Ciarán Hinds says Liam Neeson wanted a go at being a film star, but that he never had that in his DNA.
That is the difference Hinds sees between the path Neeson took and the one he has settled into after a long career that has now taken him from the stage to an Oscar nomination and back again. Hinds was nominated for best supporting actor in 2022 for Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, and he said the recognition brought with it a run of offers he did not especially need. A couple of them, he said, were the kind of action-film parts that cast him as the old crabby guy. He was blunt about that period: “A couple of things came after the Oscar nomination – to turn up in action films playing the old crabby guy. Ha ha! No, I don’t need that. There are proper adventures to go on.”
Hinds said that over the last year or two he decided to slow down and choose projects he found interesting, with his agent working closely from a shared sense of taste. At the time of the interview, he was filming Walk the Blue Fields in Co Wicklow, and he also mentioned the Claire Keegan adaptation by Conor McPherson, with John Crowley directing. The wider moment matters because Hinds is in the middle of a busy stretch that also includes Midwinter Break, Is This Thing On?, East of Eden and Cry to Heaven, after a high-profile run that followed Belfast. He framed the work as selective rather than ambitious for its own sake, saying he was not chasing perks.
The clearest example may be The Three Urns, directed by John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck, in which Hinds plays an Irishman travelling from France to Ireland with the ashes of his late wife. He said he was more likely to see himself in that kind of project than in the action roles offered after the Oscar nod. And because he was at the heart of the film, he asked if he could suggest people he would love to work with. The production agreed to bring in some of those names for a day or a day and a half, long enough to do two scenes. “It was good for me to be able to ask Jim Norton or Sinéad – people that I’d worked with – and say ‘Would you make your way up and get a decent bed for the night and decent dinner? Then we can go to work.’ It was really lovely,” he said.
That answer points to where Hinds is now: less interested in proving range, more interested in choosing work that feels worth the time, the travel and the company.
