, Jane Eyre and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Hinds returned to the stage a few years ago. He has appeared in two plays for author/director Conor McPherson: The Seafarer (Booth Theatre/Broadway, 2007-2008) and The Birds (Gate Theatre, 2009). Howard Davies, the director of this new production of Juno and the Paycock, has already directed him in Burnt by the Sun at the National Theatre, London, in 2009. On screen, Hinds specializes in supporting roles. He is obviously a team player, always committed to his work. He is not afraid of non-glamorous roles such as the worn-out husband in Titanic Town (UK, 1998) or, of course, Jack Boyle.

Though he is sometimes cast as the bad guy, the great variety of roles he has played makes any categorization obsolete. Rather than playing villains he often portrays unsympathetic characters with whom we find it hard to identify. He has played men going through a crisis, failing as fathers, husbands or citizens such as Captain Boyle. On the other hand, he has also played Julius Caesar and the boorish police officer Langton in the ITV crime series Above Suspicion, based on the novels of Lynda La Plante. These characters may be miles away from the protagonist in The Eclipse and other such men in torment, but they too reveal failure or hide a dark secret.

The list of his roles in theatre, film, television and radio is impressive. So it is no surprise that while Hinds is performing at the Abbey, his name also appears in the opening credits of two recently released films: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Debt. Both films feature him in yet another supporting role. In the adaptation of Le Carré’s novel, Hinds plays Roy Bland, the “soldier”, the only main suspect who does not feature in a major scene. However, several close-ups guarantee that one cannot miss the richness of his facial expressions. There is one major moment on a ministry staircase when the actor gives a glimpse into the character’s background, described in the novel but missing from the film. The way Bland/Hinds looks around the splendid staircase, wide-eyed in astonishment tells us that Bland has a working class background and finds himself in an unfamiliar place. In a very short time-frame, the actor creates the portrait of a human being which contributes to the film’s discourse on policy and intimacy, ideology, friendship, love and betrayal.

In the Abbey production, the fast-changing situations require huge physical exertion, both in body and voice. Hinds is frequently on the move, makes sweeping gestures, speaks with a particularly loud voice and, underlining the character’s merely imaginary authority, puts his chin forward and pulls down the corner of his mouth (not unlike Edward Chapman in Hitchcock’s cinematic adaptation of the play from 1930). His performance is a sublime vaudeville act, maintaining the delicate balance between buffoon and man in despair, stage Irishman and human being.

 By Andrea Grunert. 

Andrea Grunert, PhD, is a lecturer for film and television at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Bochum, Germany.