“It’s about a stranger who arrives in a small village late at night and moves into an old abandoned shop,” Colm explains. The Perfect Stranger was shot mostly around Orient and Bunyola. “As an actor, you don’t often get the opportunity to play the same character three times and, when the writing’s as good as Roddy Doyle’s, it’s a real pleasure.” The films were The Commitments, directed by Alan Parker (voted best Irish film of all time, in 2005) The Snapper and The Van (both directed by Stephen Frears).
Of all his roles, he’s very fond of The Barrytown Trilogy. “You know, you were in a spacesuit all week, so you didn’t want to look at ill-fitting bad spacesuits at the weekend!” He will attend the “huge” London convention next month. Eager fans still flock to Star Trek conventions: “We finished the show in ’99, but still they go on,” he laughs, admitting he rarely attended. O’Brien wasn’t originally part of the crew, the role kind of developed over a period of months.” In 1992, he accepted a full-time contract on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. He’d just moved to LA when he auditioned for Star Trek: The Next Generation: “They liked me but didn’t know how to use me. The sci-fi genre gave Colm an enduring role. “My dad sometimes took us to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and I loved the experience.” He was also influenced by films: “The wonderful Lindsay Anderson movie If, with Malcolm McDowell, affected me on so many levels.” He liked the idea of interesting stories with something to say “because I was very political.” To this day, his favourite movie is still Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976), a historical political film. “I knew from my early teens that I wanted to be an actor,” Colm tells me, over coffee at Nassau Beach Club.
To legions of devoted Star Trek fans, he’ll always be Chief Miles O’Brien, but the Dublin-born actor’s 34-year prolific screen career has featured numerous TV and film roles – including the pivotal character in The Perfect Stranger, which has just had its Mallorca premiere.
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