Colourful



There's something about Gabriel Byrne's natural colour scheme that I find distinctly alluring.

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Maybe it's the very, very dark hair. Thick, dark hair. It makes me think of virility and strength.

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Maybe it's the little flashes of grey at his temples. I read: Strength, coupled with maturity.



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Maybe it is the natural pallor of his skin. It looks delicate, fragile, and yet also reassuringly lived-in.

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Maybe it is the languid set, the limpid blue of his eyes, which seem to unexpectedly flash and reflect light at moments that truly, take my breath away.

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So he already has a - for me - fatally attractive combination of colours. Add to that a dark green jacket and a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and I'm away with the fairies.

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I suspect I am not alone.

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A Voyage Around Gabriel Byrne - Part I

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Gabriel Byrne meets a woman walking her dog in the street. She is evidently someone he knows of old. She's very pleased to see him and asks, "So, you back now?"

Gabriel looks blankly at her, scratches his chin. You can hear fingernails on his his beard's stubble. "Back?"

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"In New York?"

He's so sweet. Part of his brain is thinking, No missus - this is in fact a cunning holographic image of me. I'm actually in Florida right now, drinking a fruit-juice cocktail and wishing I knew how to swim in the hotel pool. Another part of him is wondering what kind of an auspicious moment is this, his first time back in the city for five months, and he can't understand a word anyone says to him. She sees his consternation and pats him encouragingly on the tummy, laughs, sets him back at his ease.

"My house got flooded. Again," he says lugubriously. She looks at him with an expression that suggests she would like to stroke his hair, pat his head, and make it all better. She settles for touching his stomach again. (Now, what is THAT all about?) The woman remains undauntedly optimistic, proclaiming the flood to be a wonderful opportunity for him to stay in a luxury hotel in the city. Gabriel looks faintly perplexed and she says "Isn't that what you wanted to do? A little bit? Right? No?"

"Maybe. Just a small little bit."

"See now, when you came home, you realised you wanted to come home. You have to watch that stuff now. You think you want something and it's taken away .. uh-oh!"

I myself have no idea what the dear woman is talking about but Gabriel laughs congenially, generously, with that sonorous chuckle of his that I love. She touches his belly again. It's beginning to bug me. "Well, you know," she says. "It's tough. It's tough to be you."

"Tough to be me?" More laughing, more patting of the belly. Who is this woman, a personal trainer or something? Gabriel turns his attention to the dog, which looks a bit like the one from Madigan Men. It licks his hand appreciatively. I imagine Gabriel remains unperturbed, even if he were to find his hand covered in slobber.

"Well, you know, keep in touch .." says the woman eventually. "We miss you!"

"Yeah," says Gabriel, sounding a little wary. "I miss that old torture chamber ..." Oh. I see! So she IS a personal trainer then. I bet she owns a ... ~shudder~ a Gymnasium. They kiss amicably and part.


The film starts properly with the dawn of a new day over Brooklyn, New York City. At that time of the day, even the graffiti looks attractive.

"I think I've always had a desire to move. To travel. I left home for the first time when I was eleven. Then I left again when I was twenty-two, to live in Spain. Then to London, then to New York and then Los Angeles. So in one way I've always been moving around."

Gabriel is walking through his neighbourhood. He's wearing black. He looks fantastic. The leaves on the plane trees that line the street are just beginning to turn, rifling in the backs of their closets and fishing out their Autumn clothes. It looks peaceful, gentle, a nice place to raise a family. The dying leaves are beautiful against the red and brown brick and the black wrought-iron work, of his house.

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He shows us around the inside. It's a fairly typical Brooklyn house, or what I imagine such a place to be, anyway. One climbs the steps to go inside then has to go back downstairs to the dining room, the kitchen and the french windows to the back garden. Everything is in disarray. You see this gradually, as Gabriel slowly and methodically opens the wooden shuttering. The noise of his actions echoes. Light begins to spill into the room, in exactly the same was as the film itself begins to illuminate this fascinating man.

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"This is the second flood that I've experienced." he says, unable to keep the frustration out of his voice. He walks on into his house. The floorboards creak ominously under his weight. It seems cold and dark, noises bouncing back harshly from hard surfaces. And empty. There's no furniture in the rooms he surveys, no paintings on the walls, no rugs on the parquet floors. Imagine, after months away filming, to come home to this desolation. But his mood lightens. You can hear him smiling as he talks about his son, Jack. "My son said to me, 'I think there's a Biblical curse on you, Dad. It's like God got up today and said, 'Things To Do: Put out trash. Sort out the Middle East. Flood Gabriel Byrne's house ...' "

Gabriel descends his stairs. One room is packed with cartons and boxes and pictures are stacked up against the furniture rail, for all the world as if he had just moved in yesterday. "But in fact it's something I can laugh about now," he says. "In a kind of and empty, bitter way." This is typical of Gabriel's wry sense of humour. I need to tell the reader that it's important not to take him too literally. Reading his words here is very different from hearing them. He stands for a moment and surveys his life in boxes. There is a big framed 1930s travel poster, all bright colours, saying "See Ireland First!" Not this one,

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- but one like it. There's something else I suspect is a theatre poster, judging from its shape and size. I used to have many of these on my walls when I was younger. I spot a film poster from Dead Man.

"I suppose you could call it 'Post-Apocalyptic Nouveau Style'," Gabriel says speculatively, leaning against the central breakfast bar in his kitchen. It's a well-appointed space but looks hardly used. There are quarry stone tiles on the floor. A fantastic stainless steel range. I would saw off my left hand with a blunted steak knife to get a kitchen like this, but all there is are newspapers, brown paper take-out bags, newspaper and an old coffee cup. You can see his back yard behind him. A garden table and chairs, a folded-down sunshade. Mothballed, unused, waiting for the owner of the house to return.

