Article in Culture Magazine , The Irish Sunday Times, 25/8/13

Thanks  so much to Annika (@DepplyObsessed) for typing us up a copy of the article from Sunday's Irish Sunday Times Culture supplement! It's a fab interview & it sounds as though there's some exciting projects coming up for Robbie!  As ever, let us know your thoughts in the comments, or tweet us @TheSheehab :)

Erinn x

(Front page, intro text) Thrill of the chase – Robert Sheehan on why he most enjoys the parts he has had to fight for Culture Magazine 25th August 2013

FIGHTING FIT FOR HIS NEW GANG

Robert Sheehan is hoping upcoming movie projects will prove there is life after the death of Love/Hate’s Darren, writes Eithne Shortall. There are downsides to interviewing actors in the middle of a mammoth promotional tour for a multiplex blockbuster. Tired of answering the same questions, they can start to give one-word answers or repeat verbatim what they already said to a dozen other journalists. Yet there can also be benefits. Broken down by previous interrogators, unable to continue batting away that same question, eventually they might just break.

“The day itself was just to whack off a couple of small things” says Robert Sheehan, in a fourth attempt to avoid explaining how it is that Darren, his character, will not be appearing in the fourth series of RTE’s Love/Hate – and yet he was involved in filming.  

When Sheehan was photographed on the set earlier this year, dressed in a hospital gown and then in Darren’s trademark hoodie, it was front-page news. Darren was murdered at the end of series three and a miraculous recovery has been ruled out. Other than that, all involved have been keeping quiet. Having
dismissed dream sequences, flashbacks and hauntings of Nidge, the actor descends into laughter. He gives up. “To be honest the whole thing is, Darren’s dead. You know In Love/Hate, at the beginning or even the end of an episode, they do a round-up montage where they’ll show someone sat in their apartment and someone else over there and so on? Well, there’s just something [at the beginning of season 4] of Darren dead: his body. Right? And that’s it.”

The interview continues to be more fruitful than expected. When I arrived at the designated London hotel room, Sheehan was sprawled across a couch, his long legs stretching to the coffee table. His purple leather jacket and black leather trousers squeaked as he shifted restlessly, occasionally swinging his arms. (There has been some media coverage of Sheehan’s quirky sartorial choices but, with a matching T-shirt, rubber bands around the wrist, and a large, leaf-shaped necklace, this outfit has a whiff of promotional styling). From the outset he speaks candidly and with gusto.

“That was very much RTE going, `Let’s give them a red herring,” he elaborates on Love/Hate, now sitting upright. “They courted it. They even gave me the hoodie to wear because they knew there were photographers outside. They said, `Oh, we’ll rustle up a bit of a story for the laugh. Put that on and 
pretend you don’t know the photographers are there,’ and I went, `Yeah, brilliant idea.’ And the next day, it was front-page news.”

Sheehan had been advised by his management to leave the Dublin gangster drama after season 2. Britain’s youth were besotted with him thanks to a turn in Channel 4’s Misfits, and Hollywood was starting to knock. Those working on the RTE series also presumed the rising star was done. “I had a two- or three-hour conversation with [creator and writer Stuart Carolan]. He did begin by going, `Well, I assume we’ve lost you know. ‘ And I was going, `Don’ t presume that. Let me hear what you want and let’s have a chat about the third series.’” Sheehan wanted to see Darren come full circle.

“The show truly took off in that third season,” he says with affection. The end of his time on Love/Hate coincided with a decision to take his career more seriously. This more hands-on approach was inspired by his time working on Me and Mrs Jones, a BBC series Sheehan filmed last summer but didn’t enjoy. “I took it because it was there and it was a style of TV I hadn’t done before. I thought, `There’s enough good ingredients in this that I should just go and do it. `Then, as I was doing it, I felt I shouldn’t have been. I felt not entirely happy. At the same time I saw peers doing projects that I felt to be a lot more exciting,” he says. “[The Mortal Instruments] came along around that same time, and that became the 
representation of `I want to go and do an exciting project of my own – I want to do something that feels out of reach’. So I chased this.”

