Waterloo Shoe Repairs in London cuts keys “while u wait”, and while Robert Sheehan waits for his keys to be cut we sit in the nearest pub. The Irish actor has locked himself out of his flat and has had to borrow his landlord’s master to make a hurried copy; he’s also due on stage at the Old Vic theatre round the corner in about an hour (where he’ll perform one of the last nights of his well-received run in The Playboy of the Western World), and the conflicting duties have left him a little flustered.

“I tend to get myself in a bit of a flap every once in a while,” says the 23-year-old, craning low over a table in the pub, taking off a heavy woollen cardigan and immediately putting it back on again. “A dread, a time-watching dread, about getting to the theatre on time. But once you step out on stage it’s pure joy, man. Unblemished joy.”

Discounting some amateur theatrics when he was growing up in County Laois, the Old Vic’s revival of John Millington Synge’s play – in which Sheehan has been playing the titular “playboy” – marks his first professional stage job. He’s mostly been in films and TV shows to date, accumulating good notices as a male prostitute in the Channel 4 adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding trilogy; a sword-wielding altar boy in the Nicolas Cage blockbuster Season of the Witch ; an oily superhero in E4′s teen sci-fi show Misfits. This Christmas he’ll appear in a new BBC adaptation of Mary Norton’s story about industrious little people, The Borrowers. Sheehan plays “Spiller, a James Dean-style Borrower… or at least a Borrower who’s found a tiny leather jacket and decided to adopt the attitude that goes with it.”

Yeah, that fits. Key-cutting fluster receded, pitched right back in his pub chair now, Sheehan comes across as a likeable, nonchalant chap – fluent and witty. On theatre work: “It’s a strange commodity that we push as actors on a stage. Essentially, shouting for two hours.” On former co-star Cage: “A delightfully curious human being.” On the unusually high number of roles he’s played that have required him to do racy things on screen (sex worker in Red Riding, sexual compulsive both in Misfits and 2009 Irish film Cherrybomb): “I don’t think you can consider yourself an actor if you’re gonna say no to stuff like that. Sore subject matter is all part of it. That’s why people make movies, isn’t it? To explore the darkest and lightest aspects of humanity… Not that I had these thoughts at the time. I was just getting gigs, and not really taking life altogether seriously. I still don’t.”

Proof: there’s a moment in Playboy when his character is discovered hiding in a side room. The audience can’t see him, only one of Sheehan’s co-stars can, so he has been doing everything he can, night after night, to get this unfortunate co-star to laugh on stage. Showing “half an arse cheek”, some nights ago, almost did it. Tonight he’s considering a full moonie.

Source: Guardian.

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