You suddenly realise, Gabriel Byrne lives on his own.

"The minimalist, ravaged, pillaged look!" he says, waving his arms around expansively. He's playing the part of a New York realtor all of a sudden. "It's actually a very difficult and sophisticated look to pull off .." And after a moment he grins and snorts a little at his own joke. I melt into a small and decidedly unsophisticated puddle on the floor.

Next we have a shot of Gabriel dispelling the myth that he is a technophobe. There he is, reading and/or sending a complicated-looking text message. (Laura Linney had to teach him how to use Skype or some such when he was filming Jindabyne in Australia. He called it "that screen thing.") According to Richard E. Grant, Gabriel Byrne could bring a whole new meaning to the words 'all thumbs', but here he is, doing it. With his thumbs no less.

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I feel almost proud of him. I can just imagine his children badgering him repeatedly to use technology to stay in touch. My own children did the exact same thing to their father.

"I didn't go to New York to become an actor," he says in voice-over. "I went to New York because my ex-wife was from there. I went there because I wanted to see more of her."

And see more of her, he did indeed. We see a photograph of Gabriel and his children. It's one of those kitchy, staged, faux-Victorian sepia things that was all the rage - at least in the UK - in the 1980s. Gabriel is dressed as The Sheriff, with a big gold star on his lapel. How fitting! His son has on a hat that is several sizes too big and a black ribbon tie. His little eyes are squeezed tightly closed. Gabriel's daughter, perched on his knee, has the toddler's typical expression when faced with something outlandish. "WHASSA, DADDA?" The picture is significant because it was my first really intimate view of him as husband and father, and not as actor. Millions of households all over the world have photographs just like this - imperfect. Eyes accidentally shut. Impatient, blurry outlines of small, wriggly children.

Gabriel Byrne: Hollywood Superstar? Nah, he's just an ordinary bloke. Who does ordinary-bloke things, at least sometimes. The photo is pinned, almost carelessly, on a big felt-covered noticeboard, the kind that is criss-crossed with ribbons, which hangs above Gabriel's desk. Next to it is a water-marked Polaroid of his family, including Ellen Barkin, and a coupon for a free newspaper. His furniture is all antique and a bit battered and none of it matches. I like that.

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"But - as these things happen - somebody said, 'Oh, as you're here ... you might as well go and audition for that thing..' and I said, 'Oh, OK.' So I read the script and thought, this is a really interesting script and I went in and auditioned for it. Then I was ready to go home, and they offered me the part. And that was Miller's Crossing. It dictated a lot of what happened to my life, after that."

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It's as if Gabriel has never really been master of his own destiny, not until relatively recently. I often perceive him as a man borne hither and yon on fate's unpredictable currents and rip tides. Just like the rest of us, really. We see some fascinating back-stage footage of Miller's Crossing being made. Gabriel almost jumps in too early, in front of the 'ACTION!' cue, which would have wrecked the shot. It's from the part where Tom barges into the ladies' bathroom and gets slapped about a bit by Verna, but he doesn't seem to mind too much. The camera focuses suddenly on actor John Polito, who is asking "I'd like to know his opinion, of what's it's like to work in America, this Irishman - " the camera pans to Gabriel. Again, that shy but expansive smile, the gentle laugh. My heart jumps about a bit. Does a little Irish jig in my chest.

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Back to the present. Gabriel's desk top. Oh, God! The mess! He, or someone close to him, is a doodler. A sheet of paper next to his blotter is covered in big hearts and stars and long, flowing lines. It makes me think of his teen-aged daughter, or indeed of mine. "Let's see if there's anything else in here that's worth digging out," he says, sighing, and opening the big central drawer of the desk. Anyone who has one of these desks will recognise the mess in the Central Drawer. Directly underneath where you do most of your writing, the Central Drawer is always a repository of the most important - and the least significant - things that cross your desktop at any time. There is no really obvious sign of a computer. Anywhere. Or a typewriter. I wonder, does he do it all in long-hand? And give it to someone else to type up? Or does he have a laptop secreted somewhere about his person, just like his alter-ego Paul Weston? He yanks out a sheaf of papers nearly an inch thick. It's covered in neatly-typed names and addresses.

"Ah. Here's a good address book." How would he define a bad one, I wonder? He licks his thumb and leafs through it. Mick Jagger. Jeremy Irons. A quick impression of Jeremy Irons. Paul Newman. Charles Haughey. Gabriel pauses, looks up, into the middle distance. "I remember my mother saying, 'That man's on cortisone.'" Just the tiniest flex of his vocal chords, and Gabriel becomes a 50-year old woman. His own mother. "That man's on cortisone. That man's in a wheelchair."

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Cut to the first in a series of home movies made by Gabriel and Ellen of their children. Their daughter, aged about two, runs to her grandmother. And now you hear the real Mrs. Ó Broin speak, and you know instantly where Gabriel gets his voice from, and you see her face, and know who he takes after. Her smile is identical to his. Juxtaposed against a back-drop of the everyday hustle and bustle of modern day New York, we hear Gabriel reading a passage from his autobiography, which begins, "It is early morning. Always I awake to hear my father downstairs." Fifty-five year-old images from Ireland butt up against 21st century New York. Surprisingly, it works. Because this is what Gabriel is - a man from 1950s suburban Dublin, with his Irish memories and language and thoughts and emotions, butting up neatly against what is arguably the most vibrant and multicultural city in the world.

Now Gabriel is walking these vibrant streets. I get the sudden impression that he does this a lot (I have nothing to base that on, I admit. Just a feeling.) He is bundled up against the cold, and looks around him speculatively and yet with a certain reservation, almost nervousness. His stride is long for a man of his stature. He moves swiftly. Blink, and you miss him.

