Stephen Rea makes difficult people worth attending to, using restraint and the rhythm of a line rather than spelling them out. We rate him highly, though the films around him do not always know when to stop explaining.
Fi1m perspective
Stephen Rea lets a line's rhythm suggest what a character cannot quite explain. His performances favour uncertainty over a tidy account of motives. Fergus in The Crying Game (1992), his international breakthrough, is a useful starting point: a conflicted man played with sympathy. Rea makes room for that sympathy without requiring us to find the man agreeable.
Neil Jordan is the recurring director in this screen career, and their films offer different settings for Rea's preference for ambiguity. In Interview with the Vampire (1994), Rea plays Santiago amid gothic excess and difficult attachments. We grew impatient with the repeated remorse, because the characters' behaviour had already told us what their speeches about immortality kept explaining. Jordan is better when he lets their relationships become disturbing, with Tom Cruise's malicious wit and Kirsten Dunst's force giving us the strongest reasons to watch. Rea's instinct for leaving things unsaid belongs comfortably in that kind of company.
Michael Collins (1996), in which he plays Ned Broy, gives the partnership a more urgent setting. Jordan directs it as a thriller, and Chris Menges's cinematography keeps danger close even on a large scale. Liam Neeson makes Collins's confidence reassuring enough to stir us, when the prospect of violence ought to make it frightening. It is forceful filmmaking, but Jordan's fondness for his central figure leaves too little room to question him.
The Jordan partnership continued with Bertie in Breakfast on Pluto (2005), but it is not the whole account. Rea's stage work with Samuel Beckett helps explain his attention to rhythm and uncertainty. The part of Eric in Cyprus Avenue (2016), finding a human being in an extreme character, gives another reason to distrust the familiar description of him as merely morose. That label tells us little about what he does with difficult material. Begin with The Crying Game, and give his less agreeable characters time.
Biography
Stephen Rea is an Irish actor born on 31 October 1946 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He studied English at Queen's University Belfast and trained at the Abbey Theatre School in Dublin. He began his career with Dublin's Focus Theatre and appeared in many stage and Irish television roles.
Rea came to international attention with his performance as Fergus in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. He has collaborated frequently with Jordan, appearing in Interview with the Vampire (1994), Michael Collins (1996), Breakfast on Pluto (2005) and Greta (2018). Other notable film roles include Patsy in Life Is Sweet (1990) and Finch in V for Vendetta (2006). He won a BAFTA Award for his role in the television series The Honourable Woman (2014).
