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with Nicolas Cage, and I thought now I can make a career out of this.” He also credits the influence of his agent, Rose Parkinson, with whom he enjoyed “incredible camaraderie”. People dress up as his character at these conventions, he says. “It’s taken to quite a profoundly creatively extreme level. You get a lot of girls [dressing as Klaus]. They always paint on quite a big goatee, a more generous goatee than anything I could cultivate, to be honest.” Robert Sheehan began dating actress Sofia Boutella in March 2014. Robert was open about his baby fever during the relationship, but the pair called it quits in 2018. Unsurprisingly then, his favourite role so far has been a theatrical one – Richard III in Trevor Nunn's Wars of the Roses. "Four Shakespeare plays turned into three Shakespeare plays with about 1,000 couplets written by John Barton and Peter Hall to fill in the gaps. So truthfully, I couldn't tell you which bits in my soliloquies were John and Peter and which bits were Bill. I worked really, really, really hard on it mostly out of fear of being laughed at. You have the likes of Mark Rylance and Ralph Fiennes, actors of an incredibly high calibre, doing Richard III and in comes Rob, the Irish whippersnapper. And the truth is I was f**king good . . . I was absolutely terrified. And I learned to negotiate with fear, in a way that put me streets beyond having any kind of fear on a TV or film set . . . I was good at it because I refused to pontificate with the language. I just tried to make it chat, tried to make it f**king banter, to instinctively bring those comedic comedy beats to it." It’s easier to meet someone when you’re famous but harder to conduct a relationship with someone. There is someone (significant) now and it’s been an interesting learning challenge for me; a confrontation with the self and noticing old patterns emerge and then watching them dissolve. At ground level, relationships have become easier for me because I know that what I’m fighting with is myself. Suddenly you’re five years old and you’re having the same feelings you had when your mother told you to go to bed early and, all of a sudden, you’re playing the role of your five-year-old self, and your girlfriend is your mother, and you might punch a wall because you’re an adult. And so, all this stuff, I’ve really improved upon.”
The accumulation of things like that, where essentially your presence is omitted, you are left out. For no good real reason. That would sting. There is a big effort towards inclusion, equality and diversity across casting and hiring. I saw on social media that Netflix posted, I'm paraphrasing, 'To be silent about this is to be complicit' and I think that's right." There are stories in this collection that are genuinely worthy of merit, for example the weird and memorable Medusa, which ponders the question: what exactly would Medusa's sex life be like? Or Gertie Cronin: Memories of a Young Guard by Joseph Sheehan, which is an evocative tale of a hard-as-nails Corkonian.Unusually for an actor, he didn’t go to drama school. He dropped out of college in Galway, where he studied film and television. It was, he recalls, a city where there was “plenty of opportunity” to meet girls. Not that, as time went on, it was always only girls. “I explored my sexuality, just to see if there were any tinges in a gay or bisexual area, but there wasn’t really for me. I gave it a few tries though.”
And we all looked and we all looked at each other, a few rolls of the eyes, few nods and eyes down, one or two smirks. He shtalks away and gets as far as the edge of the graveyard that’s lined with them big, tall bright- green hedges that was made in a lab, and he unzips himself and starts taking a piss. Then there was a few sniggers. Few tuts. The priest’s voice was wobbling – but it had been before, to be honest. My jaw was on the coffin let alone the ground, and my hair was all over the place. Cos no woman wants you smelly and hungover on a Sunday morning. They want the whole family to go out on a horse ride or a drive to the beach and be able to dive into the sea and be all full of energy and not sipping Lucozade and panting, even though you’re not moving anywhere, and stinking. No one wants that on a Sunday. So I was gone (from home) even before I left home properly. It was tough because I was quite lonely, but sometimes I think that suffering at that hour of my life made me robust.” Then I’m in tears and I can taste the salt, and I’m heading out the front doors of the church into the light, blinking. I hope to God no one saw me crying on top of everything else.
Does Robert Sheehan have Instagram?
