Born and raised in Dublin,
Liam Cunningham
speaks in a stream of consciousness that often has no discernible beginning, middle, or end.
He talks with his hands and taps his feet, peppers his anecdotes with friendly comments and catches his breath just long enough to take a drag on his unmistakably scented electronic cigarette.
They are not very popular in the studio.
"They smell like you took the paper that comes with a shirt from the dry cleaners and put it on a burner,"
says DB Weiss, who, with producing partner David Benioff, gave Cunningham select roles in Game of Thrones and now in
The Three Body Problem
, Netflix's brand new premiere,
a heady science fiction series based on a trilogy of novels by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin
.
In it,
Cunningham plays Thomas Wade, an outspoken spy master who leads a team of physicists
chosen to save the world from a very slow but sinister alien invasion.
Unlike Davos Seaworth, the emotionally vulnerable gentleman Cunningham played on
Game of Thrones
, Wade is gruff, bellicose and reserved, an enigmatic authority figure, whose backstory left even Cunningham with questions.
"Very little is known about him, and everyone who saw him is wondering, '
What's his story?'"
Cunningham said on the patio of an Austin hotel during the
South by Southwest
Film Festival , where the series had its world premiere.
"You have the UN Secretary General on the other end of the phone and people do what he tells them, and you wonder,
'Who gives him that authority?'
And the funny thing is that I never felt the need to talk to him. The guys - in relation to Weiss and Benioff, that is - they never offered and I never asked, what's probably not a good thing to say, and probably should say to everyone, is: 'I know
everything about him, but I'm not going to tell you
."
Breathe.
He snorts.
Cunningham entered "GOT" in the second season: he was Davos Seaworth, the emotionally vulnerable gentleman who knew how to generate thousands of fans.
Cunningham, 62, with blonde hair and bright blue eyes,
came to acting relatively late.
He worked as an electrician until he was 29
, and spent part of his twenties in Zimbabwe bringing electricity to rural communities.
"Do you know the song
'Wichita Lineman' ?" he asks, referring to
Glen Campbell
's 1960s country hit
.
That was me, but in Zimbabwe.
For an Irishman, a pale-skinned leprechaun from Dublin, he was mind-blowing." For a time he worked in a national park, "the size of Belgium and with 16,000 elephants."
That was new and exciting, and when he returned to Dublin and once again drove from job to job in a small yellow van, he found that he missed the burden of his life in Africa.
Always interested in film and television,
he saw an advertisement in the newspaper for an acting school and thought he could take up a new hobby
.
When he started getting roles in the theater, he began to feel more like a vocation.
He fell in love with the process and how it fed his natural sense of curiosity.
“It was problem solving,
‘how do we make this work?’
I found all of that fascinating.”
From electrician to being under the stage lights
Then it was time to break the news to his family.
"I love my poor wife," he says.
"I said,
'We might go hungry for the rest of our lives: I'm about to say goodbye to a well-paying, semi-government job where the only way you're going to get fired is if you shoot someone
.'" And I left him. ".
She gave him her blessing
.
She then told her father, a practical-minded dockworker.
Cunningham soon found stable work in film and television, landing roles in films such as Alfonso Cuarón's
A Little Princess
(1995), Michael Winterbottom's
Jude
(1996), and alongside Cillian Murphy in
The Wind That Caresses the Meadow
(2006). ), by Ken Loach.
Benioff and Weiss fell in love with Cunningham when they saw him in
Hunger (2008),
Steve McQueen
's film
about the hunger strike of Irish Republican Army martyr Bobby Sands.
They especially liked a long scene, shot largely in one continuous take, in which a priest played by Cunningham tries to convince Sands to end his strike.
In "The Three Body Problem," Liam plays Thomas Wade, an outspoken spy master.
"It was one of the most exciting things any of us had ever seen before," Weiss said, sitting next to Benioff.
They
brought Cunningham into Game of Thrones starting in the second season, and Davos became a fan favorite of that series.
When the writer-producers returned to Cunningham for
The Three-Body Problem
, they almost didn't count on him.
"We were like Dustin Hoffman at the end of The Graduate
," as Benioff said, begging Cunningham, who had already committed to a film, to join his project.
"I got a call from Dave and Dan, who had obviously done their research,"
Cunningham recalls.
"They said, 'You're not going to go with those guys, you're going to come with us
.' And I said,
'Yeah, okay, thank you.'
I hung up the phone, and then the professional part of my brain kicked in. "
I started and I thought,
'That was a bit stupid, this could be a week of work or a couple of days
.' I didn't even ask them about the project."
A great storyteller
As Cunningham's colleagues describe it, hiring the actor doesn't just mean getting a performer who's fiercely focused when the cameras are rolling.
They also get
a tireless storyteller for downtime
.
"He loves to tell long stories
," says Benioff.
"The other night, we were having a drink and he started telling a story about Thailand. Halfway through he stopped, looked at us and said
, 'Where was he going with this?'
And we said,
'He lost the plot
. '
"He also does a number with a napkin, which Dan and I got to watch."
An act with a napkin?
It sounded intriguing.
"I'm not going to do it," Cunningham said.
"It's one of those things where you have to have a few drinks.
It's awful and it lasts 15 minutes
."
Jess Hong, who plays physicist Jin Cheng in the series, shares several scenes with Cunningham, as Wade tries to convince Jin to bring his skills to the fight to save Earth.
She says Cunningham's stamina also comes in handy when it comes time to get down to business.
"It's incredible to see him work because, as soon as the camera rolls,
all that crazy, almost childlike energy is concentrated on the lens,
" he said in a video call from London, where he was promoting the series.
"On the way to the studio, he talks in the car about decisions he might make, and when we rehearse he talks, trying to figure out the best way to collaborate. Those
are always the most creatively rewarding moments, when you have someone who really "He wants to bring the work to its full potential
."
As soon as he decided to try himself as an actor, he got work in "A Little Princess" (1995), a film by Alfonso Cuarón.
But Cunningham appears more intuitive than systematic, especially when choosing roles.
"I try not to analyze it too much because you set parameters for yourself, and if you analyze it, your parameters get a little smaller each time," he says:
"You start to find a niche and that means repetition, and I get bored very, very easily
. "
One gets the feeling that
he would rather talk about something other than acting.
For example, barbecues
.
He had just gone to one of Austin's most popular stops, and was still excited about the experience.
"I went down to the room where they cook and it looks like the engine room of a submarine," he says.
"And you can tell that the head chef loves his job. It was great to see him, the pride he felt and how they prepared everything:
six hours for the pork ribs, eight hours for the beef and 12 hours for the brisket
. He did it everything, it was very entertaining. Delicious smells."
He's going to save the world, but first he's going to try the ribs.
And, of course, he'll tell you how good they are.
Source: The New York Times