Colm Meaney finds home on ‘Hell on Wheels’

By Luaine Lee

McClatchy Newspapers

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

Actor Colm Meaney is a man without a country. Sure, the Dublin-born actor, who played Chief O’Brien on both “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “The Next Generation,” has lived in Beverly Hills for 15 years.

But when you ask him where home is, he pauses. “It’s becoming Spain, I think. It’s kind of happening that way; we’re building a new house there so I think that’s going to become our main base. I still have my house here ... and I love the house here and my wife loves the house here too.”

Meaney has two daughters, a 27-year-old with his first wife and a 7-year-old with his second wife, Ines Glorian. His younger daughter attends school in Spain.

As he explains it, this internationalism has caused more than one snafu. “My wife is a designer from Paris. Most of her background is fashion but she’s designed for theater and film as well. We met on a Western in Spain. My wife is French with a green card, my daughter was born in Spain but she’s traveling on an Irish passport, so we said, ‘Look, we’ve got to get married to sort this out. In October we had a big wedding party in Spain.”

If Meaney finds himself all over the globe, he’s also all over the screen in shows like “Soldiers of Fortune,” “The Commitments” and “The Damned United.” Currently he’s costarring on AMC’s “Hell on Wheels” as the cunning railroad baron, Doc Durant.

“I’d heard about the pilot. Everybody in town heard this was a great pilot,” he says, easing into a lounge chair next to a round glass-topped table.

“Then my agents and manager got it to me, and I loved it from the get-go. I loved it from the audience perspective, reading the script I took such great pleasure out of it and I loved the character. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a character as well written as this, certainly in the last 10 or 15 years I haven’t seen writing that has such a depth and such a clarity, and the vocabulary!

“To have this vocabulary where you use words like, ’There will be perfidy of epic proportions.’ That’s Shakespearean, that’s beautiful. What struck me about it, it reminded me of films like ‘Treasure of the Sierra Madre’ when films were dialogue-intensive, when actors gave performances and they moved at a clip, apace — Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, those kind of guys. Rat-a-tat-tat like that. That’s what this reminded me of. I thought this was magic; I wanted to do this desperately.”

For now, Meaney, 59, is relishing the chance to tunnel under Doc Durant’s thick skin. “The thing about playing villains is you get to play extremes, and to make those extremes believable is an acting challenge, in a way,” he says.