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"I actually have a very good long-term memory, like a lot of people, and a very bad short term memory." (Not after filming two seasons of In Treatment you haven't, matey, I find myself thinking. ) "I register a lot of things during the course of a day and then if I don't keep a note of them, I instantly forget them." Gabriel is talking about his journal. His diary-keeping. He tries to define time. He tries to define the present. He talks about how transient it is.

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"Now is a peculiar .. it's gone! The idea that people will stop the present, and the past, and concentrate absolutely on THIS moment ... I don't know if that's possible. I think I try to do it though, by writing down what I feel at the end of the day. Even if its only two or three lines." Byrne is modest. "It's a vain effort to keep the present. And looking back over entries I made twenty years ago - I was reading one the other day - I find I am still preoccupied with the same stuff ..." We see and hear Gabriel in a very old interview, which I think may have been broadcast on RTE at the height of his fame in Bracken, where he reminisces about his childhood experience of going with his mother to fetch milk from the farm.

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You can see and hear how, even as a young man, he was already sifting and sorting and cataloguing and re-visiting his memories. I bet you that even then, he already harboured ideas about putting it all into a book. He's very, very young. His hair is short, and his accent is long.

And - bang! - here he is again in the here-and-now, sitting on a park bench. He's watching the world go by, drinking coffee from a cardboard cup. I think of the John Lennon song, "Watching the Wheels" -

I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go -

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"I rarely think about tomorrow," says Gabriel suddenly. He drags me back into his film. "I'm more susceptible to the past than the future." Another home movie, this time from behind-the-scenes during the shooting of The Usual Suspects. Kevin Spacey does his impression of Al Pacino, through a mouthful of coleslaw, as a special present for Gabriel's sister Breda. Huge amounts of giggling. Gabriel looking extraordinarily handsome, even for him, in a blue shirt and with his hair all over the place. Voice-over again. "I went into acting primarily, banal as it sounds, to improve my social life." Back in Brooklyn (?) now. The film jumps all over the place like this, which looks untidy as I am recounting it here, but which works PERFECTLY when you see it on the screen. Gabriel is sat in a dining room, which is beginning to look like it is getting ready to receive people. A large number of matching wine-glasses are laid out on a sideboard behind him. Or, I've just realised this, it may not be his home. It could be a restaurant, or a bar. Gabriel used to own a restaurant in Manhattan, "Balitore", it was called. In Third Avenue. A million years ago. Oh, now I'm doing it. Swinging backwards and forwards in time, in Gabriel's life, in my own.

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"Somebody said that you could be an amateur actor, and that you didn't have to be any good; that if you took some elocution lessons you could get into an amateur drama group. So I knew this guy who used to drink in one of the pubs, who everyone said 'spoke very well'. Which meant, actually, that he spoke through his nose, with a Dublin 4 accent - "

I think Gabriel is referring to a Dublin post code. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_4

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Gabriel imitates the accent. It's like someone with two pencils stuck up their nose. " - and he had a great way of talking. And I said to myself, if I could learn to talk like him, then maybe I could get into the theatre, so. He gave me a couple of lessons. I went down to this local drama group, the Dublin Shakespeare Society, because it sounded very grand. And that was the beginning of it. A very exciting time. Because I discovered that I was among people who felt like I did, and loved the theatre in the same way that I did. So when people would ask me, 'So, what are you up to?' I'd say things - very pretentiously - like, 'Well. We're on tour at the moment ...' which meant we'd all get into a big mini-van and go down to Enniscorthy for the night. And maybe eight or ten people would come out to see these things. You'd get the kind of applause that would be like a mixture of relief and derision at the end. And that was it. And then it was off to the pub."

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He gives his wry smile. I think, Mighty Oaks, From Tiny Acorns Grow. Look at you now, man.

Now we're looking into Block's Drug Store, the storefront of which is a truly iconic image from the East Village. Gabriel is in there getting his hair trimmed by an affable Italian guy. Women in the shop, getting manicures, simper quietly in the background, throwing surreptitious glances over their shoulders at the smart fellow in the barber's chair. I hold my breath as the scissors set about Gabriel's locks. Sacrilege.

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A handful of mousse gets worked into the mix somewhere along the line. Not the last and many more to come, no doubt. Hey! Why haven't L'Oreal snapped this fine-looking Irishman up for their advertising campaigns? I don't understand it. Oh. Oh. That's right. They went for PIERCE BROSNAN INSTEAD. Huh. Harrumph.

They pass the time of day. The barber likes Irish women. Gabriel tries to fathom why the man married and then divorced two of them. Which brings us neatly into the subject of Women In Gabriel's Life.

Áine. Áine. Back in the Seventies, reporting from the annual Jacob's Television award (Gabriel was honoured with this award in 1979 for his work on Bracken.) She is young, extremely beautiful, confident and well-spoken. "I met Áine in 1976. I was still a teacher at the time and she was working at RTE. She was a major television personality. I entered a new phase of my life when I met her. She turned up at my squalid apartment on the South Circular road with two poodles. At two o'clock in the morning. And a small little handbag. And that was it." Gabriel's voice is very quiet. There are longer pauses between his sentences. I feel the breath catching in my throat. "We actually lived together for ten years and she encouraged me and said, 'Look - you've a choice. You can go back to being a teacher, or you can try and do this full time.' "

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The camera roams over some beautiful black and white framed photographs of Áine and Gabriel which are evidently on display in pride of place, somewhere in his house. It's a very intimate moment, and I feel uncomfortable. Áine O'Connor is dead. She died in 1998, two years after directing her old lover in an Irish-language film he wrote the screen play for, Draiocht. Against a backdrop of clips from The Riordans and Bracken, we hear Gabriel talking about how at that time there were only two television programmes that anyone in Ireland would watch - The Late Late Show and The Riordans, and it was Gabriel's first encounter with people crossing the line between reality and fiction, where people would say to him, in all seriousness - "You'd better look out! If they find out about you and that Maggie then you'll know ALL ABOOT IT!"

