Once Upon a Time in Hollywood:  Actor Gabriel Byrne talks to Sarah Halliwell about his new memoir which traces his route from Dublin to Hollywood with humour and honesty. By Sarah Halliwell for The Gloss, December 28, 2020

From the interview:

There is restraint at play in Walking with Ghosts; Byrne doesn’t dish the dirt on anyone but himself.

“I left out so much. I’ve worked with many great directors and actors so I knew all the stories – but I couldn’t repeat those stories because to me it would feel like a form of betrayal. People are vulnerable on a film set … so I chose not to write that.” His own modesty is disarming. I liked this exchange where tells his father: “Remember when I asked you to come and see me in my first play? And you asked how much it was to get in? I told you five quid and you said, ‘Sure, I can see you at home for nothing’”.

Dingle Literary Festival was a virtual affair this year, but that just meant that more of us were able to participate in this literary event than ever before! Gabriel was interviewed by Mia Colleran on November 20, 2020. Mia is an Irish book critic and an award-winning writer and bookseller.

A life-long relationship with words: Gabriel Byrne reflects on Irish identity, language and the literature that influences him.

What will the interview be about?
How does Gabriel Byrne personally define ‘being Irish’ and how does the Irish language and literature influence his answer? Gabriel will discuss all of this with Mia, delving into his relationship with America—where he lives now—and Ireland, while also sharing some of the defining works of literature of his life and their influence on his own writing.

Gabriel Byrne on abuse, alcoholism and his new memoir. By Teddy Jamieson for The Herald, Scotland, November 15, 2020.

This is a lengthy, in-depth, and wide-ranging print interview that is engaging and illuminating, and also fun!

From the interview:

Walking with Ghosts, it should be said, holds a lot of pain in its pages. When I ask him why he wanted to write it, he talks about how he wanted to describe the world he came from and how it shaped him.

More than that, though, he adds, he wanted others who had suffered what he had suffered or who were struggling with issues of addiction in the way that he had, to know there was a way out.

“So many people feel powerless and hopeless, and one of the reasons I wrote this book was because there are so many people who live in silence about these issues. But I have a little bit of a platform. I say, ‘Look, I’ll tell you my story and maybe that will help you to see that if another person can do it maybe I can do it too.’ That’s really what I want to achieve by telling those stories. I have no real interest in being sensational or anything.”

The Verb on ‘green’ memoir – with the actor and writer Gabriel Byrne, and the poets Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Pascale Petit. What would our stories sound like if we told them through our relationships with the plants, animals and landscapes that are most dear to us? What happens when we start to see the natural world as an integral part of our own histories?

Gabriel Byrne is an award-winning actor and writer. His new memoir ‘Walking with Ghosts’ starts emphatically and lyrically with the landscape of his childhood home in Ireland and the great pleasure he took in it as a child. Gabriel also talks about his relationship with the earth – the experience of feeling the ground shift during an earthquake in Los Angeles and about the ‘photograph he carries in his heart’ – a memory of a ploughman working the land.