MORANIC INFERNO
The Irish comic Dylan Moran
coughs, hawks, rubs his eyes and runs his hands through his bedhair.He coughs
several times more and takes a gentle exploratory forearms, stomach and lower
back.Yet things are not as they might seem.Under the mat of black hair his
complexion is flawless, and he has nice teeth.A closer inspection reveals that
his shirt has no egg stains and his jeans would not stand up on their own.He is
too well washed for his mannerisms.And he also looks so young, so vulnerable and
endearing.Do women always want to protect him?
“There is always [cough cough
cough] a contingent of grannies wanting to make soup for me [cough cough
cough].I just pour it into their popsocks.”
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon and we are sitting in a pub in Islington, very much Moran’s natural environment.He peers out from under his hair, as if he were something lying in the straw at the back of a cage having a bright light shone on to it. It’s the same when you ask him questions. He sits, nurses his glass of wine, and blinks.He is, it seems, surveying matters as if from a great distance. Will he answer questions today? Or won’t he? Moran is known to be a difficult interviewee. It’s not that he’s grumpy or aggressive, and he has a soft Irish accent with an intonation that can make almost anything he says sound funny. But he won’t talk about his personal life (he lives in Edinburgh with his wife Chris and their young daughter) and finds factual information almost impossibly boring. Like so many comics he says contrary things for effect. Often, when asked a question, he just can’t help himself.
How far have you got with your
novel?
‘The flyleaf.’
Which part of Edinburgh do you like best?
‘The
airport.’
At other times there’s a very extended pause before the quip: would
he, I ask, like to play Hamlet one day?
‘I’d like to do errrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
…I’d like to do a Steeleye Span version of Oedipus.’
We are meeting today because Moran is meant to be promoting The Actors, a farce, adapted from a story by Neil Jordan about a pair of failing actors (Moran and Sir Michael Caine) who become embroiled in the Dublin underworld and try to pull off an absurdly complex heist. This is the 31-year-old Moran’s first big film part, though he made an appearance as the shoplifter in Notting Hill (1999). Otherwise his screen appearances have been on television. In 2000 he starred as Bernard, a hopeless, sozzled, misanthropic bookseller in the Channel 4 sitcom Black Books (which he co-wrote). And before that he was a hopeless, sozzled but slightly less misanthropic photographer in the BBC2 comedy drams How Do You Want Me.
Both personas were extensions of Moran’s ruminative, sozzled misanthrope-at-the-bar stand-up act. And the sizzled misanthrope-at-the-bar act is, of course, an extension of Moran. Sometimes it has not even been an extension – Moran has been known to fall down drunk on stage. He describes such performances as, ‘Your hands are very loosely on the flight deck. You’ve just passed over Chile. You think, “How the f___ did I get here?”’
But for The Actors Moran has branched out. No more sozzled misanthropes. Now he plays Tom, a relatively sober young actor who assumes ever more ridiculous disguises: an orange-haired Scot with false teeth, a myopic cockney spiv, and, with a rubber mask, a pockmarked middle-aged Irish crook. Moran is very much the star turn, demonstrating a real talent for mimicry. ‘I am by no means a natural impersonator,’ he says. ‘You just have to go pell-mell at it. And it has to work. If you do an accent badly, it is the most distracting thing in the world. It is as if somebody was walking around with their genitals out all the time.’ There is a pause while he swallows and looks across the table a little sleepily: ‘Well, it is not at all like somebody walking around with their genitals out. But it is distracting.’ Moran says he knows nothing about stagecraft. ‘First couple of years I was doing stand-up, people were roaring, “Stop f__ing mumbling!” I would sound like an old person in a sleeping bag. I never could project [my voice] past my chin. My parents just nodded when I was growing up. They’d no idea what I was saying.’
Moran was brought up in Navan, a small market town outside Dublin. He won’t talk about his parents except to describe them as ‘very articulate liberal people’. He was an only child, and he insists that he was also a most unpromising boy. He warms to the subject: ‘I was fat! I was pustule-rich! I looked like a pink human grenade! When did I blossom into the irresistible little orchid that I am now? I don’t know. Getting taller helps. It spreads out a bit.’
Then he moves on to the paralysing tedium of childhood. His hometown, he says, was supremely, spectacularly, impeccably boring,’ School was worse. ‘I was too thick. Rubbish at exams. Fat tears of boredom rolling sploshing down on the desk in front of me. I couldn’t stand the place. Hated all of the subjects. Eight years of Gaelic. I don’t remember a word. Terrible, terrible books about 300-year-old women living on farms, who only have one potato and have to milk it every morning. Oh! And I did a bit of drama. You know – pretending to be a jacket. That sort of thing.’
After school came unemployment. Moran says he did once manage a week behind the counter at a florist’s, but otherwise has never had a job. The thought of ‘turning up and smiling at some bastard’ was more than he could bear. ‘I am just constitutionally incapable of it. I just tell people to f___ off and leave. I can’t do it.’
When did he realize he was funny?
Moran snuffles and looks warily across the table. ‘I got a letter from the
Government.’
Then his manners gets the better of him, and he sort of explains.
In 1992, at the age of 20, he saw the comedian Ardal O’Hanlon perform at the Comedy Cellar in Dublin. ‘I thought I would give it a go. I suppose it was just being bored and showing off and not having a very comprehensive attention span. Farting about, really.’
