My involvement in that film [In the Name of the Father] came about almost by accident. The well-known Dublin director Jim Sheridan and the actor Daniel Day-Lewis used regularly to come to hear me doing gigs at a venue called The Speakeasy in which at is now the fashionable part of Dublin, Temple Bar. Three hundred people would squeeze in every week until they would have to close the doors. You'd see the sweat running down the walls! Daniel is a big blues fan and an extremely down-to-earth bloke, so we hit it off immediately. Jim's a true Dubliner like myself, so we knew where the others were coming from all the time. We'd frequently pop next door to Fat Freddy's pizza place for a bite, a chat and a laugh. My ex-wife Jo would laugh at Daniel when he'd say he wished he had my talent, given his own prodigious talents. At about the same time, my cousin Pamela Scully, who's a big Samuel Beckett fan and was then running a theatre company in Dublin, invited me to take on the role of the blind character hamm in a staging of Beckett's Endgame she was producing at the Andrew's Lane Theatre. I agreed on the condition I could wear dark glasses, sas I was not confident I could successfully carry off the pretence of being blind if the audience could see my eyes. After a dinner for my birthday, at which the guests included both Jim and Daniel, I invited them to join me at a gig by the man I rate as the greatest harmonica player in the world, the West Virginia country star Charlie McCoy, who was playing in Dublin at the Break for the Border venue. As I had anticipated, I was totally blown away by McCoy's performance at that gig, but Daniel and Jim would have none of it and kept telling me I was far better than McCoy, although I tried to explain the differences in our respective styles. We got into a bout of harmless slagging of the 'What do you know about music? More than you know about acting.' variety, during which I told them that I was rehearsing for the Beckett play. They were obviously quite surprised, never having thought of me as an actor. (Neither had I till then!) Nor did I suspect that they would have other plans for me. About a week later, I got a phone call asking me to meet Daniel and Jim immediately in the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham to discuss a possible part for me in a film for which they were holding auditions. I had heard nothing about the film other than that it featured a prison, so I went along, presuming they had a part requiring somebody to play a harmonica in jail. I foresaw myself having my head shaved, being dressed in regulation prison uniform and perhaps wailing a few lonesome tunes on the harmonica. This prospect quite excited me and I was eagerly looking forward to it. But when I got to the set Jim straight away presented me with a script and told me to take a walk around the garden and read the part of Joe McAndrew. Never having read a script before I was quite surprised and nervous about this proposal. When I eventually came back onto the set he asked me to read the script with Daniel playing opposite me, but being a total novice at this I found it quite hard to follow the script and act the part at the same time. Seeing how much I was struggling with this new discipline, Jim took the script away and suggested I improvise. Immediately I laid into Daniel with the cameras running. We improvised about six minutes of dialogue and when we finished, everybody on the set seemed positively shocked with my performance, so I jokingly asked to much laughter, 'Right, so do I get to play the harmnonica or what?' Some days later I heard through the grapevine that I was going to play the role of Joe McAndrew in In the Name of the Father, a film about the Guildford Four and their unjust treatment at the hands of the British authorities. Some time afterwards I received a call at home from Jim himself to confirm he was indeed giving me a part, but not the one I'd auditioned for because Gabriel Byrne wanted it. I had no qualms about playing second fiddle to such a talented actor as Gabriel, and I was quite happy to accept a more minor role, with or without playing the harmonica. The part I was now told I was going to play was that of an Englishman, so I began to fret about my ability to put on a convincing English accent, and I agreed with Jim, after some discussion, that a Cockney accent would be the easiest for me. So off I went to the voice tutor Peter Gunn, who advised me to study the accents of Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins. I then brought a woman over from London who came to all my gigs. Whenever I'd meet her I'd try to write down phonetic script for the way Cockney's spoke. I was really taking this acting lark seriously, all for the mere possibility of saying one or two lines! I'm told I even started to introduce my songs in a very odd English accent! I'd drop down to the set nearly every day, realising for the first time that what a slow business film-making is. Each day I expected to be called on to do my bit but that did not happen yet. Then the phone at home rang once again. Jo answered, to find it was Jim, so, assuming for some reason that I was going to be dropped, I signalled for her to say I wasn't in. I had suddenly decided that I wasn't an actor after all and it wasn't going to work. Luckily, Jim twigged I was there and got me on the phone to offer me the part as originally planned, because, for some reason, Gabriel was not going to do it after all. Jim wanted me immediately on the set in Merrion Square. when I got there I started apologising to Jim for not having brought any clothes and saying that I hadn't had time to wash my hair and so on. He laughed and roared at me, 'Don, this is a film set we have here. We've got a whole fucking wardrobe of clothes and make-up and everything you need! We've done this before, you know!" And that's how I ended up with a fairly prominent role in In the Name of the Father. I was fascinated by the tricks they used on set to give me a very convincing three-day growth of beard and to alter some very ill-fitting clothes to suit my build. When I eventually started to shoot scenes I got stuck into it with gusto, and I got so animated during one scene that I lost my watch. I was thrilled when Daniel threw his arms around me and said, 'Don, I know you're going to bring something very personal and very special to this film,' Given my own family background I could readily identify with the film's anger at the tragic, real-life injustice it dealt with. The authorities can fuck us all up and there's so little the weak and powerless can do to redress the injustice. Obviously, the jail scenes I featured in brought me back to my own time in prison. In fact it was during one of them that I discovered that this acting lark could be rather dangerous. It was a scene in which two English prisoners threaten me over breakfast, and when I hit one of them it sparks a minor riot. While we were rehearsing this scene I spotted the stunt coach teaching one of the actors how to wield a snooker cue, getting him really psyched up for the scene. This brought me back to my street-fighting days and since I was to be in that same scene I became quite nervous about it. My fears proved justified, because when the guy with the snooker cue went to hit the wall above my head as he was supposed to do, part of it caught me on the side of the head. Down I went, genuinely out cold on the ground, with my head bleeding. The nurse on standby on the set was rushed into action and brought me to with smelling salts or something. My first thoughts on waking up were that I'd been so badly injured that I'd lose the part, but it turned out to be less serious an injury than it had seemed at first. All in all I found playing the role a very emotional experience, and when they had finished filming my role, I collapsed into the arms of Daniel Day-Lewis and sobbed. Daniel thought it was because, in his own method-acting approach to his part, he appeared to really turn against me, but the real reason I broke down was because the scenes had helped me partly to reconnect with what I had repressed for so long. Having to act tough in the film reminded me of what I was doing in real life to avoid my deeper emotions. I had dropped my defences for maybe only as much as ten minutes, but the effect was startling and there was a great deal of healing in what happened. Shortly afterwards Daniel made me a present of a book called The Drama of the Gifted Child, which tells the story of a female therapist who got in touch with her inner feelings only when she took up painting. I suppose I've tried to use my songwriting to achieve a similiar effect.