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"They'd say things like that to you and you'd think they were joking. But .. they wouldn't be." Gabriel looks faintly shocked by this notion. Of people not quite knowing the difference between real life and television. Back in those days of course, with television in the UK and Ireland still in relative infancy, this is not so surprising. Nowadays, bizarrely, with the rise of so-called Reality TV, there ARE no differences between real life and television, a fact even Gabriel is not immune to. There is no sign of a television in any of the interior shots of his home, by the way. If someone were to tell me he doesn't HAVE a television, I should not be in the least surprised.

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Gabriel crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. He looks like a man set up to walk all day long - he has his easy, rolling stride, capacious bag slung casually over his shoulders, ready to receive gifts of newspapers and secondhand books that he acquires on his travels. I bet he has a notebook and a couple of pens in there, too. The sunshine makes the worn metal of the bridge gleam a little, washing over the rust patches, as if it were made yesterday. People coming towards Gabriel spot the camera dogging on his heels and move seamlessly to one side without a second glance, as if a celebrity with a film crew midway on the Brooklyn Bridge is de rigeur, something they see every day. And indeed maybe it is.

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"When I crossed the Brooklyn Bridge I thought: Ah, this is the New York that I've been looking for. This is the New York that I always thought existed, but which I could never quite find." Birdsong. Streets with no traffic. "It's a very still kind of area. You can hear the birds - " (he says 'boirds') "in the morning. That's not a sound that you associate with New York."

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Gabriel sits on a park bench reading a paper, then walks along a sun-dappled street with bikes chained to rails and a woman pushing a pram. As he walks he is singing to himself. I refuse to believe his (and that of many of his fans) assertion that he cannot sing. Maybe he simply is not comfortable singing other people's songs, in front of other people. I'm telling you, his voice is sweet. "It's also where my kids go to school. I bought the house because I wanted to be near where my kids went to school. So when they got out of school they didn't have too far to travel." This brings a lump to my throat. Again. I'm starting to get used to it. "One of the really great things about being out here is that it's so quiet, that it feels like it's almost in the country." Gabriel is standing in his back yard, and you can hear him fingering his keys and the small change in his pocket. It really is so quiet.

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"I do feel that in Ireland I am constantly colliding with the past. Whereas in New York, I have a kind of a clean slate. I'm free to compose my own present whereas in Dublin I am constantly being defined by my past. And that's nothing against Dublin, that's just the way. It's my relationship to that city." Gabriel walks again. Now, suddenly, he's in Dublin. It's after dark. You can hear the fabric of his trousers moving over his legs. He passes the Olympia Theatre. He's in Dame Street again. "In this place where I went to school, one day there came a man. All I can remember about his talk is he said 'hands up the boys who would like to be priests?' He had shown us pictures of Africa. Men with straw hats, riding on horses across rivers. Smiling black kids. I thought - that looks like a good job. I think I'll volunteer for that."

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Gabriel could only have been - what - ten years old? The recklessness of the decision that was to impact upon his entire life is not lost on me, the mother of an intelligent, highly imaginative boy of that same age. I cannot imagine allowing my son make such a choice. It was based on pure fantasy, as were several of Gabriel's later choices. "I remember we had to go to this society, where they would help young priests. My mother had to go in and ask for help - financial help, 'cause the seminary I was going to was in England. And help was given. No problem." Gabriel takes a deep breath. "Because that was the thinking of the day. That to be a priest was to be in some way marked by ... by God. And so at the age of eleven I left Ireland on the mail boat. One December night, I remember."

Did he miss Christmas with his family that year, then? Again, I find this inconsolably sad, and hard to comprehend.

Gabriel's voice is partly laid over footage of him walking in a busy shopping area of Dublin. I notice him noticing a pretty, blonde woman. Of course I notice. He walks past brightly lit shop windows and you can hear a busker playing. But then you cut back to Gabriel in his kitchen. Dining room. Or maybe he is in a restaurant somewhere. He never seems to be still. The film's editing emphasises this. One moment he is walking, the next he is static, but not for very long. And the 'present' is just the filling in a sandwich made of the past. His story is like a temporal Oreo Cookie; a Jammie Dodger. "I had the distinction of coming back to Dublin at fifteen and a half years of age, being a failed priest. Nothing much was said, one way or another. I started working in an insurance office, as a messenger boy, making three pounds a week."

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The viewer is treated - no, I'm not sure that is the word. 'Subjected', maybe - to a series of very early contact sheets of head shots that Gabriel must have had done when he was very first considering acting as a profession (head shots are not cheap, even now.) He looks awkward and very much less than comfortable in these ancient pictures. Young. Mustachioed. Concorde collars so typical of the 1970s sartorial disaster that was 'fashion'. But at least he did not have hip-length hair. One has to be grateful for small mercies, however tiny they might be. I wonder for a moment how many times Gabriel Byrne has been photographed since then, and my mind begins to collapse under the strain of trying to calculate it.

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"I worked in a bar. I worked in a gay bar. One of the only gay bars in Dublin. I was an apprentice chef. Then I became a plumber. Probably the worst plumber in Dublin. I had a boiler suit and I used to go to work every morning with sandwiches ..." Another head shot. It stands out. This time he is wearing one of those brown leather and sheepskin flying jackets. He looks fed up, pensive - dare I say this? - broody. Half of his face is hidden in shadow. Ahh, I think. I recognise him now. Now THAT'S Gabriel Byrne. "And the I got a job in one of the hospitals in Dublin, in the morgue. It didn't last for very long." He laughs at the humour in his tone and the camera cuts.

