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This was part of a Netflix-organised junket for the second series of its stylish, fun and darkly funny apocalyptic sci-fi drama The Umbrella Academy. In it he plays Klaus Hargreeves, the most fey, flaky, drug-addled and entertaining of a septet of super-powered siblings. The virtual nature of this press junket – the fact he doesn't have to travel to a fancy hotel – has put Sheehan into a sort of zen, reflective place and he agrees to another, longer, follow-up chat a few days later. This time he spins his laptop around to show me the "nice bit of green" outside his window and even goes for a wander at one point, laptop in hand, to open the door for a delivery. In person, Sheehan is also invigorating company, with an infectious enthusiasm for most everything (the joy of meditation, the redundancy of memory, the writing of Kurt Vonnegut). "We are all emotional sponges" he says.
Robert Sheehan, star of Love/Hate and The Umbrella Academy, has just published his first book, which is as elusive as the man himself. Donal O'Donoghue meets him. Then I’m in tears and I can taste the salt, and I’m heading out the front doors of the church into the light, blinking. I hope to God no one saw me crying on top of everything else. Were his family otherwise creative? "We did a lot of music when we were kids," he says. "We used to go to the Fleadh Cheoils. I went to France at the age of 10 with a band of musicians and the mayor of Portlaoise and the deputy mayor and mum, to do a town twinning thing. And dad [a garda] has a pretty extensive library. It's pretty impressive the amount of books that he's read . . . He was always singing songs and quoting bits and poems, so he was very influential in that way. And he has a great computer head for excerpts of things." Klaus is queer. Sheehan is straight but he has, in his own words, “had a few tries, a few goes. It just wasn’t for me . . . [On camera], it was slightly daunting kissing a man with love . . . But it’s just a lady with a beard . . . Love is love really. You can choose to emphasise the gayness of the love, or the love itself. It rang nicely with people because it placed no emphasis on the fact that it was a man with a man. [The characters in Umbrella Academy] are flawed but they’re certainly not prejudiced in any kind of way. They live in a world where if you can get a bit of love [you] cling to it because it’s like gold dust.” saw Robert take on the role of gang member Darren in the hit Irish show Love/Hate, for which he was nominated for an IFTA. Sheehan has since moved into movies, having landed roles in The Mortal Instruments and Mortal Engines.I bought it on Audible and it made it as close to perfect as possible that Robert narrated it himself. I couldn't imagine it working as well with someone else's voice. I'd give it more than 5 stars, if it were possible. He’s 33 now and sees many of his friends settling down and getting married — “deeply irritating”, he says with a twinkle — but there is no sign of him doing that just yet. In his debut collection of short stories, he disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles. People dress up as his character at these conventions, he says. “It’s taken to quite a profoundly creatively extreme level. You get a lot of girls [dressing as Klaus]. They always paint on quite a big goatee, a more generous goatee than anything I could cultivate, to be honest.” Should the first film take off in the way that's planned, the move to Hollywood is almost inevitable; his co-stars, Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower, are already there. This year he has been over twice so far. "And it's friendlier than you think," he says. "It's all: 'Chad's having a party on Saturday, Ethan's having a barbecue on Sunday, we're gonna do brunch and hiking on Monday…' It's surprisingly easy to plug yourself in."
There are stories in this collection that are genuinely worthy of merit, for example the weird and memorable Medusa, which ponders the question: what exactly would Medusa's sex life be like? Or Gertie Cronin: Memories of a Young Guard by Joseph Sheehan, which is an evocative tale of a hard-as-nails Corkonian. Even in the early years of his career, there was, behind the youthful confidence, a gravitation toward self-help and spirituality. He sighs, setting his green eyes on me. "You do know I'm going to get in so much trouble for telling you this." The accumulation of things like that, where essentially your presence is omitted, you are left out. For no good real reason. That would sting. There is a big effort towards inclusion, equality and diversity across casting and hiring. I saw on social media that Netflix posted, I'm paraphrasing, 'To be silent about this is to be complicit' and I think that's right."
