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Well … if I’m being totally honest, not all of me made the promise. I made it, but not all of me made it. The bit of me that makes all the right decisions, that fella made it. You know this, God. You know the fella who at the end of the night when someone says, ‘We’ll walk up the road to Doheny’s, sure they’re open till half two,’ and the other fella is telling you, ‘Go, go, go on, there’ll be craic!’ That fella who’s in the front seat is shouting, being barely heard, ‘You’ve been up to Doheny’s a thou- sand times and it’s always the exact same craic – don’t bother.’ But the booze tends to quieten him down no matter how high-pitched he screams. The booze puts him on mute. But he’s the fella I should be listening to, because he’s looking out for not only you and me but everyone else around as well. He’s got everyone covered. Unsurprisingly then, his favourite role so far has been a theatrical one – Richard III in Trevor Nunn's Wars of the Roses. "Four Shakespeare plays turned into three Shakespeare plays with about 1,000 couplets written by John Barton and Peter Hall to fill in the gaps. So truthfully, I couldn't tell you which bits in my soliloquies were John and Peter and which bits were Bill. I worked really, really, really hard on it mostly out of fear of being laughed at. You have the likes of Mark Rylance and Ralph Fiennes, actors of an incredibly high calibre, doing Richard III and in comes Rob, the Irish whippersnapper. And the truth is I was f**king good . . . I was absolutely terrified. And I learned to negotiate with fear, in a way that put me streets beyond having any kind of fear on a TV or film set . . . I was good at it because I refused to pontificate with the language. I just tried to make it chat, tried to make it f**king banter, to instinctively bring those comedic comedy beats to it." It’s easier to meet someone when you’re famous but harder to conduct a relationship with someone. There is someone (significant) now and it’s been an interesting learning challenge for me; a confrontation with the self and noticing old patterns emerge and then watching them dissolve. At ground level, relationships have become easier for me because I know that what I’m fighting with is myself. Suddenly you’re five years old and you’re having the same feelings you had when your mother told you to go to bed early and, all of a sudden, you’re playing the role of your five-year-old self, and your girlfriend is your mother, and you might punch a wall because you’re an adult. And so, all this stuff, I’ve really improved upon.” I lived alone but was never lonely," he says. "I worked on the book and didn’t read or watch the news. One day, I was writing in my bedroom, which faces out onto the street, and suddenly a huge protest went past. It was surprising because I’m not on a main road or anything in that part of North London. So there was one thousand or so people, all socially distanced, shouting 'F*** the police’ and I was thinking ‘What the f is going on?’. It had to do with George Floyd and police brutality. But I had no idea, having not looked at the news or social media for a long time. I find the reality that is in front of you and just behind you to be enough."
After a while I yearn for my own, for the craic, for the ease and the fluency of people who speak not only your language, but your cultural language I was definitely more contrarian for a living when I was 20. I thought it probably made me seem more edgy . . . I was very wary of gathering moss. That was my big thing . . . After two series of Misfits I was like ‘Nah! I’m doing something else.’ I had this desire to not allow anything be bigger than me, as in, be beholden to any show. That’s how I thought.” Being able to process those emotions, and the ability to enjoy the bone-deep satisfaction of creation, is what drives him to write most days. Another book is in the works, although he can’t say yet what it will be about. But whether he’s as successful at writing as he is at acting is beside the point, he says. He forgot about the essay style he’d been tinkering with fitfully — for a piece on shadow puppetry, of all things. And instead, on the notes app of his phone, he “wrote a very anecdotal piece in a voice of how I would chat to someone. The story, I suddenly understood, is just what it is in the moment. I tried to make it more like the oral tradition, little rambling meditations.” Informed by the author’s peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters’ streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, and explores the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives.playing a mentally disturbed teen who was convinced his stepmother was poisoning him. His growing stature as an actor combined with his arresting appearance — large expressive eyes and a crown of dark curls — Was he as hard on other people as he was on himself? “Absolutely. In relationships, I had a tendency to be rather selfish at times.” Would he apologise to any of his exes? “I’ve done that. It is a good idea. It’s as much about you as it is about them but, if you’re doing some spiritual housekeeping, I think it’s no harm to reach out.” Even in the early years of his career, there was, behind the youthful confidence, a gravitation toward self-help and spirituality. So he’s the fella to listen to, the Big Fella. The fella who has your voice, God. He’s the one who made the promise. He made it as defence against the other fella. He’s the one who wants everything now now now. Next week won’t do. He wants to taste the forbidden fruit – he’s the Low Fella. He’s the snake. He’s the Devil. And he tempts and he tempts and he tempts. And God knows he likes the drink as well. Because the drink turns up his volume. And down the other fella’s. And we all looked and we all looked at each other, a few rolls of the eyes, few nods and eyes down, one or two smirks. He shtalks away and gets as far as the edge of the graveyard that’s lined with them big, tall bright- green hedges that was made in a lab, and he unzips himself and starts taking a piss. Then there was a few sniggers. Few tuts. The priest’s voice was wobbling – but it had been before, to be honest. My jaw was on the coffin let alone the ground, and my hair was all over the place.