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This whole sequence is cut very fast, like a list, Gabriel reeling off a never-ending sequence of job after job after job. "I got a job repairing bicycles for a while, which I knew nothing about, either." He pauses for a moment and looks searchingly into the air. "Why I never found a job that I was any GOOD at, or that I had any kind of capacity for, I don't know." He sounds a little like the exasperated parent of an intelligent but rather aimless teenager.

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And he asks this question in genuine ignorance. He doesn't seem to understand, even with the benefit of hindsight, that all the qualities he has now are the same he had then, and all of those qualities make him superbly qualified for being an actor. Does he not get that, then? I scratch my head in puzzlement, and start the film up again.

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"I sold encyclopedias for a while." Gabriel tells the story of his friend Carl Daley, an encyclopedia salesman, who's stock-in-trade catch phrase was "You've gotta think positive!" It is in this kind of storytelling that Gabriel really excels. Every character he recalls and describes has his or her own voice. Their own intonation, and accent. "Myself and this guy from the North of Ireland tramped around all these suburbs of Dublin selling encyclopedias. In order to entice people into buying these encyclopedias - your spiel was, you had to say with as much sincerity as you could muster, 'You do realise how important education is for your children?' So you'd guilt them into saying, oh I don't want my child to grow up being an ignoramus. I'd better sign up for a hundred-and-forty four A-Z Encyclopedias of Knowledge." I notice he says "ay-to-zee" instead of "ay-to-zed". He's been in America a long time, after all. Gabriel looks like a naughty schoolboy at this point, thinking of his deception, the struggle to keep a straight face. It must have taken all of his fledgling skills as an actor to persuade people who really, really could not afford to do so, to invest in an expensive set of reference books. And especially so, given the absolute irony of his own situation at the time - uneducated, drifting, an academic failure. Going nowhere. He might as well have said, "Get these books for your little-ees missus, else they'll end up like me." Gabriel's roguishness didn't end there. "As an incentive then, you would say, 'Of course, you realise, you don't just get the Encyclopedia. You are also entitled to two years free supply of Tool and Spade or Field and Stream!' Magazines in which people in Clonshaugh or Killester had no interest whatsoever. So. I did that for a while. I began to see that that kind of picaresque lifestyle was getting me nowhere. I had a kind of Road to Damascus moment where I thought: I'd better go back to school..."

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A Voyage Around Gabriel Byrne - Part II

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The scene changes again, and the sound of sirens and the yellow taxi cabs tell me we are back in New York City. Gabriel is sitting in the window seat of a coffee shop, once again watching the world go by. His own voice, from nearly thirty years in the past, is telling us about the first time he went into a cinema.

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"We walked past the guy in the red uniform and into this room that was just FULL of noise and sound and light. I remember a ship was just passing across through the dark as we went in. I'd never seen anything like it. And I was hooked (he says it as though it had three o's in it - 'Hoooked') from there on. But I never thought I would ever end up on the screen, never. I remember once I was passing by St. Patrick's Park. I was on the mitch from school. I saw them making a film called 'Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx.' And it was Gene Wilder's first or second film. He had to eat an onion sandwich in St. Patrick's Park. And if he had it once, he had it twenty times. I stood there and I said, 'God, how can they do this for a living?' But .. that's what I'm doing for a living now." A huge grin nearly splits his face in half and you realise how happy he must have been to finally, FINALLY, find his true calling.

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Abruptly, in the way of this film, we are in California. Watching the filming of the opening sequences of Paul Weston's attendance at Alex's funeral. These, it turns out, were amongst the last scenes to be shot for season one of In Treatment, probably because all of the episode takes place on location rather than in the studio. The set is bustling with people in T-shirts and baseball caps. Equipment, cars, other actors. Gabriel is showing us Paul, freshly arrived at the crematorium, looking mournfully out at the scenery before turning and crossing the parking lot. It was - perhaps you remember - the Sunglasses Scene.



We see that seminal Moment of Hotness from an entirely different point of view, with crew scurrying backwards in front of Gabriel, hefting cables, ushering the guy with the steadi-cam, moving the sound boom arm. A helicopter is overhead. Somewhere a big truck is reversing. It takes about ten seconds. And then we're suddenly ... on the beach.

The film moves suddenly but seamlessly into another gear entirely. We've done with talking about his past. "Most of the time we spend in a kind of 'acted' universe. There's our own private monologue that goes on, our - kind of - soundtrack that we carry around with us. And then, our interaction with other people. Which, for the most part, is about wearing some kind of a mask. Acting in film and theatre is actually not what people tend to dismiss it as - a form of untruth - but is a form of truth. When it's done at it's best. Because that's what acting really is. Acting is about trying to tell the truth about human nature. That's what great writing is about, too. It's an attempt to tell the truth. To speak the truth. Comedy does that too, in its own way. But most of our interaction is based on the fact that we are not actually telling the truth."

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We see Gabriel sitting on the step of his location trailer in between shots for In Treatment. He looks tired, exhausted even, and is having a moment on his own. He rests his head in his hands. "I think that most of us are really afraid to confront who we are. And sometimes as an actor, you're forced to confront who you really are in ways you mightn't want to."

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Cut to, incredibly, Gabriel Byrne being admonished (albeit gently) by the In Treatment director. He, Gabriel, had left out a whole chunk of dialogue somehow. He holds his eyes in his hands, saying "I know, I know." A makeup artist is trying to brush colour onto his face. He seems not to notice. He's talking to the director and to two other actors about his motivation for a certain scene - you always think that an actor asking about his motivation is some kind of joke, a cliché. But no. Here he is, doing it.



