Colm Meaney
THE PROLIFIC IRISH ACTOR ON THE IMAGES OF HIS CAREER
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
“YOU HAVEN’T PICKED a dud yet,” laughs Colm Meaney, halfway through his Time Capsule experience. “You haven’t picked something where I’ve went, ‘Oh my God, no!’” When you’ve made as many films and television shows as the 71-year-old Irish actor has in his career (almost 150, as it happens), it stands to reason that there might be the odd dud. But there’s also been a string of crackers, from stints on not one but two seminal Star Trek shows to this month’s charming, Paul Reiser-penned, Irish-set comedy The Problem With People, all of which benefit from Meaney’s assured presence. So, then, let the dud-free detour down memory lane commence.
FIRST MEETING THE PROBLEM WITH PEOPLE(2023)
“This is the moment in the film where Paul (who also co-stars) and I first meet, but it was probably midway through the shoot. It reminded me of when I did first meet Paul, because we’d been in touch for nearly two-and-a-half years, but never actually met until the first week of shooting. And we arranged to meet in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin and he said, ‘I’ll see you in the lounge.’ Which to me is the bar. So he’s sitting out there thinking, ‘This fucker’s not going to show up,’ and I’m sitting at the bar thinking, ‘This is very Hollywood, showing up fashionably late.’ And this picture reminds me of that.”