Chris O’Dowd has had an unlikely career, from The Clinic to Hollywood heartthrob, but acting, on stage and screen, is what drives this prolific performer and writer. Donal O’Donoghue meets the man from Boyle.
“I remember saying to my agent, back when I was getting a bit old to be a romantic guy, ‘Do you think I could play like a rogue cop or even maybe an FBI agent?’ She just took one look at me and said: ‘Well, I think you could play a literary agent.’”
Chris O’Dowd (46) chuckles at that one, his answer to the observation that he usually plays the man-child on screen, a gallery that includes slacker Roy in The IT Crowd, the lovable traffic cop in Bridesmaids and the imaginary friend in Moone Boy.
“There’s probably a truth in that, but not necessarily that I’m simply cast as the man-child character,” he adds. “Childishness has become a byword for uncertainty, and there’s something nice about playing characters who aren’t certain about everything. And anyway, can you see me playing an authority figure? Like, ‘Hi, yes, I’m the President.’”
Chris O’Dowd poses backstage at The Olivier Awards 2025. Getty Images
It’s a Friday afternoon in Dublin, and O’Dowd is in flying form. We talk about the family donkey from his teen years in Boyle, County Roscommon. He recalls his UCD student days when he won tickets on the Late Late Show for a trip to France and ended up managing a bar in Paris during the 1998 World Cup. And then there was that time he was a 13-year-old babysitter.
Charming and funny, his interviews are studded with stories – a career-shaping meeting with Judd Apatow, proposing to his now wife, Dawn O’Porter (she changed her name after they married in 2012) – just as his career bubbles with variety. When we met, The Sheep Detectives (O’Dowd as a sheep called Mopple) had just opened, and he was about to start filming the comedy Bender, but the main topic was Conor McPherson’s play, The Brightening Air, which opens this week at the Gate in Dublin.
O’Dowd got rave notices for his portrayal of Dermot, a self-made man who returns to the old family home for his pound of flesh, when The Brightening Air premiered in London last year. It showcased an actor adept at tapping into the dark as well as the light.
“Although most people know Chris from his movies and screen work, he is also a natural theatre animal,” says McPherson, who also directs the play.
“His character Dermot is one of those people who hides his insecurities with a brash exterior, putting you down under the guise that he’s just ‘telling it like it is.’ Chris is fantastic at letting the audience glimpse the vulnerability that often drives people like this. Everything is complex with Chris’s work – he transmits information beneath the surface in all kinds of ways – and at lightning speed. This makes him a joy to work with for any playwright.”
It also makes O’Dowd a natural storyteller. “Our donkey was called Miley,” he begins. “We got him for dad for what must have been his 50th birthday. Dad had a workshop out the back of the house, and we had a half-acre at that time. So, we put Miley in there. We didn’t ride him as we were too big by then; we were teenagers.
“But we’d go and talk to him a lot, and Miley would also hang out with dad when he was working (he laughs). Dad used to tell this story that back when he was printing all these election posters, the lads would come to collect them and see the donkey in the room. They never took it as a great sign for their election campaign: ‘Folks, I got these posters from a guy who had a donkey out the back.’”
Chris O’Dowd attends NY Red Carpet and Premiere of Amazon MGM Studio’s “The Sheep Detectives”. Getty Images
A few days before meeting O’Dowd, I watched a clip of him on The Graham Norton Show, in which a man called John from the west of Ireland (biographical details were vague for a reason) told his red chair story. It involved John and his siblings being minded by a last-minute babysitter, not much older than his charges. The night descended into chaos. “Oh my god yes,” says O’Dowd with a chuckle.
“My older sister was meant to be the babysitter that night, so I was drafted in at the last moment. I was just 14 or so but I was six feet tall. Being a big fella, people thrust responsibility and authority at you whether you were capable of it or not. I was running a bar in Paris at the age of 18 because I just told them that I was 30 and nobody checked my age. I also had a beard. Maybe that helped.”
O’Dowd grew up in Boyle, Co Roscommon, the youngest of five siblings who was largely left to his own devices. “It helped that I didn’t cause much trouble, and I played lots of football,” he says. Was he any good at the GAA? “I was tall and I had good hands, so I was handy enough,” he says.
