Irish Times Interview
By Sean O’Driscoll
Andrew McCarthy is sitting in
a Starbucks coffee shop in Greenwich Village and he
doesn't like it. He has lived
in
the West Village for the last 20 years, since he was
a Brat Pack idol making movies for adoring teenagers.
Now
he's watching
the area being slowly taken over by chain stores and
the Starbucks phenomenon. "I'm not a Starbucks fan," he
says, "but if
nowhere else is open, well, alright." If you could
project the Andrew McCarthy of Pretty in Pink forward
20 years, he
would look like he does now. He is sensitive
and smiles a lot, he has long wavy brown hair, and he
has held on to the boyish good looks that made him an
adolescence
teenage pin-up in the 1980s.
He's often recognised when
he walks around nearby streets or when he collects
his son from kindergarten. I can
see a middle-aged man at another table pointing towards
us and
talking excitedly to a female friend.
I wonder if it's
wearying to deal with the fame some 20 years after
the Brat Pack films were released? "Oh,
I'm fine with it. It's not like they hated my work
and they're coming
to me full of venom. They've projected something
on to me that they have found in themselves and that
projection
is
lovely."
So what does he think of those films
after all this time? "Well,
I've been asked about it so many times over the
years, but now I have a new theory. I think the
films captured
so much
because they were the first to treat teenagers
with respect, in that their problems were real,
however
glossy. They
were treated as real people, not just underground
junior people.
I hear about that from people who were teenagers
in the early '80s."
The Brat Pack title was
something invented by a journalist and not anything
with relevance to his
life, he adds. "I
lived a separate life here in New York. It's
not like the original Rat Pack. We weren't down
in
Vegas drinking shots
together."
He likes the enthusiasm of the
1980s movies fans, but his mind is on his current
projects. McCarthy
is flying
to Ireland
this month for the Galway Arts Festival, where
he will perform A Distant Country Called Youth,
a one-man
show
based on the
letters of Tennessee Williams. It will be only
the third time he will perform the 80-minute
piece, which
a friend
wrote after reading a new collection of Williams's
letters.
The subject is the playright's life
from his childhood to his first success with The Glass
Menagerie and
the start
of his work on A Streetcar Named Desire.
" You see whole other side of
Tennessee Williams. He worked in a shoebox factory and
all kinds of things and here he
was, this crazy poet that nobody had ever
heard of."
I tell him of an Irish review of the
Williams letters which said they showed such an
unbridled egotist
that it's difficult
to enjoy his work after reading them.
"
I don't see that," says McCarthy. "I think
he was an artist with great guilt about his sister Rose
when
she
was locked up. He carried that all
his life. His mother sounded like a tough character,
his father was absent.
I don't know
if he was any worse than any young
man in his 20s."
The real tragedy, he says, is the
loss of talent brought on by Williams's
rampant alcoholism.
"
When I first read the work, I remember saying "Ok,
well, where is the story?" Then I read it again
and realised it was going somewhere. It reminds me of
this article he
wrote about the disaster of success
and how you end up thinking: 'This is all happening but
how come I'm still
me?'"
I wonder if this disappointment
with fame is something McCarthy
has experienced
in
his own
career? "Oh, of
course. I first saw my name on
a billboard in Times Square 20
years
ago. I felt nothing. Absolutely
nothing. I looked at it
and said: 'OK. It's there. Well,
I'm hungry. Time to eat'."
He
is astounded by the reality TV
phenomenon and people's desperate
desire to be
seen on television. "What's
more interesting is why the audience
are so insatiable for it.
I'm not sure what it touches
in us except that we like to
see people
suffer. It gives people a fleeting,
false
sense
of superiority. I get it too,
when I watch these things. I'm
looking
at the TVgoing 'you fucking idiot.
Come on,
you're fired!'"
He laughs
loudly and sips again from
his ice tea. He'd rather
talk about
his trips
to Ireland
than
reality
TV. He has been
coming to Ireland for 20 years,
to play golf in Clare, where
his family
is originally
from.
His interest in Ireland
led him on a two-decade crusade
to film
a Frank
O'Connor
short
story called News
for the Church,
which follows a young woman
as she goes to confess her
sexual
exploits
to a cynical
priest.
The film earned strong
reviews at the Craic Irish Short
Film Festival in
New York last
year. McCarthy
went
low budget,
shooting the interiors
in Vancouver while making the
TV series
Kingdom Hospital.
He shot the
exteriors after
trawling on
the internet for a suitable
Irish church, eventually
settling on
one
in Enniskerry,
Co Wicklow.
For the lead, he recruited
Nora-Jane Noone, known
for her role in The Magdalene
Sisters.
" The director of photography
on Kingdom Hospital said that he would do the camerawork
later that week. I rang up and
asked would you mind
flying out Good Friday to shoot on Easter Saturday. Like
a good Catholic, she was on the plane."
He was conscious
of keeping the film away from stage-Irish cheesiness. "I
didn't want to compete with Frank O'Connor's dialogue.
You know, the American writer coming in with the
wee Irish dialogue.
You know what I mean!" He laughs
again.
He would like
to direct more, and finds that
it helps him
learn more
about
acting. He
remembers his family's
reaction
when he first said
he wanted to attend
New
York University
acting
school. "'No
fucking son of mine
is ever
going to be a thespian!" decreed
his father, a tax
shelter consultant.
So
if not for the
money, why has
McCarthy stayed
in acting
for so
long when he
could easily
have moved on to
another career,
basking in
the big hair, bright-jacketed
days
of his early '80s
glory. "Because
I just love it," he
says. "Some
people are into things
because they want
to make huge money.
I'm ambitious, but
it's to do good work
and I'm just aiming
in a different direction
right
now."
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