We're in Gabriel's present, now. "I'm doing a series that HBO have been shooting for the last five months and I play the leading role in it. I play a psychologist. I've been in every single scene, every day, for five months. And ... " Gabriel pauses, trying to think what to say. He's scratching his cheek insistently, distractedly.

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For a 58-year-old man who is utterly knackered, he looks superb. "Basically, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. Five months. Twenty five pages of dialogue every two days. So it's very, very ... uh, intense." We see some of In Treatment. Paul and Gina. Paul is getting very angry. They are talking about Laura. I remember just how struck I was with what Gabriel did with this character, and what it has meant to me since then. Cut to Gabriel in the back of a car, being driven to location. He looks at his watch - but has forgotten to put one on that morning. "How we doing on time there, Doug?" he asks, trying not to sound anxious. They are a few minutes late. Perhaps Gabriel Byrne doesn't like to be late. He isn't even too sure where it is they are filming today. The perils of a busy life there, Mr. Byrne.

In the make-up trailer. Gabriel is doing something extraordinary to his hair - running both hands rapidly through it over and over again, to completely and utterly send it into disarray. I shout at the screen: "Let me! Let me!" The hairdresser is stoical, reflective. "He loves to mess it all up, and then I get to fix it again."

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"I feel like - what's his name? The guy from the Three Stooges? Shemp!" says Gabriel, doing a fairly scary impression of the Stooge who used to emit a piercing high-pitched squeal and slap himself repeatedly in the head. Back on the set. "Action!" Dialogue between Paul Weston and Alex's father, who is mistaking Laura for Paul's lovely wife. And, "Cut!"

"Oh, please, let this be the end. Oh, Jasus," says Gabriel plaintively. Melissa George laughs gently at him. He puts his glasses back on like Horatio Caine in 'CSI: Miami' and tries to take in just one more line from the page of script in his hand. "Today is the second-last day. It's a very conflicted feeling. Really desperately dragging yourself the last couple of weeks and then also realising that you're probably never going to see any of these people again. You do get to know people on a film set in a way that you wouldn't normally because there's something about the dynamic of it that encourages people to reveal themselves." Gabriel's tone suggests that he thinks this is a good thing, an interesting thing.




He's seen resting between takes, but this time with a succession of people coming and talking to him, telling him stuff, making him smile or laugh. You see him bidding people farewell, embracing them, kissing them. "And of course the notion of having a common purpose together, and the ins and outs, the everyday dramas are intensified, perhaps in an unreal way. It's like being in the circus as far as I'm concerned, you know?" And there he goes. He bids one final farewell and walks away from his trailer, still wearing the black suit and tie he was wearing in the scenes (I have a theory that they saved lots of money on Paul Weston's wardrobe just by using Gabriel Byrne's own clothes.) His tie is loose, his collar undone, and he's carrying a little paper bag and a plastic cup of iced coffee. And grinning ear to ear.

Cut back into his past again. A photo of him on the set of The Usual Suspects with Jack, who is playing with a clapper board and looking utterly adorable. Not unlike his father.

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"Well, after The Usual Suspects," says Gabriel, "I went through what I call my 'Hollywood Period'." A street sign shows us that that is where we are now. Hollywood Boulevard. "I worked and lived in Hollywood for four years. I made films that were commercially successful. I did them for various reasons. I did them because I wanted to experience what it was like to be a Hollywood star. And I also needed and wanted to make at the time, money." Cut to some old footage of Gabriel driving in his car through Beverly Hills. Tinny music is playing on his car stereo. It's not exactly "We Have All The Time In The World" by the Bobby May Orchestra, but it is something like that.



"Evenin' all," says Gabriel, laughing, sounding just like Dixon of Dock Green. (Hey, Google it.) "We're on our way to the famous Beverly Hills Hotel. One of the most famous hotels. In the world." The camera looks out at the broad California highway, lined with palms and then pines. There's a letter needs posting on the dashboard of Gabriel's car, reflecting off the windshield. "If you look in there - that's where Marlon Brando used to live - " Gabriel points an elegantly manicured finger. "He shared a house in there with Montgomery Clift. And James Dean used to have a room in there. Gene Kelly used to live there - " Gabriel grins broadly at whoever it was filming him, whoever he was showing the Hollywood sights to, and I wonder whether it might have been one of his siblings. In voice over again, the present-day Gabriel says: "I discovered a life of ease and comfort and security and all the things that go with being in hit movies. I got quite into that for a while. In a place where you live where there are no seasons, time gets warped and years can go by very quickly. Which is one of the reasons why I left LA; because I realised I'd been there for five years and five years had gone by (he clicks his fingers for emphasis) like that - "

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Some mournful accordion and guitar music overlays a variety of establishing shots of LA. I get lost in a daydream about playing music with Gabriel Byrne. Him on accordion, me on guitar. There are shots of empty blue skies over empty grey carparks, of the city's famous garland of smog, of back alleys pregnant with last night's trash. Of the nightly stream of traffic like a glittering silver snake on a bed of black pitch. "It's a restless city. Los Angeles even more so than New York, is a city where people come TO. It has to exist for those people. You can't exist in places outside it. It exists for people who out-grow, who out-dream or who out-fantasize their own places. And the sense of freedom and light and being able to reinvent oneself is very strong there. But there is also a sense of melancholy that pervades the place. And it is also Tir-na-nOg. It's a place where people think that if they get successful and wealthy enough, then they're not going to die."