Robert Sheehan is one of Ireland’s brightest stars of the screen, both at home and abroad. Best known for his roles in Love/Hate and The Umbrella Academy, Sheehan has received widespread critical acclaim for his acting talent. With a number of nominations under his belt, Robert Sheehan has made a name for himself as one of the hottest stars from Ireland today. Where is Robert Sheehan from? Acting is a personal thing. It’s not someone telling you how to act the same way as everyone else': Robert Sheehan. Photograph: Jason Hetherington/Observer
His parents, he says, “inflated me with a sense that I could do anything I want to do. There was no talk of, ‘Oh it’s not the most practical thing.’ They put me ahead of themselves, particularly my mother, driving me all over the country to auditions. When I was a teenager, I was with a young person’s agency and going up for the odd class on Sunday and there might be an audition that day.” I was definitely more contrarian for a living when I was 20. I thought it probably made me seem more edgy . . . I was very wary of gathering moss. That was my big thing . . . After two series of Misfits I was like ‘Nah! I’m doing something else.’ I had this desire to not allow anything be bigger than me, as in, be beholden to any show. That’s how I thought.” is the first big one) and, at 16, this precocious, musical (he played the bodhrán and tin whistle) son of a guard left home for seven months to film a television series in Canada. I don’t know if I was in a position to know the plights of people from minorities [who] may not have been getting the same opportunities I was getting, which is kind of shitty. The results are the type of witty colourful writing that would have gotten published, even without Sheehan’s star caché. It might be easy to be cynical about an actor turning his hand to fiction — the critical mauling Sean Penn received a couple of years ago for his novel lingers in the memory — but the Portlaoise-born actor has a rare imaginative talent and has already won fulsome praise from Breakfast on Pluto author Pat McCabe no less.
He started meditating a few years ago, when he was at an unhappy period in his life. “I was around 30 and I was doing a film called He forgot about the essay style he’d been tinkering with fitfully — for a piece on shadow puppetry, of all things. And instead, on the notes app of his phone, he “wrote a very anecdotal piece in a voice of how I would chat to someone. The story, I suddenly understood, is just what it is in the moment. I tried to make it more like the oral tradition, little rambling meditations.” So what does Robert think his debut book says about himself? A nervous guffaw. "I hope it shows someone who was eager to write something contentious, something provocative," he says. Has he always been provocative or contrarian, as he might put it? "I think so. I’ve tried my best anyway." Like that time he got involved with one of those organised teenage fights on the green near his family home and his father, a Garda, arrived in a squad car to investigate. He laughs again. "Joe pulls up in the police cruiser and roars ‘ROBERT!’ and I just legged it." Robert Sheehan grew up in Portlaoise, one of four children of Joe and Maria Sheehan. Disappearing Act, which comes with a warning (Contains Adult Material) is dedicated to his father, who instilled his son with a love of literature and the arts. Both parents were supportive of Robert, who used to play the tin whistle and bodhrán in his days performing at the Fleadh Cheoils. "I don’t really play any more," he says (although he was 'hammering’ a bodhrán recently for his music-mad landlord). Well … if I’m being totally honest, not all of me made the promise. I made it, but not all of me made it. The bit of me that makes all the right decisions, that fella made it. You know this, God. You know the fella who at the end of the night when someone says, ‘We’ll walk up the road to Doheny’s, sure they’re open till half two,’ and the other fella is telling you, ‘Go, go, go on, there’ll be craic!’ That fella who’s in the front seat is shouting, being barely heard, ‘You’ve been up to Doheny’s a thou- sand times and it’s always the exact same craic – don’t bother.’ But the booze tends to quieten him down no matter how high-pitched he screams. The booze puts him on mute. But he’s the fella I should be listening to, because he’s looking out for not only you and me but everyone else around as well. He’s got everyone covered.
Truly, how exactly is the reader meant to react when we are told the story we are about to read was written “in an Uber in London”? So I was gone (from home) even before I left home properly. It was tough because I was quite lonely, but sometimes I think that suffering at that hour of my life made me robust.” What are his family’s favourite of his roles? “Love/Hate is on again at the moment and my mother and father are watching that,” he says. “They really love that. They like the Irish homegrown stuff the best. They probably relate to it the most. I don’t think my dad’s even seen Umbrella Academy.” playing a mentally disturbed teen who was convinced his stepmother was poisoning him. His growing stature as an actor combined with his arresting appearance — large expressive eyes and a crown of dark curls —Once upon a time, Dennis Quaid, Sheehan’s co-star on Fortitude, told me of this young Irish actor (now 33) with an alchemical acting ability. Down the years, the Portlaoise-born actor, who quit college to run away with the acting circus, has shown his range: from Nathan in Misfits to Richard III in Trevor Nunn’s War of the Roses or Klaus in The Umbrella Academy.
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