Three and Out star Colm Meaney chats with Blockbuster about quality, chemistry and taking chances.
A charismatic character actor who's both respected and popular, 55 year-old Dubliner
Colm Meaney knows a good project when he sees one. Best known to telly addicts for his 200-plus appearances as engineering marvel Miles O'Brien in
Star Treks'
The Next Generation and
Deep Space 9, he's equally familiar to movie fans for playing in features as diverse as
Con Air,
The Commitments and, as a brash, burly and resolutely suicidal Irishman, the darkly comic but emotionally compelling
Three and Out.
"You can tell people what it's about in three sentences," says Meaney of
Three and Out, available now from Blockbuster. "A train driver [
Mackenzie Crook] finds out that if he kills three people in a month, he'll get a golden handshake. He's already killed two, so he goes looking for a third. He finds this guy who wants to commit suicide, and helps him put his life in order before flattening him under his train. And that's it.
"What makes this movie special is that the characters are so well written and well observed. People often ask me what I do in terms of research, but with good writing, you don't need to do that. With good writing it's all there on the page and that was very much the case with this. It was an absolute page-turner."
"You don't find good, original material by playing it safe, and
Three and Out has a very unique tone. That's what attracted me to it in the first place - it wasn't like anything I'd read before. It has a wonderful, bittersweet quality, it's very funny, and extremely emotional too. I remember at the initial table reading of the script, we were taken by surprise by how quickly we came to care for the characters. That's when I realised we were really onto something."
Dividing his career between intimate, independent projects and fully loaded Hollywood blockbusters, Meaney reveals which of the two he favours. "I suppose it would be films like
Three and Out because I really like the pace. On
Three and Out we shot maybe five or six pages a day, and that's a good pace to work. The big ones can be such a drudge, because you sit around for endless months. I don't think that's conducive to good work. When you get a bit of momentum going, you want to keep it up and running."
Chemistry between co-stars, adds Meaney, is equally key to a positive working experience, and though he and Crook are very different people, as actors they were on the same page. "Mackenzie is a very introspective, calm, quiet and sensitive man," he explains, adding with a laugh, "I think I'm probably none of those! It's not about our individual personality traits, though, rather who we are as actors, and we both recognised and responded to the material. We read it and we got it and again that's a testament to the good writing, and also to what a good actor Mackenzie is."