Don’t hate Colm Meaney because he’s a Yankees fan.
The Dublin-born actor makes no apologies for this seemingly incongruous allegiance. But others find it odd that a working-class Everyman–Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” for Pete’s sake!–would favor the widely despised lads in pin stripes.
“I’m going to Boston this spring to film `Noose,’ with Denis Leary and Ted Demme,” said Meaney, laughing through a mild brogue. “They’re diehard Red Sox fans and it’s going to be rough up there. Denis is disgusted with me.
“He invited me up to his house to discuss the project and I showed up in a Yankee cap and jacket. He said, `You’ve got a Gerry Adams book there and you’re from Dublin.’ . . . How can you be a Yankees fan?”
In fact, Meany explains, the transformation from rounders enthusiast to Bronx Bomber buff was entirely seamless.
“The first ball game I ever saw was in 1979,” he recalls, over a hearty lunch in the Hotel Nikko. “I was visiting New York, and some friends took me to Yankee Stadium . . . night game, midweek. I walked through the tunnel to the grandstand seats, and this vision appeared before me–lush green, white uniforms–and there were 50,000 fans chanting, `Boston sucks, Boston sucks.’
“I thought, I’m at home here. I instantly became a rabid Yankee fan.”
Actually, it’s not hard to imagine the beefy, curly haired Meaney portraying an overly enthusiastic fan–or maybe a frustrated coach or manager. He’s played just about everything else lately, and, besides, he has the kind of open face and easy on-screen demeanor that suggests leisurely afternoons spent in the bleachers or at a sports bar.
In “The Van”–the third in a trilogy of films based on Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown novels–Meaney spends a great deal of time in the local pub, hoisting pints and yelling at the telly, where the rise of Ireland’s 1990 World Cup squad is on display. It is a time of optimism for soccer fans but near desperation for blue-collar workers who are being made “redundant” in greater and greater numbers.
Meaney has been the connecting thread in all three of the films made from Doyle’s books. The other two are Alan Parker’s “The Commitments” and Stephen Frears’ “The Snapper.”
“Roddy invented this place called Barrytown, which actually is north of Dublin–Coolack and another neighborhood–where he grew up and was a teacher,” the 43-year-old actor explains. “When you read the books, it’s the same family . . . they’ve changed the names in the movies. While the books are a trilogy, there was a feeling that to present `The Snapper’ as a sequel to `The Commitments’ would have been misleading.”
Still, the fathers in all three films share many similar attributes.
Before playing the occasionally bombastic and often confused Larry in “The Van,” Meaney first portrayed the Elvis-worshipping dad of one of the young Commitments, Jimmy Rabbite. In “The Snapper,” he gives an unforgettable performance as Dessie, a proud blue-collar bloke who struggles through the pregnancy of his teenage daughter, and the local gossip.
“Dessie’s feelings are very close to the surface, so he reacts to things very instinctively and instantly–and sometimes he’s completely wrong,” Meaney says. “In that way, he’s sort of like Ralph Kramden. When he gets it wrong, he really gets it wrong.”
Meaney is given a vastly different assignment in “Con Air,” the kinetic, big-budget thriller about a group of high-risk convicts who hijack a transport plane and threaten to land it on the Las Vegas Strip. In it, he plays a Corvette-driving DEA agent who wants to blow the wayward jet out of the skies.
If “Con Air,” which opens Friday, and “The Van,” scheduled to open later this summer, share anything in common, it’s that Meaney’s dialogue in each is liberally sprinkled with the kind of profanity heard in David Mamet plays.
“I’m very versatile, actually,” he says, with a wink. “I can swear in any dialect. I’m good at it.”
Not that he’ll be repeating that kind of language any time soon on his most frequent forum, “Deep Space Nine.” The 5-year-old series is meant for family viewing, and O’Brien must watch his step.
“He’s the head of his department, keeping all the environmental systems up and running,” says Meaney, who admits to being not much of a fan of science fiction. “I like him because they try to make him an Everyman character.
“Sometimes, though, they try to make him a bit too lumpen. His wife goes away and the apartment falls apart, which is baloney.”
The son of a bread-truck driver, Meaney began studying acting at 14. After high school–and a brief stint as a fisherman–he entered the Abbey Theater School, where he learned from some of the nation’s top professionals.
He worked in London with the 784 company, then moved to New York in the early ’80s. He made his Broadway debut in “Nicholas Nickleby” and also toured with the show (including a stop in Chicago).
For the last 10 years, he has bounced between Europe and L.A.–where he currently lives, near his 12-year-old daughter, Brenda–appearing in such diverse material as “The Dead,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “Dick Tracy,” “Under Siege,” “Into the West,” “The Road to Wellville” and, memorably, as Morgan the Goat in “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill, But Came Down a Mountain.”
During his hiatus from “Star Trek,” Meaney is keeping busy. He just returned from New York, where he played a pimp in an untitled thriller from Lodge Kerrigan, and now is on the Isle of Man, being a good-natured landlord in Rodney Gibbons’ “Owd Bob.”
From there it’s on to Boston and “Noose,” in which he portrays a street thug.
It will be a real test of Meaney’s acting ability, if–when he joins Demme and Leary at Fenway Park in his Yankee gear–Everyfan, er, Everyman, can make it through an entire game without yelling, “Boston sucks.”
