Biology is destiny for an actor, especially in films. If you look like, say, Jude Law, sooner or later someone is going to cast you as a robot gigolo. If you look like Amanda Seyfried, you are going to play characters whose huge blue eyes brim with tears. But if you're Ciaran Hinds, the 57-year-old Belfast-born actor whose face can look either old-school handsome or as angular as an anvil, whose brogue can sound musical or brutish, and whose 6-foot-1 frame can appear lean or hulking - well, you're probably not going to be a movie star, no matter how fine an actor you are. But you will have a long and varied career.
In his four decades of work, Hinds has played Julius Caesar (in HBO's miniseries Rome), King Herod ( The Nativity Story) and a Russian president ( The Sum of All Fears). He was equally believable as a dirt-encrusted oil driller ( There Will Be Blood), a debonair businessman ( Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day) and a doomed fisherman ( The Weight of Water, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and shot in Nova Scotia). And he's always nuanced, whether he's playing a conscience-stricken assassin ( Munich), a comic-book foe ( Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life) or two stalwarts of literature, Captain Wentworth in Persuasion (1995) and Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre (1997).
"There was a period about 15 years ago when I was never out of breeches," Hinds said in a phone interview last week. "I was stuck in the 19th century. But that's the nature of our work - we don't get to choose, really. Somebody chooses us. So you find out, 'What are people seeing in me? What do people feel I'm right for?' I've often been cast as presidents or emperors, which is funny. They don't see me sloping 'round the corner shop, unshaven."
Onstage, where looks matter less, Hinds has done everything from Shakespeare and Ibsen to Sam Shepherd and Stephen Sondheim. Playing a doctor with a cruel streak in Patrick Marber's play Closer, he won accolades in both the London and New York productions. When it came time to cast Mike Nichols's film version, however, the part went to the more symmetrical Clive Owen. (Imagining Owen playing Hinds reminds me of those Windows 7 TV ads, where the speakers' visions of themselves are a titch more beautiful than the reality.) Most recently, Hinds appeared in two plays written and directed by the award-winning Irish playwright Conor McPherson: The Seafarer on Broadway in 2007 and The Birds in Dublin in 2009.
Hinds's relationship with McPherson also led to his latest film, The Eclipse, which opened in Toronto yesterday and will expand across Canada this month. (McPherson wrote and directed, based on a short story by the well-known Irish writer Billy Roche.) Hinds plays Michael, a widower who works for an Irish literary festival. It's an ideal role for him, because Michael is an unusual leading man: Though he has a fistfight with the bad guy (a self-important novelist played by Aidan Quinn) and kisses the girl (a writer who believes in spirits, played by the Danish actress Iben Hjejle, who was John Cusack's girlfriend in High Fidelity), he is also awkward, lonely, grief-shattered, shy - and oh yes, contending with the vile-tempered ghost of his father-in-law.
"In most of Conor's major pieces there is something otherworldly going on," Hinds said. (His character in The Seafarer turned out to be the Devil.) "He wants to put people in a place where a nightmare strikes out of nowhere, unbidden. He studied English, psychology and philosophy. So I suppose there's a lot of questioning going on in his head. Whereas I might take a break and read the sports results." He chuckled.
In The Eclipse, McPherson is "exploring the idea of what happens to us when we're blocked by grief, and can't find that cathartic moment of letting it go and moving on a bit," Hinds said. "He wanted to have all these strange, sometimes quiet, sometimes contemplative, sometimes shocking effects of a man's mental state. It will piss off some viewers because they won't know what genre to put it in. But personally, that's the way my taste goes: to be taken on a journey and be not quite sure where we're going."
After a recent screening in Boston, a woman approached Hinds. "She said, 'I lost my husband about four months ago, and this was quite hard to sit through. But it helped me understand what's happening to me,'" he remembered. "It was very personal, yet I knew she meant it. That's the thing about these small films. There are no car crashes or guns. But people can be touched deeply by them, I think."
When he's not working, Hinds likes "to read, walk. I'm quite domestic really," he said. He lives in Paris with his companion of 23 years, Hélène Patarot, and their 19-year-old daughter. (The couple met when they were both in The Mahabharata, a six-hour theatre piece directed by the legendary Peter Brook that toured the world in 1987 and was made into a 1989 film.) "It may seem like I work a lot, but I turn up like a bad penny for four or five days, then disappear and do something else." He recently finished playing Aberforth Dumbledore in parts one and two of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and is currently shooting the biggest-budget film of his career, John Carter of Mars, a live action/animation/CGI hybrid from Wall-E director Andrew Stanton.
Whether a role is large or small, for Hinds it's about one thing: the collaboration. "That kind of meeting of minds, where between you, you construct something - that's what keeps me stimulated," he said. "It's not about turning up and saying, 'Yeah, I know how to do this.' It's, 'How will we?' You never really get it right, but you live in that dream-like existence where you believe maybe one day you will." His deepest friendships are with colleagues he's known for 30 years, including actors Liam Neeson and Helen Mirren. And on John Carter, "I'm reconnecting with James Purefoy, who was Mark Antony in Rome," Hinds said. "So we're together being Martians - he said very quickly."
He laughed again. " The Eclipse was five short weeks, sitting on rocks in County Cork - with as much to do in those five weeks as in the year it will take to shoot [ John Carter] It's not quite an antidote, one to the other, but sometimes it feels very strange to work out how you got from there to there."