Colm Meaney Guardians Of The Galaxy

A s a Dubliner who has lived in Los Angeles for three decades, Colm Meaney says he ever keeps an centre out for Irish scripts – but he confesses to a slight feeling of dread when ane lands on his chump. Cliched characters, simplistic politics, shonky dialogue – he'south seen them all. The 63-twelvemonth-old has been lucky with some – particularly the trilogy of Roddy Doyle adaptions that began with 1991's The Commitments and won him a Golden Globe nomination for The Snapper two years later – and less blessed with others that have come up his style. "Oh yes. Mentioning no names only … oh yeah."

So when he first heard virtually the Northern Irish novelist Colin Bateman's script for a drama about Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, with the latter function potentially his, he says: "My ears pricked upwards immediately, but I idea – this could be hard". Meaney knew and liked McGuinness and supported him politically – he hosted a rally for the late Sinn Féin pol'south unsuccessful campaign to be Irish president in 2011. Reading the script was a relief and a thrill, he says. "You felt they had actually got the complexity of Irish politics, the complication of the characters, the humour of these two men." By the fourth dimension he got to the end, "I badly wanted to practice it."

Certainly the film, the abstraction of its director Nick Hamm and entitled The Journey, offers Meaney and his co-star Timothy Spall, unrecognisable equally Paisley, plenty to get their teeth into. It as well tells one version of an extraordinary story, i that still has close observers of Northern Irish gaelic politics scratching their heads and asking: "Did that really happen?"

In October 2006, when the pic is set, Paisley was the bombastic leader of the Democratic Unionist party, the elderly Presbyterian prophet-firebrand who had railed against the Good Friday agreement, which put in place a power-sharing arrangement between the province'due south bitterly divided tribes, as "the greatest betrayal e'er foisted on the unionist people". McGuinness was the erstwhile senior IRA human who had helped lead his republican party to peaceful negotiations, but remained unrepentant for his past. The two men, McGuinness told Hamm as he was researching the picture, had never exchanged a give-and-take; Paisley refused even to acknowledge McGuinness's presence if they passed each other in a corridor.

And nevertheless, 7 months subsequently, Paisley and McGuinness were sworn in as the start government minister and deputy get-go minister of a devolved assembly in Northern Ireland. Even more astonishingly, out of mutual loathing came a boyish friendship that earned them the nickname "the Chuckle Brothers". Paisley died in 2014. When McGuinness also died last month, the unionist leader's son revealed that the ii men'due south deep mutual amore had continued even after they stopped working together.

'The Chuckle Brothers' … Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney as Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness in The Journey. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

How on world did information technology happen? Nobody really knows. They certainly didn't go from frost to thaw in the space of a unmarried motorcar journey from St Andrews to Edinburgh airport, as the flick fictionalises (though the two men would travel together occasionally, even during tense negotiations, which offered the genesis for Hamm's idea).

Paisley and McGuinness were deeply divisive characters in their homeland and much further afield, and the ongoing controversies about the roles they played in Northern Republic of ireland'southward Troubles didn't end when either man died. McGuinness was praised past many following his death in March for his move from terrorist to peacemaker, merely many remained unable to forgive his by or allegations over his involvement in a number of the worst terrorist acts of the period.

Meaney is firmly in the former campsite, expressing exasperation that McGuinness faced constant questioning during his presidential campaign over his IRA past. "To mind to these fuckers, these revisionists, yous would think Martin McGuinness created this situation, that he came upwards and singlehandedly created a fucking war in Derry. He was born into this."

Spall, though two decades younger than Paisley was in 2006, adopts an alarmingly accurate voice and look as the DUP leader; but Meaney's McGuinness is more of an estimation than impersonation. McGuinness is probably the more than sympathetic of the ii characters, reaching out to try to make peace while existence rebuffed past Spall's righteous reverend (Paisley is surely 1 of a rare number of characters whom it is almost incommunicable to overplay). But and so, when he expresses remorse for the victims of 1 bombing barbarism, Paisley scorns his "crocodile tears". Hamm has said he was at pains to brand the motion picture an equally discomfiting watch for those of all political backgrounds in Northern Ireland.

In any event, the two atomic number 82 actors clearly relished their roles. Meaney and Spall both appeared in 2009'south The Damned United, Meaney playing Don Revie to Spall's Peter Taylor, "but we didn't really have anything to do together, then it was really like coming together meeting him for the first time", says the Irishman. "And it was extraordinary. We didn't have to sit downwards to discuss how he works or how I work, at that place was none of that. Nosotros merely eased into information technology. And fortunately we got on very well, considering we were stuck in the back of that car for prolonged periods, in very close proximity."

Ian Paisley, George W Bush and Martin McGuinness at the Oval office in 2007. — Ian Paisley, George W Bush and Martin McGuinness at the Oval function in 2007. Photograph: John Harrison/PA

Meaney himself was built-in in 1953, coming into his young adulthood as the Troubles were catching alight 100 miles to the due north. "All those events are very clear in my head," he says. "Crystal clear. And I totally, totally understand where McGuinness was coming from when he said that when his community was attacked, he would have been ashamed if he hadn't joined the IRA."

Just for his own part, a teenage member of Sinn Féin largely because of its leftwing policies, Meaney says he fiercely opposed the use of violence by the Provisional IRA after the republican movement split in the late 1960s. "I believed they had to negotiate, and the Provisionals came to that position in the mid-90s. I wouldn't say that to Gerry or Martin though! 'Nigh time, boys!'"

His own active political date lapsed as he started to get more into acting, first at the Abbey Theatre School in Dublin, afterwards moving to London where he worked at the Half Moon theatre in the Due east End and with diverse touring companies.

By the early on 80s, Meaney had moved to New York ("I loved the energy, but became aware that there wasn't a lot of work apart from daytime soaps. Even Broadway was dead"). He settled in Los Angeles a couple of years later, earning small parts in Television receiver shows such every bit Moonlighting and Remington Steele and contesting for the hard-won breakthrough that wouldn't actually come in film until The Commitments. On goggle box his break was landing the role of Master Miles O'Brien in Star Expedition: The Next Generation, a role he played for more than a decade.

He has remained up to date with Irish and British politics, however, and makes a bespeak of telling me that both he and his wife, French costume-designer Ines Glorian, are paid up Guardian members. "The concluding twelvemonth and a half... here [the Great britain], the Usa, everywhere. It's just extraordinary. Demagoguery seems to rule again."

Meaney says he has hope for The Journeying, even so, and its tale of peace and rapprochement. Referring to Paisley, he says: "Information technology takes one of history's great demagogues and shows him making this extraordinary journeying towards a reconciliation. You would hope that that would exist at least an aspirational slice for people to take on board."