You'd think it would be hard to be a renaissance man, but Robert Sheehan – actor, writer, musician – sure makes it look easy.
Robert spoke to Brendan O’Connor about *deep breath* some of his favourite music, his upcoming stage and television shows, the joys of meditation and his new book.
And Robert speaks very well – he's thoughtful, erudite, funny and very easy to listen to. Here he is on living abroad as an Irish person:
"I think we only own a percentage of ourselves – whatever that means – and the rest is the property of the environment that you’re in. Maybe a lot of people in the world leave where they were born, their place of origin and they find somewhere else and they flourish and they find more of a wholeness, more of a sense of self there.
"And I always loved being away, you know, I loved the self that I found there, but at the same time, I got to a stage of life where I realised that I was kind of playing a kind of a, it was like I was pretending I didn’t know something about myself by living in London."
Robert’s second book is due out in September, and he told Brendan how he enjoys the creative differences between writing and acting:
"The good thing about being creative and writing books is that it’s not location-specific, you know? It doesn’t mean leaving home to go and do your art and that’s a big part of the joy of writing books for me. And the kind of, just, you know, the source-ness of it.
"You know, acting needs a production, needs a Landmark Theatre, it needs a director, it needs a thing that’s been commissioned, it needs a budget, it needs other actors, it needs a room, you know, in order for you to step up and actually express yourself [...] whereas writing, you just sit at home and procrastinate for several hours and then write something."
The upcoming book is called Playing Dead: How Meditation Brought Me Back to Life and Brendan wanted to know just how accurate that title is. Did meditation change Robert’s life? Yes, is the unequivocal answer. Robert tells Brendan about how, while on a film shoot, the production was shut down for three days due to snow and he was having a hard time stuck in accommodation by himself:
"And about 12 hours into this, I was like climbing the walls and really miserable on my own. And I was just thinking, 'Why is this? Why can’t I just be, you know? Why can’t I just be, without needing to see people, or needing to go out, needing to blah, blah, blah?’ And I just sat down and started a very shaky meditation practice."
That shaky meditation was in 2017, when Robert describes himself as being lonely, miserable and confused. Confused? He started acting professionally when he was 14 and got bitten by the bug and here he was doing the thing that he wanted to do since he was a boy – and doing very well at it – so why wasn’t he happier?
"The more the outer success was happening, the less successful I was feeling inside, do you know what I mean? So, I had to kind of come clean to myself that the plan I’d made, either consciously or possibly unconsciously when I was very young, which had to do with, I think, other people’s approval, more so than making art, you know, at that hour of my life, was not working. It was actually doing the opposite."
Meditation allowed Robert to look at all the impulses and opinions and criticisms he had about himself and stop for a couple of minutes, take a step back and just let them happen, without judgement and then forgive himself for having them and allow himself to be nice to himself. After about a year, he says, what he calls the incoherence was still there, but at a much more manageable level:
"What had kind of replaced it was this beautiful, broadening, expanding sense of space around it, which was allowing me to be [...] just in the present moment and not be dragged out of it by the impulse to do something or be heard or be seen.
"To be able to just listen and settle in oneself for longer periods of time is a huge, huge gift."
The style of the book, Robert says, is accessible, but it’s based on actual science and hard facts – something people might not necessarily associate with books about meditation:
"I’m bringing up the language of authority to kind of take it out of the language of woo-woo, you know?"
Robert is, of course, mainly known as an actor and he will next be seen on stage at the Galway International Arts Festival in Mark O’Rowe’s new play, Reunion and on screen in the final season of the hit Netflix show, The Umbrella Academy. And Robert has a, well, a meditator’s take on acting:
"Acting, you know, if you break it down, acting is acting natural while watching yourself acting natural, you know, which is extremely unnatural."
You can watch Robert acting natural in Reunion at the Black Box Theatre in Galway from the 12-27 July and season four of The Umbrella Academy drops on Netflix on 8 August. Playing Dead: How Meditation Brought Me Back to Life by Robert Sheehan is published by Rider on 5 September.
It’s well worth listening to Brendan’s full conversation with Robert – complete with his brilliantly eclectic musical choices – by clicking above.