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Cut to the view from a hotel window. White, Spanish-style buildings topped with interlocking terracotta tiles. I am transported back very suddenly thirty five years to my own childhood in California, when we lived in a house built like that. It is evening. The television is on. It's an old movie with Phil Silvers in it, from the 1960s. My Californian childhood looms even larger all of a sudden. The camera looks down on the inner courtyard of the hotel with it's pool and its loungers, currently unoccupied, and I suddenly wonder if this is the Sunset Marquis, where Gabriel was staying when he was interviewed for the British edition of GQ magazine, 16 years ago. He's a creature of habit, after all. It could be. Gabriel sits on the end of his bed, delighted with the television, an innocent, almost childish smile of pleasure on his face. I chalk this up to further 'evidence' that he has no television of his own. "Sometimes I think that the nature of moving from one place to another can be quite addictive. I don't like to stay in any one place for too long at a time, And yet, at the same time, in the various cities that I go to, I have a routine that I immediately fall into."

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We see Gabriel on the phone, lounging on his bed. We see him reading a newspaper, bits of it slung on the floor at his feet. His luggage is dropped behind him, unpacked. He sits at the hotel room desk, writing. He gazes out of the window. He looks entirely comfortable, entirely at home.



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"I have a routine in LA. Places that I go to, restaurants; in London, Dublin, I know exactly where I want to go and what I want to do in these places. I like the anonymity and the impersonality of hotel rooms." He's in a different hotel room now. "I like that you can live in them and not belong there and leave again. Travel has lost its excitement for me in one way, I still feel a kind of compulsion to move .."

"KEEP WALKING, GABRIEL!"

It is Ellen Barkin's voice, unmistakably. She is making a home movie of her husband and his mother Eileen as they take a walking tour of New York. Ellen pokes gentle fun at the man. Her affection is so obvious in her voice that it is almost painful. Obligingly, her husband does a little dance. The Twin Towers loom in the background. Gabriel narrates from the vantage point of a decade or so in his own future, as his past self clowns in front of the camera like any other tourist would do, pulling faces and larking about. "I would have been very happy to continued in London and to have worked occasionally in Europe and England and Ireland. But I did Siesta in Spain and I came to New York, to see Ellen."




There follows some more home movie, this time of Ellen and Gabriel goofing around at a table in a pavement cafe together. The humour in their relationship is very, very apparent. As is the physical attraction. I have never, ever seen Gabriel act like this, in any of his films that I have seen so far. It's like I have crossed a sort of Brooklyn Bridge of my own, and discovered a Gabriel Byrne that I always thougt existed, but which I could never quite find.



This is one part of Gabriel's story that I have a problem in understanding. How did it all fall apart? Unusually, the question remains unanswered. "She'd just done a picture called The Big Easy, which was about a year after we met. It became a big hit. And then she did Sea Of Love with Al Pacino and she became really well known and then Miller's Crossing came out for me and for a moment we became the couple who people said, 'Wow! they're one of those acting couples!' Truth is, we hardly ever talked about acting at all." Gabriel says quietly. "I suppose she found me exotic. I found her exotic." He has a very small hint of a naughty grin on his handsome face. (Members of my family have to take me to the dinner table in a bucket after seeing that.)

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Cut to footage of their middle-of-the-night wedding in Las Vegas. "This is it!" he's saying. "Oh no, oh no!" she's wailing. "We got married in Las Vegas at three o'clock in the morning," says present-day Gabriel. They both look pretty damned good, considering. "I think in the same chapel that Elvis got married in. It was all kind of exciting and it felt like it wasn't conventional, which ist wasn't. There was a part of me that still kind of longed for ..." Gabriel looks a tad embarrassed at the admission he seems about to make, that he wanted a traditional wedding with all the trimmings, and he veers off sightly. "I knew I was a long way from the banns being read from the pulpit on a Saturday morning, and a long way from getting married at St Stephen's Green church. But it felt right at the time."

"Ellen, do you take Gabriel as your wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward- "

"Yes!"

" - for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do you part?" Much giggling from Ellen, who had jumped her cue.

"I do."

"You may now kiss the bride." Gabriel needs no further invitation.




A while later. Jack is born. There he is - very, very new to the world indeed - in his father's arms. "He has the hiccoughs," explains Gabriel. "Too much whiskey. Oh yeah, whaddya want now? Oh, you're a bit cold." Gabriel covers his son gently with the blanket he is wrapped up in. Jack looks distinctly unimpressed. A year later: Jack in the bath. (I bet the young man is even now cursing his parents for allowing this footage out onto the world's stage, just when he is trying to impress young women. In the bath tub, for christ's sake. It's the kind of thing I use as blackmail with my own children. "You'd better behave or else I'll show all your friends these pictures of you in the bath!") It is Jack's first birthday. I guess he's having his evening bath. Ellen is talking to him. "Oh Jack-y boy," she says sentimentally. "It's the end of the day on the day of your first birthday..." and she turns to look at the camera, and you know it must be Gabriel holding it from the expression she gives him, because that expression is one that can only be given between people who are parents together.

More footage. In a restaurant. Gabriel is bouncing Jack, who is now four or five, on his knee, and is singing to him. I tell you, the man CAN SING. I know about these things. But he collapses in giggles and very nearly throws his son onto the floor. He follows him down and the camera concentrates instead on the serious gaze of a beautiful little girl. For Romy has by now also arrived on the scene. She takes the opportunity, seeing her father and brother distracted, to steal her brother's Happy Meal box.

Two or three years later. Gabriel, behind the camera, is teaching her to sing, 'She is handsome/ she is pretty/ she is the belle/ of Dublin City' whilst she buckles up her shoes. "I'm dressed!" she shouts proudly, and her father cheers gallantly. Here's present day Gabriel again, seemingly unconcerned by - or more possibly obivious to - the notoriety his showing his home movies of his kids will bring him, now they are both teenagers. "I had also at that time bought a house in Ireland. So we moved between New York and Ireland because I was determined that I was not going to lose contact with Ireland. And she (Ellen Barkin) fell in love with the country. My kids early years were spent going to and from Ireland."

