Horsing around: Ciarán Hinds delivers in The Three Urns. Photo / Supplied
In his latest film, Ciarán Hinds is an Irishman who has travelled home from France to scatter his wife’s ashes in the places that were special to her. That might make The Three Urns sound like a sad film. It isn’t.
As Hinds tells the Listener via Zoom from
his kitchen in Paris, “It’s a nod to the landscape of the country, to the music of the country, to the poetry of the country, and to the mad, daft fuckers you meet along the way.”
That sentence rolls out in the baritone that has been the voice of many a patriarch, king, emperor, spy boss, wizard, supervillain or troll on screen. And many a character by Shakespeare, Wilde or Chekhov on stage in a 50-year career that shows no sign of slowing down.
At 73, he’s wanted to work less but he keeps getting the call for interesting stuff.
“I was always, by nature, a day-to-day person. I never had any career plans like, ‘I wanted to do that; I wanted to get there.’ But I’ve had the great fortune to work with some fantastic people, and it’s usually the people around you creating things that spurs you on to keep your interest going. Maybe a couple of years ago, I was getting a little bit jaded and I thought, ‘Well, that’s age, you’ve been doing it for a long time.’ But then suddenly a couple of things came up, and I started to feel, ‘This is very juicy, you can read it and enjoy it and can’t walk away.’”
By the end of this year, as well as The Three Urns, Hinds will have starred in another film, Midwinter Break, the miniseries East of Eden, the third season of Middle-earth prequel The Rings of Power, and the final season of Irish television comedy-drama The Dry.
Hinds says he got a late career boost from his Oscar-nominated supporting role as Kenneth Branagh’s doting grandfather “Pop” in the actor-director’s 2022 autobiographical Belfast. But Hinds, who was born in Belfast, wasn’t exactly off Hollywood’s radar before that.
Hinds the movie star, at a pre-Baftas event in 2022. Photo / Getty Images
He’d appeared in plenty of big-name director features before – like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood, Steven Spielberg’s Munich, Martin Scorsese’s Silence. There were also his three seasons as Mance Rayder, leader of the wildings in Game of Thrones, which, with his appearance as Aberforth Dumbledore in the final Harry Potter film and Rings means he completed a kind of screen fantasy franchise trifecta.
“I’m more of a character actor, I guess, than a front man, so you go with the flow and you go, ‘What are they asking for?’ and then they maybe discover, from all that pretending to be Caesar, pretending this, that and the other, you finally discover your soul that you can share in a different way.”
The Three Urns does that. It’s made by the same English writing/directing team of John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck who made Hinds the lead in 2020’s The Man in the Hat, in which his character tootled around south-west France in a Fiat Bambina while pursued by a carload of musicians.
Hinds said only one word in the 2020 film, which was influenced by French cinematic comic Jacques Tati and the dialogue-free films featuring his Monsieur Hulot character.
“As you get to a certain age, you’re almost going back to school to learn the alphabet with learning all the scripts, because your brain doesn’t have that retention. So when we did The Man in the Hat I was thrilled, because I think I only said one word in it. They said, ‘You’ll have to speak a bit more in this … but we’ll keep it just minimal.’”
On his Three Urns quest he is pursued by a mysterious French woman (Olga Kurylenko) in her own inadequate vehicle. Along the way, he encounters some familiar faces behind counters (like Stephen Fry’s bookseller charging the earth for a Yeats first edition) and musicians of many genres. There is clearly a strong hip-hop scene in Donegal.
There’s also Hinds’ old Game of Thrones castmate Stephen Dillane, who returns as “the Damp Man” from The Man in the Hat.
It’s a quirky, sentimental road movie, driving through one postcard after another in County Donegal, where Hinds’ Professor O’Connor and his wife originally came from. He has to navigate the countryside first by car, then by a tiny milk float that starts out petrol powered, before it’s converted to solar, then eventually drawn by a horse called Molly.
Hinds has some previous screen equestrian experience, but the film’s modest budget didn’t extend to stunt wagoners. “I was amazed at what we got and that nobody got hurt.”
East of Eden: Hinds with co-star Hoon Lee in the NZ-shot Netflix series. Photo / Supplied
Hinds had a horse or two to deal with when he was in New Zealand early last year filming East of Eden in Ōamaru and Central Otago. In the adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel he plays Samuel Hamilton, the Irish immigrant patriarch of one of the two families whose lives are intertwined in the book and who represents the author’s own grandfather.
“Lord, thank you for informing me of that. I was unaware.”
The Hamiltons don’t seem to feature as much in the series as they do in the book, with the show’s main focus on Florence Pugh’s Cathy Ames. Hinds is impressed by the drama’s treatment of the character.
“I don’t think I had ever, ever come across such a dark, evil female … the darkness and the badness in it was kind of stunning. It took my breath away.”
Hinds’ main memory of his New Zealand excursion was the time he and actor wife Hélène Patarot, who appears briefly in The Three Urns, spent with another Northern Ireland-born actor Hinds had met a few times before, Sam Neill.
“He sent this little message saying, ‘When you get tired of the nightlife in Ōamaru, do come visit, there’s a bed.’”
The production shifted nearer Neill’s stamping ground anyway and Hinds dined with him a couple of times.
“He was such a wonderful, warm, and very witty man … I was so saddened by his death.”
Hinds and Patarot’s daughter Aoife Hinds has followed in her parents’ footsteps as an actor – she played Paul Mescal’s university girlfriend in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
Her next role is a lead and involves another hit book, Kaliane Bradley’s 2024 sci-fi romance The Ministry of Time, in which she’s an employee of the department bringing doomed historical figures into the modern world.
One is Graham Gore from Sir John Franklin’s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Bradley was inspired after watching the 2018 television series The Terror about the expedition – in which Franklin was played by one Ciarán Hinds.
Both Hinds and his wife have been cast as their daughter’s parents in the new series. Hinds was reluctant at first. “But my wife said, ‘I’ve rehearsed 34 years for this part,’ and then I thought well, it’d be churlish of me, and I’ll get kicked out of the family if I don’t come. It’s like reverse nepotism or something.”
The Three Urns screens as part of the British and Irish Film Festival at selected cinemas from October 28. East of Eden is now screening on Netflix.
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