Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 19, 1993 TAG: 9302190243
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder Newspapers
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
HE'S NOT CRYING
The problem with "The Crying Game," which just may turn out to be the year's most-talked-about movie, is that you can't talk about it.Virtually anything that Stephen Rea says about his work in writer-director Neil Jordan's complex, lyric thriller is saying too much.
"It's tricky," concedes the film's star, who was nominated Wednesday for an Oscar. "Beyond a certain point, there isn't much you can discuss without spoiling it for the audience."
Still, there's plenty to discuss after the audience has seen it, and Rea (pronounced Ray) has been greeted on Manhattan streets by passers-by eager to compliment his remarkable performance and deconstruct the multifaceted suspense yarn. In the movie - which opens today in Roanoke - the Belfast actor plays Fergus, an Irish Republican Army volunteer involved in the kidnapping of a British soldier. Rea has been in New York since late last month, when he debuted in both "The Crying Game" and a Broadway drama, Frank McGuinness' "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me."
"It's kind of exciting having a play and a film opening in the same week in New York," offers Rea, 43, a lanky man with shaggy hair and a lilting brogue. In the McGuinness play, he is an Irish journalist held hostage with an American and an Englishman in a Lebanese cell.
Rea's roles in the film and play - abductor and abductee, respectively - are exact opposites, and, in one career-defining swoop, he has wowed New York with his range and talent. Suddenly, after several decades of quiet success as a (mostly) stage actor in Britain and Ireland, he finds himself the focus of attention in the media capital of the Western world.
"Oh, yes!" he exclaims in mock self-rapture. But while he acknowledges that he's happy to be stopped on the streets - "that was a big bonus and something that doesn't really occur in England" - Rea is eager to declare that "I'm not really an egomaniac. I'm slightly uncomfortable seeing myself in the papers."
And more than slightly uncomfortable when he's misquoted, which was the case, Rea says, in a recent New York newspaper profile.
Because "The Crying Game" deals to a considerable degree with the conflict between British troops and Irish Republicans, and because the film has at its center a sympathetic portrait of an IRA gunman, a certain amount of discourse on the "troubles" in Ireland is inevitable. Doubly so when it is discovered that Rea's wife, Dolours Price, is a onetime IRA hunger-striker who spent eight years in jail for a 1973 London car bombing.
But in an interview a jet-lagged Rea gave to Newsday the day after his arrival in America, the actor was painted as an IRA zealot and advocate of violent means.
"Yes, my wife was in the IRA," he acknowledges, his voice taking on a circumspect timbre. "It was 20-odd years ago, she was a very young woman, and one of the sadnesses for me is that very decent, sensitive people have got caught up in it. I don't think it helps to assume that everyone who is involved [in the Republican cause] is a brute. And certainly, that's what I was bringing to [my portrayal of] Fergus in `The Crying Game,' because . . . in a sense, a nice guy can get caught up in the ugliness, the violence.
"Some of the Republicans feel they're protecting their community," he adds, "and that's what I had to feel for Fergus, otherwise - well, a portrait of a psychopath isn't very interesting."
In the Newsday story, says Rea, "because I tried to discuss the issue with some complexity, areas of what I said were taken to mean that I was advocating support for violence. And that's certainly not the case. I don't believe in violence. . . . The problem is that I understand why people get drawn to it - there's a military situation there. . . . It's a tragedy.
"The Irish politicians and the British politicians - they should just be doing something. . . . That it should be so down their list of priorities is deeply sad."
The son of a bus driver and the grandson of a farm laborer, Rea was raised in Belfast - where he, his wife and their sons Danny, 3, and Oscar, 2, still live. Rea keeps an apartment in London, where most of his work these past two decades has been, but he wants his children to grow up on Irish soil.
"I was a terrible showoff when I was a little boy," says Rea, tracing his theatrical ambition back to its roots. "I went into a kind of adolescent decline, like you do, but then I came back to it. I always wanted to act. It was just a question of: Would I do it?"
Some of Rea's most notable roles came in films by fellow countryman Neil Jordan: In the director's 1982 feature debut, "Angel" (on U.S. video as "Danny Boy"), he stars as a hapless musician caught up in the "troubles" ("it wasn't the usual spurious gunslinging film about Ireland"); and in "The Company of Wolves" (1984), a revisionist "Little Red Riding Hood," he appears as one of the horror tale's lupine beings. Rea also appears in Mike Leigh's "Life Is Sweet" (1991), playing a huckster who unloads a dilapidated cafe truck on a starry-eyed sucker.
But it is "The Crying Game," which takes its title from a 1964 English pop hit by Dave Berry, that is Rea's first big-time, big-hoopla film performance. The actor, with his handsome, hangdog countenance, is in virtually every frame of the film.
Rea followed his work in "The Crying Game," which also stars Miranda Richardson, Forrest Whitaker and newcomer Jaye Davidson, with "Bad Behaviour," a British domestic comedy-drama in which he stars opposite Sinead Cusack. He declined the lead in another film - Stephen Frears' "The Snapper," currently shooting in Ireland - to travel to Broadway with "Someone."
That decision was prompted by the prospect of having a show on Broadway and a film in theaters simultaneously - resulting, Rea hopes, in a slew of offers from American filmmakers.
"Obviously, there's a continent of people that I haven't worked with," observes Rea, citing Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma as Yanks with whom he'd be happy to collaborate. "And one of the reasons for choosing to come to Broadway is to see if I can open up some [work possibilities] here, too."
Does he have a sense yet that such possibilities may arise?
"I don't know," Rea smiles. "I think anything's possible if you want it to happen."
But, as is his nature, one senses, Rea quickly leavens his optimism with a bit of self-deprecating caution: "I'm very new to cinema. I mean, I am deeply experienced in the theater, but I'm a bit of a baby in cinema.
"So, who knows?"
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