He’s being modest. O’Dowd played intercounty for Roscommon from U-16 to U-21s and was the minor goalkeeper in the 1997 Connacht final. At UCD, he studied politics and sociology but didn’t complete his degree. “I went to exams and, honest to God, there were times when I didn’t even know what they were about,” he once said. His energies were focused elsewhere, including acting in UCD’s Dramsoc and later, he moved to London to study at LAMDA, working on building sites, hopeful of getting a toehold in the biz but never anticipating Hollywood.
Chris O’Dowd attends the Choose Love 10th Birthday Gala. Getty Images
“The IT Crowd was the first time I felt I could give up working other jobs, but The Clinic was the time when I did give up doing other jobs,” he says when asked to list the roles that shaped his career.
“And the last play I did in Ireland was a 2004 Druid production of The Playboy of the Western World. I was in my late 20s and working with Garry Hynes, Cillian Murphy and Aisling O’Sullivan made me thinking, these people know what they are at.
“It felt like a big change from the classical drama school I had attended where I felt at times that everyone was faking it: I didn’t get that while I was working in the West of Ireland on Playboy. And it was a mad run with the production staged on all the Aran islands and down in Clare and elsewhere: mad sh*t and a very creative experience.”
O’Dowd lives in London with his wife, the actor and author, Dawn O’Porter, and their two children, Art (11) and Valentine (8), having lived for ten years in West Hollywood. Does he worry that his children might end up with English accents (his own accent is still happily settled west of the Shannon).
“That is the fear,” he says. “They kind of have a funny accent now which has touches of American still because we were there for ten years and they were born there. When the London hits, I may just have to charter a plane for Ireland.”
Chris O’Dowd and Dawn O’Porter. Getty Images
Is he an optimist? “I’m a pragmatist. Maybe if everything goes sh*t, I’d be less of an optimist. But it’s very hard not to think the best of everything when life is good. And things are going well for me because for the most part, I get to do things that I enjoy.”
Apart from acting, he also writes. His TV series, Moone Boy, (also three teen books), a semi-biographical tale set in Boyle, was co-written with Nick V Murphy, while the 2025 TV drama, Small Town, Big Story, which starred Christina Hendricks and was inspired by the play, The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt, was also set in the west of Ireland.
“I’m developing a show with Steve Coogan which we’re hoping to shoot next year in Mayo,” he says of new work. “I’m also working on something with Nick Murphy and Liam Neeson. It’s based on a story that happened to a mate of Liam’s from school in Ballymena. Long story short, he was a plumber who hit hard times during the recession of the late 1980s and ended up doing the plumbing for Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad three weeks before he invaded Kuwait. It’s a mad story.”
Beyond O’Dowd’s stories and crumpled charm, there’s the serious actor and the activist who has campaigned against the genocide in Gaza and marched with the Palestine Solidarity Group in his hometown of Boyle.
“I read the names of all the Palestinian children who have been killed in Gaza outside the Houses of Parliament,” he says. “And we do a lot of work with this refugee charity called Choose Love, which my wife co-founded. It was started about eight or nine years ago when news of those big immigrant camps in Calais was making headline news. Dawn raised a truckload of stuff to be distributed to the camps and that became three truckloads and now they are raising over £15 million a year but it was impossible to get into Gaza.”
Before going back on stage with The Brightening Air, O’Dowd was playing a carpet salesman in a comedy film called Bender, set during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ireland in 1979. His co-star is Bill Burr who played the controversial Riyadh Comedy Festival. Would he have played Riyadh?
“I haven’t thought about it,” he says, employing a phrase that surfaces whenever the conversation shuffles towards controversy. And while he seems cuddly and roguish, he is also savvy and hard-working, an actor with the alchemical ability to show us life from both sides.
“Chris can have the audience in stitches while he’s talking about awful, dark stuff,” says McPherson. “This is quite a rare facility and it’s a font of energy for the audience and his fellow cast members. Plays depend on destabilising factors, and Chris is basically controlled anarchy on stage.”
The Brightening Air by Conor McPherson is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, from July 17 to August 30. gatetheatre.ie