Some footage, which I think is being shot by Ellen Barkin, of Gabriel working on Into The West. The beach scene from near the end of the film. The director is feeling rather fragile, and shoos Ellen away. Gabriel pulls a secret 'shock/horror!' face at her, his partner in crime. It looks extremely cold, especially when Gabriel is being sprayed with water from a contraption more normally seen to be used to douse roses with bug-spray in your garden. There's some footage of Ellen and Gabriel being interviewed for a kind of behind-the-scenes documentary about Into The West and again, the attraction between them is palpable.



Some pantomime now. Mrs. Ó Broin, a little nervous in her first speaking part on international film, opens the front door to her son's home and says her line. "Oh! They're expecting you! Come in! Madam?" And the camera sees Mrs. Byrne, International Sex Symbol and Movie Star, cigarette dangling sluttishly from her over-rouged lips, a pink bathrobe with a fox fur draped over her shoulders. "Oh great, she says. "I was just taking him his breakfast, so why don't you come with me?" and she expertly negotiates the baby gate on the stairs, taking a tray piled with an assortment of unlikely looking articles up to HIM.

Gabriel's in the bed, hidden behind an issue of Hot Press with Bryan Adams on the front cover. The entire bed is shaking convulsively. "Here's your breakfast," says his wife, cigarette jiggling madly between her lips as she, too, begins to crease up with laughter. "What're you laughin' at?" But Gabriel is incapacitated by giggles. I watch in astonishment. This footage is SO private, it is SO personal; it shows us an utterly unseen side of the man. I feel grubby, voyeuristic. But I find that I, too, am giggling. Like yawning, uncontrolled mirth is highly contagious. You hear Gabriel's voice from the behind-the-scenes Into The West film again. Throughout the whole of Stories From Home he seems to be running to keep up with himself, finding himself in three different places at once. He says something complimentary about Ellen. You can hear he has a stinking cold, and you wonder if the beverage he's supping from the china mug is actually a Lemsip. Ellen is not taken in by his display of sincerity. Gabriel looks at her for confirmation and the two of them burst out laughing at the overt seriousness of what he has just said. "That was the biggest load of bullshit I've ever heard!" she remarks fondly.



We're somewhere else now. It's raining, an echo of the 'wet' scenes at the end of Into The West that we have just seen. Gabriel is walking. He has a big newspaper tucked under his arms and, even though it is raining, he has no umbrella or even a hat. He stops. He is being distracted, he is being seduced. His attention turns away from the camera and onto the brightly lit window of a bookshop. You can almost hear him making noises like Homer Simpson does when looking at a box of fresh doughnuts.




"I don't think that actors have the same ability to examine the nature of the human behaviour that - say - a writer has or a psychologist has, or an artist. But what they do have is the power to interpret that. In acting, or in art, you try to approach a kind of truth that's free of all social manners and restraints and expectations. To reach somewhere that's really pure. Because it is so difficult to achieve that in real life. I think that maybe part of the fascination that people have with actors is that we're fascinated by the human ability to transform ourselves into other creatures. We're fascinated by that at some primitive level. How do you do that? How do you actually become somebody else?"



Now, he's really onto something here. Throughout the whole of human history, events have been influenced by people pretending to be other people. It is the way in which our society functions, it is how we interact and relate to other people. Religion, Politics, Entertainment, Trade and Commerce - all of human activity is governed by the need to impress yourself and your ideas upon other people. And how do you do this? By pretending to be someone - or some thing - else. My mind is reeling now. I begin to feel that if I cannot just sit down and TALK to Gabriel Byrne face-to-face about all these things spinning in my head that his talk have galvanised, then I will simply burst. Perhaps that is why I am sitting here transcribing his film virtually word-for-word, so that other people can at least READ what the man has to say and then, maybe, discuss it with me instead.



A clip from Miller's Crossing plays. Tom is about to kill Verna's brother, for real this time. "The character of Tom in Miller's Crossing was a watcher. You had to understand - or at least you had to be seduced into thinking that you knew what was going on in Tom's head. The reason he's able to kill with such impunity, and have no conscience, is because it's debatable whether he actually has any empathy. For anybody."

In total contrast, the scene from Jindabyne where Stewart first comes across the body in the river. Stewart's horror and anguish, and his utter fear, are palpable. "Whereas in Jindabyne, the character who I play there is a man caught up in a moral conflict, who has witnessed an act of violence. Awful violence." The scene between Stewart and Clare at the truck stop, where they fight, plays out. "For Ray Lawrence, his idea as a director was .. 'Did you get that? Did, did .. did you sat that line? OK. I'm after a mood here, I'm after a moment. I'm not after precise dialogue.' "




This reminds me of what Gabriel was saying earlier about his vain attempts to capture a piece of 'now' in his diaries. "And so the dialogue was very loose and sometimes unscripted." Back to Miller's Crossing. "The Coen Brothers on the other hand - their use of language - was very powerful on Miller's Crossing. They had written the screen-play in the same way that maybe a poet constructs a poem. Where each word has its place and each sentence has a rhythm. They were mimicking, I suppose, the style of Chandler, with the screenwriting style of those gangster pictures of the thirties and forties. Everything had a rhythm with it. So you couldn't really interfere with the rhythm by ad-libbing in anyway. So if that happened, they immediately called 'Cut!'. They'd say, 'There's no "the" there. It's "a". Not "the". ' "

Miller's Crossing footage: Marcia Gay Harden throws a spectacular stage punch, and Gabriel stumbles backwards into a trolley full of glasses. "I suppose you think you've raised hell!" she says caustically, sashaying past him. Byrne steadies himself on the upholstery of the ladies powder room. "Sister," he says. "When I've raised hell, you'll know it."




Which is foreshadowing.

For scenes from a much darker theme in Gabriel's life.