This shrink rap comes with a brogue

By LYNN SMITH

Byrne tends to not look deeply at his performances so he doesn’t get critical.

HOLLYWOOD — If you’ve watched HBO’s “In Treatment,” you’ve seen Gabriel Byrne sitting in a chair, playing therapist to Melissa George’s seductive patient.

“Let’s talk about what’s really going on here. Mmmmm?” he says as the camera closes in on his warm blue eyes boring into hers. He raises an eyebrow. Silence. He crosses his legs. He taps his fingertips together.

Byrne’s Dr. Paul Weston dominates nearly every scene in every episode of the five-night-a-week therapy drama. The action consists mostly of talking and listening, and takes place in one room — either his home office or his own therapist’s home office.

As the first season of “In Treatment” draws to a close this week, rumors abound over the fate of the series which, like the network’s “The Wire,” has a cult following, but relatively few viewers.

Those who like the series love Byrne’s portrayal of the troubled Weston, tempted by a severe case of mutual erotic transference with Laura (George). Judging by the postings on Internet sites, they also love the 57-year-old Irish actor with a signature brogue.

There’s little doubt that Byrne, after a career of small independent films and stage acting, has finally found a star vehicle on TV.

“It’s a delightful kind of surprise that people like it,” said Byrne recently during a short visit to Los Angeles.

Even the HBO-estimated 2 million viewers are more than he’s used to. He admitted he was thrilled to get a congratulatory call from his favorite actress (whom he refused to name), but was also frightened by a New York woman who approached him on the street and admonished, “Don’t you go with that Laura!”

A singular and intensely introspective actor who aims to reveal himself in his roles, Byrne called Weston and the 12-week shoot on a cramped set particularly challenging. His opinions on how he wanted to play it — no props, extended silences, totally engaged — eventually prevailed on set, but apparently not without creative debate.

None of that matters now, he said. “All that matters in the end is that it got done.”

To Byrne, who lives in Brooklyn, Hollywood is like a small village, one he inhabits at the noncommercial edges. After making a splash with “Miller’s Crossing” (1990), “The Usual Suspects” (1995) and his 1999 divorce from actress Ellen Barkin, Byrne said he moved to New York to be close to his children. To get roles in mainstream films, he said: “You have to be in a movie that makes a lot of money. That changes everything. And if you’re not, you go do independent films.”

Anyone who leaves Los Angeles for New York “might as well be dead,” he said.

Byrne worked on Broadway (“A Moon for the Misbegotten”) and with a who’s who of indie directors: Wim Wenders, David Cronenberg, Jim Jarmusch, Bryan Singer, the Coen brothers, Costa-Gavras, John Boorman, Ken Russell and Ken Loach. Even if one of his films was panned, Byrne has almost always received positive reviews in which he was invariably called the “brooding Irish heartthrob.”

Byrne said he’s always been aware of life’s ups and downs, but after he was offered the Weston role, he had a realization about life: It’s all about loss.

“The fact of life is, we lose everything,” he said. “People we love. People who love us. I’ve lost people very close to me. And I’ve lost things I never thought I would lose. I have known failure. And I have known success of a kind. What I wanted to bring to that man was a sense of, at the end of the day we’re all united by our common humanity.”

As young as 12, Byrne had a romantic idea of “escaping from the world” and left his home in Dublin for a London monastery. Eventually, at 29, he replaced the monastery with Dublin theater.

“Acting is also a form of escape from the world,” he said, and, like a monastery, it offers the structure that actors like himself crave.

He never took acting lessons, he said, but learned as he went by making mistakes.

“It’s like if somebody says to you, ‘Here’s wood, I want you to make a table.’ If you were really ignorant, like I was at the time, I had no idea where the legs on the table went. I just went out and started hammering pieces of wood together and people said, ‘Actually, the legs are supposed to be on the bottom.”’

Now, he said, his creative process is about “allowing the camera into yourself. ... What’s important is that you get at the things that can’t really be written,” he said. Rather than “acting” feelings, he puts himself into their service. A mysterious and seductive fact about cameras, he said, is that they “photograph your thoughts.”

For the role of Weston, Byrne said he had to study how to make the act of listening compelling to viewers. In particular, he watched old tapes of “The Dick Cavett Show.”

“I looked at the way he interviewed people,” he said. “He was never over-awed, never judgmental. He was sometimes flustered. He was sometimes awkward. I thought this guy doesn’t have to be perfect, he doesn’t have to have an immediate response. He can actually take a moment.”

Byrne never watches his own performances because he is too self-critical, he said. The only parts he’s seen of “In Treatment” were the clips shown on “The Charlie Rose Show.” If he doesn’t watch, he said his performance “stays in that place where it can’t be attacked in my head. Therefore, it’s like a stage performance. My memory of it is totally protected. As soon as I start to look at it, that shatters. Then I’m full of doubt and say, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’”