Let's get real

NEW YORK -- Within days of reading Michael Rymer's script for Angel Baby, Irish actor John Lynch found himself on a plane to Australia to play one of his most challenging roles: Harry, whose romance with a fellow schizophrenic hits rough waters when the couple attempt to have a child.

"I didn't know what to expect," says the 33-year-old Lynch, who knew little about mental illness. "I didn't have any detailed understanding of it at all. I was as misinformed as other people about the stigmas attached to it, the images and stupid fodder. I had no real sense of it."

Lynch and co-star Jacqueline McKenzie spent a few days at a drop-in center for outpatients like the one where their characters meet in the film. "Once you spent a week and a half with these people, what you came away with was the tremendous courage of these people trying to hold on to a sense of themselves. Also, the medication is such a heavy thing; it deadens everything. What was important to them was to have their lives portrayed honestly, to have that stigma removed, that they were just like ordinary people trying to get through."

Lynch says he does not think Angel Baby succumbs to the common tendency of films to patronize the mentally ill. "Not really. They're so incredibly angry. There must be a lot of anger because of how they're perceived, how they're treated. That brings a very caustic wit, a streetwise sense that deflects everything. There's an incredible frustration inside and hurt that could go into that sort of maudlin indulgence, but it seemed more appropriate to make them positively angry, to defy people to patronize them."

In fact, Lynch sees a trend toward less caricatured portrayals of mental illness in movies, noting that in Angel Baby and fellow Aussie film Shine, the characters' illnesses are not specified. "It was very welcome not to make that an overriding issue but to get on with the dramatic thrust of the story itself and let that fall in as it went along. It was great to have that release and treat the audience as adults."

Lynch is also currently on screen in Some Mother's Son, playing IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands. In fact, he is a virtual one-man studio of movies about the Troubles, having made his debut in Cal and gone on to appear in In the Name of the Father and the upcoming This Is the Sea and Nothing Personal.

"It's where I'm from," explains the County Antrim native. "It's the place I know. The hunger strike would have been at its height when I was 17. I remember the marches, Sands's election, Sands's death, the people being brought back from H block. I had a strong sense of it. Nothing Personal, which is loosely connected to the whole sectarian infighting in Belfast in the mid '70s, I remember that, too, very vividly. It's what informed me and shaped me."

Lynch points out that these films try to avoid reducing the Irish experience to a caricature. "It's a very difficult thing to balance. That's the whole idea that [director] Mary McGuckian tried to achieve with This Is the Sea, a reflection of the contemporary reality. People aren't firing arrows at the English or running around the hills with leprechauns. It's much more complex, about how people live."

Rather than being a historical take on the situation, "This Is the Sea is trying to deal much more with the present. It was filmed the summer before last, at a time when the ceasefire was holding. It's set now, not in the '70s. It really is trying to wrench it out of the past and move everything forward, trying to escape. It's very energetic, very hopeful, very youthful, very up."

With so many films in release in the space of a few months, Lynch could parlay his new prominence into Hollywood work, but he's spending the next year bringing a labor of love to fruition. "I took last year off to write a screenplay about one of the best soccer players who ever lived, [Northern Ireland's] George Best, and that's what I'm doing next. During the '60s, he was the first rock-and-roll soccer superstar. Mary McGuckian will direct it, and I'll star in it." He adds, "I have a healthy fear of Hollywood. I'd hate to sit by the pool -- not that I'd do that anyway."

What does he do to relax?

"Play soccer."

-- GS