Through the noughties, his star continued on its ascent. He was BAFTA-nominated for his performance in Misfits, about teens with superpowers on community service, and won warm praise for his performance in The Accused, playing a mentally disturbed teen who was convinced his stepmother was poisoning him. His growing stature as an actor combined with his arresting appearance — large expressive eyes and a crown of dark curls — made him popular with casting directors and fans. At times, this has been a bit of a double-edged sword and, quite frequently, he gets pestered for selfies (“What do they even do with them all?”). According to Netflix, 45 million households watched the first series of The Umbrella Academy. Photograph: Erin Patrice O’Brien/Netflix I don’t know if I was in a position to know the plights of people from minorities [who] may not have been getting the same opportunities I was getting, which is kind of shitty. Were his family otherwise creative? "We did a lot of music when we were kids," he says. "We used to go to the Fleadh Cheoils. I went to France at the age of 10 with a band of musicians and the mayor of Portlaoise and the deputy mayor and mum, to do a town twinning thing. And dad [a garda] has a pretty extensive library. It's pretty impressive the amount of books that he's read . . . He was always singing songs and quoting bits and poems, so he was very influential in that way. And he has a great computer head for excerpts of things." I bought it on Audible and it made it as close to perfect as possible that Robert narrated it himself. I couldn't imagine it working as well with someone else's voice. I'd give it more than 5 stars, if it were possible.
You know, I was only thinking earlier on that as you get older the outside world shrinks and shrinks. And things right in front of you get kind of big. When I interviewed Sheehan several years ago, after he had been working on the film Season of the Witch, he said he didn't want the same level of fame as his co-star Nicholas Cage. He laughs when I remind him of that now.is the first big one) and, at 16, this precocious, musical (he played the bodhrán and tin whistle) son of a guard left home for seven months to film a television series in Canada. Well … if I’m being totally honest, not all of me made the promise. I made it, but not all of me made it. The bit of me that makes all the right decisions, that fella made it. You know this, God. You know the fella who at the end of the night when someone says, ‘We’ll walk up the road to Doheny’s, sure they’re open till half two,’ and the other fella is telling you, ‘Go, go, go on, there’ll be craic!’ That fella who’s in the front seat is shouting, being barely heard, ‘You’ve been up to Doheny’s a thou- sand times and it’s always the exact same craic – don’t bother.’ But the booze tends to quieten him down no matter how high-pitched he screams. The booze puts him on mute. But he’s the fella I should be listening to, because he’s looking out for not only you and me but everyone else around as well. He’s got everyone covered. Klaus is queer. Sheehan is straight but he has, in his own words, “had a few tries, a few goes. It just wasn’t for me . . . [On camera], it was slightly daunting kissing a man with love . . . But it’s just a lady with a beard . . . Love is love really. You can choose to emphasise the gayness of the love, or the love itself. It rang nicely with people because it placed no emphasis on the fact that it was a man with a man. [The characters in Umbrella Academy] are flawed but they’re certainly not prejudiced in any kind of way. They live in a world where if you can get a bit of love [you] cling to it because it’s like gold dust.” His meditation practice has helped him to deal with the grief of losing his uncle, Mikey, who died in a tragic house fire in Kilorglin, Co Kerry — where Rob’s father grew up — two years ago. “That was very sad. It was unexpected. I didn’t get to see my family through that time; I was in Toronto making television. Writing helped to process the grief. I was meditating on set about three months after he died and somehow I started welling up and I started writing about him on my phone.” This was part of a Netflix-organised junket for the second series of its stylish, fun and darkly funny apocalyptic sci-fi drama The Umbrella Academy. In it he plays Klaus Hargreeves, the most fey, flaky, drug-addled and entertaining of a septet of super-powered siblings. The virtual nature of this press junket – the fact he doesn't have to travel to a fancy hotel – has put Sheehan into a sort of zen, reflective place and he agrees to another, longer, follow-up chat a few days later. This time he spins his laptop around to show me the "nice bit of green" outside his window and even goes for a wander at one point, laptop in hand, to open the door for a delivery.
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