An Accidental Heart-Throb

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Heard the one about the scruffy Irish comedian who the ladies can’t resist?

Dylan Moran has. But he doesn’t find it funny, says Wendy Ide.

Just what is it that makes comedian Dylan Moran so damn attractive? Because technically, he shouldn’t be. OK, he has one of those timeless, poetic-looking faces – you can picture him pensively scribbling verses in a draughty garret. But catch him at the wrong angle and those brooding features can take on a look that can only be described as ‘potato-like’. Then there’s the hair – an unruly, tousled permanent bed-head that’s kind of raffish, kind of sexy. Except of course, for the occasions when it looks like it has been combed with bacon. He’s constantly mauling his locks with nervous fingers when he gets agitated, and he’s agitated pretty much all of the time. He’s a grumpy old man in a 31-year-old’s body – he hates celebrity culture, information technology and modern music, although he will admit to owning a Nelly Furtado CD. And he’s probably the most self-conscious person I’ve ever seen when having his photo taken.

It’s a glorious sunny spring day for the ELLE photo shoot and we’re hanging out in the atmospheric back streets of London’s Hoxton. Dylan is here to promote his first big film role, co-starring with Sir Michael Caine in The Actors. He’s dressed in a fashion-neutral, all-purpose boy uniform of jeans, black shirt, denim jacket and leather coat. And he’s practically squirming with embarrassment whenever the lens points towards him, his shoulders hunched with discomfort. He murmurs apologetically to the photographer that ‘it must be like photographing a foot.’ Dylan Moran shouldn’t be a heart-throb and he certainly doesn’t want to be one. He gets quite arsy when I try to broach the subject later. ‘Well, anybody who fancies somebody because they’re on the screen needs to get out more.’ Ouch. That told me.

But at the risk of provoking a fresh outburst of scorn from Dylan, the fact remains that plenty of girls do have a soft spot for this irascible, shambling Irishman. So for the benefit of the numerous other women who are mystified to find themselves smiling fondly at the TV screen during Dylan’s latest drunken exploit in the fantastic TV series Black Books, I can offer a scientifically researched (ie I had to chat with some mates over a couple of bottles of wine), point-by-point examination of the Moran Effect.

Exhibit A: for the first clue, we have to go back to the photo shoot. Between poses, during the moments of freedom from the dreaded camera, Dylan visibly relaxes. He keeps the ELLE girls who are co-ordinating the shoot in fits of giggles with a string of witty little quips muttered under his breath. I know, it’s the lamest of clichés, but we girls just can’t help but love guys who makes us laugh. And Dylan is hilarious. He does a mischievous impression of the average on the street recognising Sir Michael Caine that has me in stitches – all slack-jawed wonder and delight. ‘It has such a strange effect on people. They stand that far away from somebody and point at them with their mouth open, because they just stepped out of the picture library in their head. And they’re not meant to be there. It’s like they’re too famous to walk around, they’re too famous to be on the planet. They’ve been beamed in from Dircon 4 where they should live, and there they are on the street. People just make an eejit of themselves by going up and saying “You’re Michael Caine!” ‘.

According to Dylan, the key to being a successful comic is that ‘you don’t care about making an arse out of yourself. Sometimes it’s as though you’ve got to do all the things that make people hold their head in their hands when they see photos from a Christmas party. That’s your day’s work, to do all those things.’ Gosh, and here’s me, thinking it was all about telling jokes.

Exhibit B: the Irish factor. It’s not just the accent, although Dylan’s lovely, musical County Meath lilt makes just ordering at the bar sound somehow seductive. No, it goes deeper than that – there’s a mystical allure to all things Irish. Would anyone really drink Guinness if it was the regional speciality of Stoke-on-Trent rather than a vital ingredient in the legendary Irish craic? No. there’s something fundamentally attractive about Irishness in general and Dylan is living proof that you don’t have to look like Colin Farrell to lay claim to that famous Irish charm. And you get the sense that Dylan is fiercely proud of his heritage. There’s an unexpected spark of enthusiasm when he talks about what attracted him to Conor McPherson’s script for The Actors. ‘I just laughed out loud, which doesn’t happen that often with scripts. I connected instantly with this script – it was this immediately recognisable voice of a place, of Dublin. I lived there for a while. I grew up not too far from there. Conor has a brilliant ear for the people, the Dubliners. it’s great, it’s very recognisable.’

