Frank, my character in The Low Down, is aimless, indecisive, self-absorbed and has difficulties communicating.
He's in his own world a lot of the time. He's begun to realise that his life hasn't turned out as he wanted. He's not a successful artist, he's a prop maker - but there's relief in seeing that it's OK. He seems to take it well, but underlying it is tension which explodes at one point. We all know that sort of feeling.
I have no idea why Jamie Thraves, the writer/ director, chose me. He might have seen Mojo, which I'd done on stage and later on film. I'd seen two of his shorts, Scratch and Kiss You, and they were excellent and I felt his film would have an unusual visual style.
It's a contemporary twentysomething drama about life, love and all that, co-starring Kate Ashfield and shot around Islington, Dalston and Holloway - all the places Jamie used to live and close to where I live now. The flat in the film was Jamie's old flat in Sandringham Road, Hackney. It was a nice flat, a bit messy in the film because of the flatmate Terry (Rupert Procter), who was depressed.
I'm not neat and tidy. But I've always shared with girls - I've not lived with blokes or shared a boys' flat like the one in the film. I've lived in London on and off for the past 12 years and now live in Islington, with my partner and our two children, one street away from where I rented a room when I first came from Dublin in 1989.
