Son rising: Lorcan O'Toole
(from The Independent)
He has his father's rakish attraction, and passion for acting, says Rhoda Koenig
Published: 29 March 2007
"I was going to be called Luke," says Lorcan O'Toole, smiling, "but, right before I was born, my father had a dream in which he was told that I should be named Lorcan." Now 24, he will appear as Lord Byron in Dianna Lefas's The Last Nightingale, a play about the top three on the Romantic-poet hit parade. Mitch McGowan directs the production, above the Gatehouse pub in Highgate, London, where Byron, Shelley and Keats used to drink. Although O'Toole is eight years younger than the character he plays, "he really looks like our idea of Byron," McGowan says. "Beyond that, he has, more than an aristocratic air, a quality of unassailability." He also has the paternal blue eyes, although his voice shows the inheritance of an American mother and a life spent on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in Ireland. He was born in Dublin and grew up in Connemara: "That's my favourite place," he says. "You don't find people there who are bitter and self-loathing."
To paraphrase Byron, O'Toole didn't wake one day to find that his father was famous. "It was more like a cat looking in a mirror," he says of his gradual awareness that other people's parents did not also appear on movie screens. He first thought of taking up acting when he was 12 and in a Tom Stoppard play at Harrow. "My father just had two words of warning - he said: 'It's hard.'"
Lorcan O'Toole studied drama at New York University, but left after a year. "You didn't get to do any acting until the second year, and I felt I had had enough, at Harrow, of writing essays on Ibsen. I think the only way to get better is through experience." He was also at odds with the American approach to motivation: "The drama teachers would say, 'Lorcan, just ride the river,' but I've always wanted to understand things psychologically, to see the mechanics behind the acts." O'Toole was slow getting started, a problem he attributes to, "having a young face and an older demeanour. The different attributes didn't add up. But now that I'm a bit older, things are beginning to come together." Acting has more than lived up to his father's description. "You need to be sensitive in order to act, but you need thick skin to keep going." The support and commiseration of other actors, he says, helps to make the struggle bearable. "We all march together as a tribe." Last year he had his first film role, in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, playing the grandson of Joan Plowright, an actress he admires: "You can see her thinking."
While waiting to be discovered, O'Toole has been writing screenplays and is trying to get backing for a feature called The Night Child, about which he is reluctant to be too explicit. "It's about terrorism in London in the present and future." Being his father's son is, he says, "60 per cent good, 40 per cent bad if it's an acting role, the other way round if it's another aspect of the business". Peter O'Toole has given him advice on technical matters, but otherwise, says Lorcan firmly: "We're from different generations, we're different people, and, although we share a certain energy, we have different styles. I'm not following in his footsteps. I'm making my own."
After the play ends its run, he will start on Knife Edge, a film directed by Anthony Hickox, and starring Patrick Bergin, Hugh Bonneville, and Andrea Corr, about a man scheming to drive his wife crazy. He plays the wife's brother, "a bit of a rapscallion". Can he manage the stretch from playing Byron the rogue? He laughs. "Who knows? I might play a scoundrel next."
'The Last Nightingale' runs from 31 March to 14 April (www.upstairsatthegatehouse.com; 020-8340 3477 London)