Exhibit C: having finally finished the photo shoot, I suggest we retire to a quiet little pub in the neighbourhood for the interview. Dylan surges ahead with a renewed sense of purpose, but then judges that the pub is too far away and dives into the nearest trendy Hoxtonite bar, the Shoreditch Electricity Showrooms. (Dylan, grinning incredulously, ‘Noo – is it really called that?’) Yes, Dylan is fond of a drink or two and rewards himself with a glass of dry white wine after his ordeal by camera. This seems immediately wrong to me. Dylan’s character, Bernard Black in Black Books only drinks red wine, glugging it down by the caseload. I have to remind myself that the man in front of me is a far sweeter, shyer, milder version of his larger-(and drunker)-than-life comedy persona. So how much of the grumpy, wine-sodden misanthrope that we see on stage is actually part of Dylan? ‘I don’t know, that’s very hard for me to answer because it’s obviously based on some part of you. I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself. You exaggerate your own reactions. That’s the hook – you’re talking about “my life” and “my girlfriend and “my cat” and “my house”. But the point is that you pretend to talk about your house and your cat, but really you’re talking about everyone’s.’

Even when Dylan is on his best interview behaviour, it’s not hard to launch him off on a tangent about Things That Are Stupid and Annoying. And right now, one of the things really getting his goat is ‘celebrity’. ‘There was a time when I thought if I see Victoria Beckham’s face any more I’m going t forget my 11 times tables because my brain is going to dislodge old information to accommodate the new,’ he says, stabbing the his cigarette in the air to emphasise the point. ‘And there isn’t room for all these faces I keep seeing every day. I’m actually going to have to start getting rid of the useful information I rely on.’

You can tell it’s a subject that niggles him because he also gets flustered when we talk about his own success. ‘I have a very low level of recognition, which is fine by me,’ he says. ‘People walk past me in the street and look at me, but because they think I work in their office and they can’t remember my name.’ But we both know that if Dylan’s career continues to accelerate, he’ll end up a household name, whether he likes it or not. Which brings us to…

Exhibit D: if you love the boy, chances are what impressed you first was his irreverent, surreal work. Dylan made his name in stand-up with freeform, shambolic shows that were so funny they hurt. He started performing when barely out of his teens and he says, ‘I think probably the root of it is about showing off, there’s no question about it. Showing off seemed to me to be a highly valuable and necessary activity when I was 20.’ He was the youngest comedian to win the Perrier Award in Edinburgh, aged only 24, and now makes the city his home, with a wife and young family, a subject that is categorically off-limits. He broke into TV with How Do You Want Me?, co-starring the late Charlotte Coleman, but it wasn’t until BBC2’s Black Books (which he co-wrote) that people started to take notice. His work as the wine-swilling, customer-baiting bookshop owner earned Dylan a tiny role in Notting Hill (‘a blip’ he calls it). And now with The Actors, he has his first starring role in a feature film under his belt, playing a frustrated thespian pursued by several criminal gangs. On the transition to film acting, he’s typically evasive. ‘I don’t really think of myself as an actor. I’m not really supposed to say anything, I’m sure. In Black Books and stuff, I did a schtick. It’s like getting really good at making one particular type of spaghetti. But when you do a film, you have to be prepared to learn a whole different menu.’ For the record, he does a great job. There’s a sweet vulnerability in his performance we haven’t seen from him before and, even though he shares the screen with titans like Sir Michael Caine and Michael Gambon, your eye is drawn to Dylan. And not just because he’s cuter than they are.

Still, Dylan is at pains to point out that he never actively sought out roles in television and movies. ‘I don’t walk around knocking on doors and going to auditions and things generally. All the work I did was self-created.’

So it’s time to put him on the spot. Why, out of all the stand-up comedians slogging away on the circuit, is it Dylan who’s winning the plum roles – and the female admirers? Much embarrassment from Dylan, plenty of defensive fringe tugging and a studious interest in his cigarette packet. It’s like watching a teenage boy trying to buy his first pack of condoms. The best he’s able to come up with to explain the Moran Effect is, ‘I think that women just have a primeval instinct to make soup, which they will try to foist on anybody who looks like a likely candidate.’ It’s a typically strange, evasive answer from a guy who just wants everyone to leave him alone. Sadly for Dylan, though, the more he jokes the more we love him. Looks like he should start getting used to it.