Derry actor Pat Lynch talks about his role in new film Ballywalter

Derry cinemagoers will be treated to an eye-catching turn from popular local actor Pat Lynch this weekend as the much-anticipated Ballywalter, starring Patrick Kielty, hits our screens.

The accomplished theatre and screen actor plays a supporting role in the comedy-drama critics have hailed as a 'minor key masterpiece' and a 'touching and bittersweet movie'.

The Bishop Street native plays 'Boring' Chris, one of the students enrolled in a stand-up comedy course that Kielty's character, Shane, also attends.

The role called for an actor who could make the audience laugh - but Pat found himself in no mood for joking when an attack of sudden hair loss made him anxious he might have ruined his chance of landing the part.

He explained: “I had been for an initial audition, and then, a while later, I got word they wanted me back to do another one.

“The thing is, in the time since that first audition, I'd gotten alopecia. Over the course of about two weeks, all my hair fell out.

“I said to my agent, 'What am I going to do? They've seen me with hair'. And he told me to just go and do it and he would put a wee note down to explain what had happened.

“So I went and did it - and I got the part. And I think I got it because of the way I looked. It seems to make doing comedy easier, somehow.

Ballywalter stars Paddy Kielty and Seana Kerslake give 'superb' performances in the film, says Pat.

Pat attended the premiere of Ballywalter at the Belfast Film Festival last year and is hopeful it will be well received when it goes on general release tomorrow.

Directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah and with a script by Stacey Gregg, the film has attracted praise for its touching portrayal of the two central characters and the connection they make with one another in the midst of personal turmoil.

Said Pat: “Ballywalter is a really well-made film. It has some beautiful cinematography and a strong script, and Paddy and Seána (Kerslake) are absolutely superb in it.

“I don't have a huge part, but that's to be expected. I'm a character actor who does small roles; I'm never going to be a leading man.”

And this fact is something the modest 72-year-old is perfectly content with. Over the course of a 40-year career, Pat's work – predominantly on the Derry stage but also in a number of critically acclaimed short films and television pieces – has earned him a solid reputation for bringing maximum impact to even the most minimal role.

I recently witnessed this rare gift when I was given a sneak preview of the upcoming Derry-made short film, Communion, directed by Sean Coyle (the film is fantastic, by the way, and I hope the hugely talented Coyle is given the opportunity to direct a full-length feature on the back of it).

Pat has a couple of brief scenes in the 30-minute feature, but the authenticity of his performance - as the ageing priest who feels dejected, angry and confused that modern life appears to have dismantled the traditional values he holds dear - has lingered with me ever since. His versatility is one of his greatest assets; he can do endearing, cruel, funny and bewildered; sometimes all of them in the one performance.

Pat first took up acting in the early eighties, when a fellow member of the Colmcille Debating Society, Mickey McGowan, asked him would he like to have a go on the stage.

“Mickey had a drama club,” said Pat. “He was putting on Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow and asked me would I do a part in it as a prison screw. So I did, and we performed it in the Union Hall.

“But see after that? I vowed I would never do anything like it again. It was so nerve-wracking. I said, 'My nerves will not take that'. When I was on stage, the nerves left me, but just the whole build-up to it, the notion that somebody is going to be looking at you and judging you, it terrified me.

“But then, lo and behold, several months later, Mickey came back again and asked me to appear in a wile funny play, by a man called Wesley Burrowes, called Affluence. Catholics and Protestants wouldn't share the same sewer pipes - so they literally wouldn't share shite. I played a Church of Ireland minister and I had great craic with it, and I started to let go of the anxiety a bit.”

Pat as a sadistic priest in the late Liam Campbell play The Monk, the Bird and the Priest.

But a return to the stage in the John Godber comedy Bouncers, performed in the Playhouse alongside the late Kevin McCallion and his wife Carmel McCafferty in 1996, sealed the deal for Pat.

“That was me back at it,” he said. “I did it part-time along with my job as bar manager of the Magee student union. Then, when I was made redundant in 2013, I decided to go full-time.”

He has rarely been out of work since, most notably in theatre collaborations with director Kieran Griffiths that include the critically acclaimed The Bog Couple and The Monk, the Bird and the Priest, from the pen of the much-missed Liam Campbell, and Beyond Belief, the musical drama about the life of John Hume. Represented by Nova Artists, he has also featured in a variety of adverts, short films and TV productions.

But theatre is undoubtedly the medium that brings him the most satisfaction.

He said: “I love theatre; you can't beat the buzz. I enjoy the whole process - the rehearsal as well as the actual live performance itself. I love exploring a play's subtext and my character's back story, and what the writer is wanting to say and how I can convey what the writer's intention is.

“If I do my preparation, the audience will see it. In small, black box theatres, there is such intimacy. People are sitting so close that even the blink of an eye is noticed. That level of intensity, when an audience responds to that, is very special.”

The great Spencer Tracey famously once warned, 'don't let them catch you acting'. Getting the audience to believe you are the character you are playing is the benchmark for all good actors (the ones without an ego, at any rate) and it is something Pat strives for in every performance.

He said: “I always liked the way James Cagney described how to be a good actor. He said, 'Plant yourself, look the other fella in the eye, and tell the truth'.”

Pat remembers performing in Over the Wire, by the Derry playwright Seamus Keenan, in the Tron in Glasgow. It's set in Long Kesh in 1974, in the aftermath of the burning of the internment camp by the Republican prisoners.

It's a visceral, claustrophobic play where things become increasingly volatile as paranoia sets in among the prisoners. Pat and his fellow performers were enclosed in a cage that was literally within spitting distance of the audience.

He said: “One guy in the audience got up and came right over to the wire and started shouting 'you bastard!' to me; the buzz that gives you, it makes everything worthwhile.

“After The Monk, the Bird and the Priest (Pat played a sadistic priest in a Catholic boys' school in the 1950s), Molly, who would normally come up and give me a hug straight after a play, well... I won't say what she called me, but it wasn't a very nice word!"

Nobody wants to hear their beloved calling them a four-letter word, but Molly could not, perhaps, have paid a greater compliment to Pat than when she let him know that, for that short time, she couldn't separate her husband from the character he was playing.

A potential return to the stage this year, in a comedy play currently being developed by Pat's brother, Eamonn, is in the pipeline, and we will shortly see him making a guest appearance in the popular BBC drama, Hope Street, in late October/early November.

Sitting with a coffee and a scone in the Cottage Cafe and looking very comfortable in his own skin, Pat has certainly come a long way from those early days of fear and uncertainty when he performed Brendan Behan in front of all those people in the Union Hall.

"At the start," he said, "if I was turned down for a part I'd auditioned for, or if I felt I could have done better in a certain role, I'd say to myself, 'I'm a failure”, because my biggest fear, like many actors, was rejection, or people thinking I'd not done a good job. But over the years I've come to realise it's part and parcel of it.

"I was turned down for Hope Street three times before I finally landed a role in it. Sometimes you're just not right for a part and it's not about anything you did or didn't do.

“I'm lucky in that I'm still getting plenty of auditions, and that's the main thing - the parts will come when they come."

Ballywalter goes on general release today (Friday).