Unusually for an actor, he didn’t go to drama school. He dropped out of college in Galway, where he studied film and television. It was, he recalls, a city where there was “plenty of opportunity” to meet girls. Not that, as time went on, it was always only girls. I don’t know if I was in a position to know the plights of people from minorities [who] may not have been getting the same opportunities I was getting, which is kind of shitty. Robert Sheehan was born in Portlaoise in Co Laois in 1988. He discovered his love for acting when he starred as Oliver Twist in a primary school production. He decided to study film and television at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology but failed his first-year exams after he missed months of the course to film Summer of the Flying Saucer. Robert Sheehan's career Both Sheehan’s and Blindboy’s writing focus on the darker aspects of humanity and both rely on absurdity to try to extrapolate on that. However, when you place both of these writers side by side, Sheehan’s weaknesses only seem greater. There are some stories in Sheehan’s collection that you just wish Boatclub had got his hands on first. For example, the story Funeral, which feels the most directly like a Boatclub pastiche (though there are some shades of the rural menace of Colin Barrett). Names such as Willy Boland and Father Looney Tunes, as well as the subject matter of a vindictive man attending the funeral of his enemy, feel so close to Boatclub’s style and voice that comparisons are surely justified.The alternative, he says, “would be not working on it. I’d be slaving under it for the rest of my life and grow old exactly the same and have people say ‘ah that’s just our Robert, cranky as ever, he’s a character’, when really he was just a sulky oul p***k who never dealt with the way he was.” Unusually for an actor, he didn’t go to drama school. He dropped out of college in Galway, where he studied film and television. It was, he recalls, a city where there was “plenty of opportunity” to meet girls. Not that, as time went on, it was always only girls. “I explored my sexuality, just to see if there were any tinges in a gay or bisexual area, but there wasn’t really for me. I gave it a few tries though.”
The promotion of the book promised humour, which I failed to see. Instead it's filled with constant dark, morbid thoughts - something I enjoy reading, so I'm not complaining.He’s been moved by the response to the character. “Teenage queer people come up to you in tears saying ‘The portrayal of Klaus in the Umbrella Academy was a big part of my coming out or was a very meaningful thing for my journey.’ You go ‘F**king hell that’s lovely’. It’s a great badge of pride.” Robert's acting career started at a young age. When he was just 16, he appeared in the Australian television show Foreign Exchange. This was followed by roles in The Clinic and The Tudors. is the first big one) and, at 16, this precocious, musical (he played the bodhrán and tin whistle) son of a guard left home for seven months to film a television series in Canada. Robert Sheehan began dating actress Sofia Boutella in March 2014. Robert was open about his baby fever during the relationship, but the pair called it quits in 2018. Should the first film take off in the way that's planned, the move to Hollywood is almost inevitable; his co-stars, Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower, are already there. This year he has been over twice so far. "And it's friendlier than you think," he says. "It's all: 'Chad's having a party on Saturday, Ethan's having a barbecue on Sunday, we're gonna do brunch and hiking on Monday…' It's surprisingly easy to plug yourself in."
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