Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has said he is searching for a “simple” burial place in Ireland, despite the fact he will never live here again.
Speaking at the Dingle Literary Festival at the weekend, the 75-year-old reflected on how his late friend and fellow author Edna O’Brien had decided on her ultimate resting place years before her death.
“I want to be in a simple graveyard. If you saw some of the graves in Hollywood, my God what monuments to vanity they are,” he said.
“I don’t think I can ever live here again and I do not want to be buried somewhere else.”
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“Edna O’Brien ... where she was buried, now that’s an Edna moment. She was buried out on an island and she had decided that years and years ago, because I’d asked her that question ... I haven’t quite found that place.”
The actor, who lives in Maine in the US with his wife Hannah Beth King and their daughter, appeared in full health as he engaged audiences about the challenges of emigration, and finding solace in literature alongside author Karl Geary on stage in Dingle.
“It wasn’t until I emigrated a long time ago that I understood that longing that people have to return home to wherever that is,” he said. “Home ... the eternal search for home. Belonging. I haven’t quite found that.”
He added: “The thing about it is that when you leave home, you no longer belong in the place that you left, and you don’t really belong in the place that you go to, and I think that’s something that’s shared by almost every emigrant.”
Byrne, who published his memoir Walking With Ghosts in 2020 and subsequently toured its stage adaptation, said theatre audiences are “desperate” to connect in a technology-driven world.
“We are being isolated or being made more lonely by technology,” he said.
“I find when you go back to the theatre and you’re performing in front of an audience ... audiences are desperate to connect. And one of the things that’s making a comeback is storytelling. We [in Ireland] have a primal relationship with fire.
“We have a primal relationship with stories, and to sit around the fire with the stories, which I was lucky enough to get as a kid with the last of those storytellers that were going around ... to sit by the fire with only the flames and have this man tell a story about mythical giants that managed to speak colloquially ... that’s what I miss in America. I miss storytelling, and I miss the connection that a shared culture gives you.”
The Usual Suspects actor, who lists writers Wendy Erskine and Elaine Feeney as current favourites, and Myles na gCopaleen and Woody Allen as old favourites, says he is continually searching for the perfect book.
“I can’t pass a bookshop without going in, even if I have 10 books on the go ... I have to go in because I’m always looking for that one book, the perfect book that I can take out and say: this book changed my life or changed the way I looked at the world.
“Any town that has a bookshop is a good town. Luckily where I live in Maine we have five bookshops, one second hand.”
He added: “I think one of the loveliest sights for me is to come across somebody who’s reading a book. I can never resist going up and saying: ‘what are you reading?’. I’ve discovered quite a few books like that.”
