Show features cast from 13 countries

The star has nothing but praise for the film’s director.

By BRIDGET BYRNE

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON — Paddy Considine was at a point when he felt he wasn’t going to be acting for much longer.

Then he was offered the role of Timofey Berezin, a man who knew his life wasn’t going to last much longer.

Considine expressed his reluctance, telling director Scott Burns, “I don’t think I can do this. I don’t think I have the energy to do it. I don’t care about acting. I’m at the end of my rope.”

His doubts about the merits of acting had been exacerbated by unsatisfactory work with an inexperienced director, whom he politely chooses not to name. Never mind that Burns, producer of this year’s Oscar winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” also was a first-time feature director.

Considine said he recognized instantly that he is “obviously an intelligent man.” He went with his instinct and signed on.

The result of the collaboration between the British actor and American writer-director can be seen in “PU-239,” adapted from Ken Kalfus’ short story set in opportunistic post-Soviet Russia.

The HBO drama about Berezin, a nuclear facility technician dying of radiation poisoning who tries to secure his family’s future by selling weapons-grade plutonium to an inept gangster, Shiv (Oscar Isaac), premieres Saturday (8 p.m. EST).

“I must stress how good [Scott] was as a director,” says Considine as he chats in the bar of a chic London hotel, looking like an ordinary bloke who has just wandered in from the street.

The 33 year-old actor is famous in England for independent collaborations with his college chum, Shane Meadows. His most recent international credits are “Hot Fuzz” and “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and he’s just filmed another HBO drama, “My Zinc Bed,” with Uma Thurman and Jonathan Pryce.

First moment Burns conducted a rehearsal workshop with him and Radha Mitchell (who portrays Timofey’s wife, Marina), Considine thought, “God, I’m going to be all right. This guy can direct. I don’t know if he knows he can, but he can, he certainly can.”

At his house on one of the canals in Venice, Calif., the 45-year-old Burns certainly projects the energy and intellect to disperse doubts. And on that day, Hollywood trade papers announced that he is developing, in collaboration with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, an HBO series about international aid workers.

Informed of the comments Considine had made about him back in England, Burns returns the compliments to the actor he has admired since seeing him starring as an illegal Irish immigrant struggling to support his family in the 2002 movie “In America.”

“He was more drawn to the part of Timofey that’s a father and husband,” Burns says, noting the determinedly noncelebrity lifestyle of Considine, who lives with his family in the British Midlands, where he was born.

“I think at one point in our conversation I said, ’Maybe some of the antipathy that you have toward the filmmaking process, and how toxic it can be, can be feelings that you sort of transpose into Timofey’s feelings about the people who run the [nuclear] facility and the corruption of that.”

That seemed to work for Considine, Burns continued, “and I think he was really able to get in touch with some anger and frustration and the sense of being overwhelmed by the system.”

Burns discovered Kalfus’ short stories, which included “PU-239,” while browsing in a Greenwich Village bookstore when he was working as a writer on the short-lived 2000 TV series “Wonderland.”