{"id":625127,"date":"2026-10-09T07:22:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T07:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/625127\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T07:22:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T07:22:16","slug":"ciaran-hinds-on-sam-neill-east-of-eden-and-his-quirky-irish-road-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/625127\/","title":{"rendered":"Ciar\u00e1n Hinds on Sam Neill, East of Eden, and his quirky Irish road movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Horsing around: Ciar\u00e1n Hinds delivers in The Three Urns. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n

In his latest film, Ciar\u00e1n Hinds is an Irishman who has travelled home from France to scatter his wife\u2019s ashes in the places that were special to her. That might make The Three Urns sound like a sad film. It isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n As Hinds tells the Listener via Zoom from
\n his kitchen in Paris, \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

At 73, he\u2019s wanted to work less but he keeps getting the call for interesting stuff.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was always, by nature, a day-to-day person. I never had any career plans like, \u2018I wanted to do that; I wanted to get there.\u2019 But I\u2019ve had the great fortune to work with some fantastic people, and it\u2019s 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, \u2018Well, that\u2019s age, you\u2019ve been doing it for a long time.\u2019 But then suddenly a couple of things came up, and I started to feel, \u2018This is very juicy, you can read it and enjoy it and can\u2019t walk away.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Hinds says he got a late career boost from his Oscar-nominated supporting role as Kenneth Branagh\u2019s doting grandfather \u201cPop\u201d in the actor-director\u2019s 2022 autobiographical Belfast. But Hinds, who was born in Belfast, wasn\u2019t exactly off Hollywood\u2019s radar before that.<\/p>\n

\"HindsHinds the movie star, at a pre-Baftas event in 2022. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

He\u2019d appeared in plenty of big-name director features before \u2013 like Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s There Will be Blood, Steven Spielberg\u2019s Munich, Martin Scorsese\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m more of a character actor, I guess, than a front man, so you go with the flow and you go, \u2018What are they asking for?\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Three Urns does that. It\u2019s made by the same English writing\/directing team of John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck who made Hinds the lead in 2020\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you get to a certain age, you\u2019re almost going back to school to learn the alphabet with learning all the scripts, because your brain doesn\u2019t 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, \u2018You\u2019ll have to speak a bit more in this \u2026 but we\u2019ll keep it just minimal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s bookseller charging the earth for a Yeats first edition) and musicians of many genres. There is clearly a strong hip-hop scene in Donegal.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also Hinds\u2019 old Game of Thrones castmate Stephen Dillane, who returns as \u201cthe Damp Man\u201d from The Man in the Hat.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a quirky, sentimental road movie, driving through one postcard after another in County Donegal, where Hinds\u2019 Professor O\u2019Connor 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\u2019s converted to solar, then eventually drawn by a horse called Molly.<\/p>\n

Hinds has some previous screen equestrian experience, but the film\u2019s modest budget didn\u2019t extend to stunt wagoners. \u201cI was amazed at what we got and that nobody got hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"EastEast of Eden: Hinds with co-star Hoon Lee in\u00a0the NZ-shot Netflix series. Photo \/ Supplied<\/p>\n

Hinds had a horse or two to deal with when he was in New Zealand early last year filming East of Eden in \u014camaru 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\u2019s own grandfather.<\/p>\n

\u201cLord, thank you for informing me of that. I was unaware.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Hamiltons don\u2019t seem to feature as much in the series as they do in the book, with the show\u2019s main focus on Florence Pugh\u2019s Cathy Ames. Hinds is impressed by the drama\u2019s treatment of the character.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think I had ever, ever come across such a dark, evil female \u2026 the darkness and the badness in it was kind of stunning. It took my breath away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinds\u2019 main memory of his New Zealand excursion was the time he and actor wife H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Patarot, who appears briefly in The Three Urns, spent with another Northern Ireland-born actor Hinds had met a few times before, Sam Neill.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe sent this little message saying, \u2018When you get tired of the nightlife in \u014camaru, do come visit, there\u2019s a bed.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The production shifted nearer Neill\u2019s stamping ground anyway and Hinds dined with him a couple of times.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was such a wonderful, warm, and very witty man \u2026 I was so saddened by his death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hinds and Patarot\u2019s daughter Aoife Hinds has followed in her parents\u2019 footsteps as an actor \u2013 she played Paul Mescal\u2019s university girlfriend in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney\u2019s Normal People.<\/p>\n

Her next role is a lead and involves another hit book, Kaliane Bradley\u2019s 2024 sci-fi romance The Ministry of Time, in which she\u2019s an employee of the department bringing doomed historical figures into the modern world.<\/p>\n

One is Graham Gore from Sir John Franklin\u2019s 1845 expedition to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic. Bradley was inspired after watching the 2018 television series The Terror about the expedition \u2013 in which Franklin was played by one Ciar\u00e1n Hinds.<\/p>\n

Both Hinds and his wife have been cast as their daughter\u2019s parents in the new series. Hinds was reluctant at first. \u201cBut my wife said, \u2018I\u2019ve rehearsed 34 years for this part,\u2019 and then I thought well, it\u2019d be churlish of me, and I\u2019ll get kicked out of the family if I don\u2019t come. It\u2019s like reverse nepotism or something.\u201d <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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