[1] "It's a delightful kind of surprise that people like it," Gabriel Byrne says of HBO show In Treatment, which screens weeknights at 11.30pm on SoHo. A weekly omnibus screens on Sundays at 10.30pm. Photo supplied. Gabriel Byrne looked exhausted.
Three days earlier, he had wrapped production on a season of In Treatment, the drama in which he plays therapist Paul Weston, and as he sank into a sofa at the HBO's mid-town headquarters, the Irish-born actor still had heavy bags under his eyes.
"It's a doggedly difficult role to play," said Byrne (61), who is in every scene of the show. Each episode was filmed on a Queens soundstage in about two days, a punishing pace that forced the actor to master his lines breathtakingly quickly: by the end, he was up to 12 pages in 30 minutes.
"I didn't experience the winter in New York at all," he recalled. "I arrived in the dark and I left in the dark, and all day I was in a room in a chair. It taught me an awful lot about perseverance and stamina and focus and concentration, and not staggering under the weight of it."
It was a gruelling experience to undergo for a quiet drama that attracted a small audience in its first season, despite its many critical plaudits, which included a Golden Globe win and Emmy nomination for Byrne.
But the actor speaks about the series in ambitious terms not usually applied to a television show.
"The themes that are examined ... are reflective of our culture, our society, in a larger context," he said. "In my opinion, it deals with the loneliness of the kind of communities that we live in.
Everything that we took for granted, the stable pillars of society - that's no longer there. So uncertainty produces fear and anxiety."
Each episode plays out like a half-hour, one-act play featuring Byrne and another actor, just sitting in a room, talking. The drama builds through the slow revelation of the real trauma behind the patient's turmoil.
"There's something about seeing people bare their souls and seeing that this person you're baring your soul to has just as many warts as you do - it's fascinating to watch," co-star John Mahoney, whose last television role was playing Martin Crane on Frasier, said. "I had no intention of doing another series, but you get offered a part like that, and you just don't turn it down. It was exhausting and exhilarating at the same time."
The unusual series, based on a popular Israeli show, captured a small but devoted following in its debut season in the US. On average, a little fewer than 2 million people watched each episode, according to the network.
The way that In Treatment was scheduled, with a new episode debuting each night of the week, may have been daunting to viewers, said Sue Naegle, HBO's president of entertainment.
"Even if the numbers don't improve greatly, it's still a success for us. When people like this show, they're obsessed with it. Because of Gabriel's performance, they feel a real intimacy with him. It's voyeuristic, and you feel you're part of the experience."
For Byrne, the role gave him the chance to explore masculinity in a way different from how it is usually portrayed in contemporary culture.
"There's no posturing with him," the actor said. "He's intensely vulnerable, and he is a very committed professional, but he's a damaged human being, and he struggles with life, and he's engaged with his own weaknesses. I like to examine that, as opposed to the stereotypical notion of the strong man who knows the answer to everything and knows how to act in every situation."
But the burden of such an intense part took its toll.
"Listening on-screen is tremendously difficult and really de-energising," Byrne said. "And listening is what this role is really all about: showing you're listening, and yet not over-showing that you're listening. Because the big trick of it is to try to let the audience see what you're thinking, and not let the patient see what you're thinking."
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