With luck, and a couple of positive reviews, “The Closer You Get” could turn Liverpudlian actor Ian Hart into the overnight success he started out to be 16 years and 22 films ago.
It isn’t that Hart was invisible, lo, those many years. After all, he twice memorably played John Lennon — in “Backbeat” and “The Hours and Times” — and did stellar work in such fine Irish exports as “The Butcher Boy,” “Michael Collins” and “Nothing Personal.”
Most recently, he raised eyebrows as the mousy P.I. who dragged his son along on his investigations in “The End of the Affair.” It would have been impossible to steal any scenes from Neil Jordan’s steamy triumvirate of Julianne Moore, Ralph Fiennes and Stephen Rea, but Hart more than holds his own in their company.
Nevertheless, the role of lovelorn Donegal butcher Kieran O’Donnagh in Aileen Ritchie’s romantic comedy is Hart’s first lead role in a potential commercial success, and Hart thinks it would be nice if someone actually knew who he was.
“People will say they saw me in `Backbeat,’ but that was seven years ago. . . . I may as well have stayed in the house for those seven years, as far as they’re concerned,” said the 35-year-old Hart, working on a sandwich in a Beverly Hills restaurant. “No one who saw my characters in `The End of the Affair’ and `Backbeat’ would connect the two guys. I’ve done more than 20 films and most people might have seen four of them.
“But they’ll tell me I wasn’t in any of them. They didn’t recognize me, so I must not have been in them.”
He has played leads before, but only in “films no one has ever seen … independent films with small, small budgets. If there’s a film with a big budget, even if they think I’m perfect for the lead, I won’t get the part.”
In “The Closer You Get,” he plays a small-town shop owner who decides, along with the rest of the local barflies, that the inventory of unmarried women in Donegal leaves something to be desired. After an accidental screening of “10” at the local church — the priest had intended to show “The 10 Commandments,” but got Bo Derek instead of Moses — the lads decide to place an ad in a Miami paper to recruit fresh talent.
Not to be denied — or dissed — the women send out for some fresh meat of their own, challenging the Guinness-soaked knuckleheads to come to their senses.
“I told my agent that I wanted to do a comedy, because I’d never done one,” Hart recalls. “The fact that it was from the producer of `The Full Monty’ almost put me off it. I thought it would be another `Full Monty’ and the last thing I wanted to do was be the guy who made the sequel to the hit that made everyone famous.
“They wanted me to come in and audition for the producer, but I said, `No way.’ It wasn’t like I was auditioning for the lead in `War and Peace.’ They’d seen my work … either they liked it or didn’t like it.”
Hart, who lives in London with his companion of 11 years and their 3-year-old daughter, truly hates auditioning.
“No one benefits from an audition, so why do it,” he declares. “One of the things I don’t like about the U.S. is that you can’t just go in and meet with the director. You have to audition for a casting director … then, you have to put something down on tape and everybody has to discuss it.
“I’ve done 22 films. If you can’t extrapolate my ability to act from that, no audition is going to convince you. Bring me in and ask me what I would do with the character, but don’t ask me to read from a sheet of paper.”
Besides being the incubator for the Beatles and the setting for a well publicized garbage strike a few years back, Liverpool has been a forgotten city for most of the latter part of the 20th Century. Its glory period as shipbuilder and port is long past.
Hart describes the opportunity he got to bust out of this once dying town “a fluke.”
“Instead of hanging around outside the record shop or clothes stores, as usual, one day a friend took me along with him to an improvisation class for kids with social problems,” he said. “They could get their angst out with drama, but most of the guys there had no intention of becoming actors. After I did my second play, I knew I was bitten.”
He couldn’t get into acting school in London, so he spent much of the ’80s in a fruitless search for gigs before establishing a theater company back home. Among the troupe’s noteworthy productions were adaptations of “My Beautiful Laundrette” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” in which Hart took the role made famous by Al Pacino.
The exposure and excellent reviews he enjoyed for his portrayals of Lennon broke the drought. They led to roles in “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill …,” “Hollow Reed,” “Monument Ave.,” “B. Monkey” and an association with Jordan, who originally intended to cast Bob Hoskins as the detective in “The End of the Affair.”
One thing Hart takes more seriously than most of his fellow actors is the voice that comes with his characters. He diligently studies the dialect of the people he’s entrusted to represent, and goes the extra mile to convince the folks back home.
“Even within the regions of Britain and Ireland, north and south, there’s a difference,” he points out. “American audiences wouldn’t notice . . . so, I could have done a Belfast or Cork accent for Donegal, but the people in Donegal would. I had some people from Donegal put their voices on tape for me . . . it’s best to find someone like a cab driver.
“Then, I work with a voice coach, and hang out with people from the town.”
Although Hart is terrific, as usual, in “The Closer You Get,” his many skills have yet to be fully appreciated in Hollywood. As proof, he admits that the rest of his afternoon will be consumed not by drinks and snacks at poolside, but in auditioning for director Wayne Wang.
Oh, the indignity of it all.