The Mortal Instruments also represents the big time. It co-stars Lily Collins, Jamie Campbell Bower and Jonathan Rhys Meyers and cost about $60m (€45m) to make. Tipped as “the next Twilight”, it is based on a series of Gothic fantasy books. Sheehan plays Simon Lewis, the nice-guy best friend of Clary (Collins), the heroine. He really did have to chase the part because Harald Zwart, the director, wasn’t keen initially. “They probably had a preconception of what Simon Lewis’s character should be,” he says. “He should be altogether uncool, which is not to cast aspersions on my own coolness. He shouldn’t be in any way close to as desirable as Jace who, as soon as Clary sees, she starts to fall in love with. Simon is very much in the friend zone.

“They said they didn’t want to see another [audition] taping and I said, `No, I want to send another taping. What was the problem? I can work on it.’ I insisted on them telling me. Even though American agents have this really annoying habit of trying to filter that stuff, or trying to keep you from that knowledge, when in fact that is the most helpful thing you can tell an actor – it’s direction. So I eventually squeezed it out of them after lots of asking and I just changed up my performance.“

The most rewarding roles are generally those the 25-year-old has had to chase. His part in The Mortal Instruments was probably offered to better-known actors first, but he’s fine with that. “There are always the few guys a couple of rungs ahead, who from a producer’s standpoint have more sway. If they have a
small independent film and they go to Nicholas Hoult, for example, and they offer him the part, through foreign sales and pre-sales he will win their money back a lot quicker than I could – for the time being. For now, Hoult,” he says, adopting a villainous tone. “You scumbag.”That kind of sway, he says, is what recognition gives an actor. Sheehan has already experienced some of it in Ireland, where the popularity of Love/Hate makes it difficult to spend long periods in the country. The actor has an apartment in London but he’s giving it up when he returns to Toronto to shoot the second instalment of The Mortal Instruments next month. He will then, technically, be homeless. “For the time being, I’m happy to not have a home,” he says. “I grew up in Portlaoise [which] is a lovely town, but I don’t have any great desire to go back every few months. It doesn’t sing to me. For me, home is the people I grew up with and the people I love dearly. Thankfully, they’re mobile, so I can gather them in Dublin or in London on occasion rather than having to go back to a town or a particular place.”

The Love/Hate recognition is nothing on what The Mortal Instruments is expected to do for Sheehan internationally. The film is aimed at teenage girls, which, the actor acknowledges, is “a very feverish demographic”. Before the film was even released, the three stars had experienced hysteria at Comic-Con, and fans camping out the night before premieres. “It’s the way the film is being marketed and presented to them as well – as the next big culturally relevant urban-fantasy thing,” he reasons. “That kind of inspires fanaticism in people sometimes.”

Sheehan has been acting since the age of 14, when he was cast in Aisling Walsh’s Song for a Raggy Boy, and is wise to the industry. He knows that being internationally recognisable gives him clout. When filming wraps on The Mortal Instruments 2 in December, he plans to start work on Jet Trash. A movie about a wanderlust generation, it will be his first producer credit.

For Sheehan, the most difficult part of his rising career is being cut off from reality. In Toronto, he will be given an apartment, a driver and his own trailer. The only interaction is in the make-up room or on set. He appreciates that this is out of respect for the actor’s space but “being kept in a box” is difficult.


"All this promotion, being on a gruelling schedule and pocketed in hotels and taken in cars to an airport and brought to the next hotel, next car – after a while it’s cumbersome. It feels like you’re being disconnected from the world,” he says. For all his jocular bravado and occasionally grandiose turns of phrase, the actor seems to have his head – complete with his trademark curls – planted firmly on his shoulders. This is the calm before the storm, but Sheehan has the waters sussed.

(The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is on general release now; see review, page 25.)

Source - thesundaytimes.co.uk