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Chris O’Dowd moving forward

Wandering career, no safety net make ‘great catapult’

By Luaine Lee, Tribune News Service
Published: August 25, 2017, 6:02am

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Actor Chris O’Dowd admits that he lied to land his first job. And it wasn’t even acting.

The Irish-born performer, known for his comic roles in “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” “The IT Crowd” and “Bridesmaids” hauled off to Paris when he was 18.

“I ended up running an Irish bar in Paris. I lied my way into it. I had a beard. They thought I was 25 because I told them I was, but I’d never really worked in a bar before,” says O’Dowd, seated at a corner table in a noisy meeting room.

“And I ended up in Paris because I’d won tickets on a game show to go for a day. And I ended up staying for five months. Which is kinda crazy, looking back,” he laughs.

He was having too much fun to be intimidated, he says. “When you’re 18, I don’t know if fear has the same weight. You don’t have any comfort, so what’s the worst that’s going to happen? If I end up sleeping on a park bench in Paris, who cares?”

That easy attitude has always buoyed O’Dowd, in spite of his sometimes risky choices. The latest is his role in Epix’s hilarious adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s “Get Shorty.” O’Dowd plays the small-time criminal, Miles Daly, who worms his way into the movie business via a has-been director of schlocky movies, played by Ray Romano.

O’Dowd admits that it was a bit risky the first time he ventured to L.A. from the U.K. “I came here almost by accident where I’d auditioned for a pilot that I thought was for the BBC, and it turned out being for NBC,” he says, leaning back in his chair.

“I auditioned for it in London and ended up testing for it with Kevin Hart. And we got it. We shot the pilot for NBC when I was around 25 or 26. It was a little introduction to the place. It’s nice to come here for work, not when you’re LOOKING for work. … That pilot didn’t go.”

In fact, O’Dowd met his wife, writer Dawn O’Porter, here. “I just came here, hung out a little bit looking for work, got a job, got an agent — did all that. Then I did ‘Bridesmaids’ and that brought me over a bit longer. And I was just really enjoying my time here. I met a girl from England, but met her here. We came over and back for a few years, then we moved here three years ago.”

The youngest of five himself, O’Dowd is the father of a 2-year-old son and a 7-week-old baby boy. He’s sleep deprived, but says it’s worth it.

“Becoming a father for the first time changes you dramatically,” he says. “It made me become much less driven in a different way. You push yourself all the time, but now I want to push myself to be the kind of man that I’d like my boys to be, rather than the kind of man that I thought I wanted to be — not that I have a perfect example of what either of those are.”

A former Catholic altar boy, O’Dowd is a self-confessed atheist. “There are actually things about the church I really like,” he nods. “I just don’t have any faith in God, so I’m an atheist. I think it would be wonderful to be a believer. What comfort you must get from believing there’s this whole world after you die,” he shrugs.

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“I can understand why religion exists; what a joy. But if you don’t believe it, you don’t believe it.”

Though his career has soared since “Bridesmaids,” O’Dowd’s first stumbling attempts at acting almost stalled his career. “After I left drama school I got a job, and then I didn’t work again for nearly a year and a half,” he recalls.

“So I was back working at bars, call centers and things. It was never that I wanted to quit, because I had no fallback, which is great. Having no fallback is a great catapult. If you’ve nothing to fall back on, you’ve got to keep going. If I’d said to anybody, ‘I’m going to quit acting.’ They’d probably figure out that I wasn’t currently doing it,” he chuckles.

“All the time I thought I’d end up working in a bar all my life. But I loved working in bars, so it was never something that terrified me. I think I would’ve been a bit disappointed if I hadn’t got to act a bit more, but I never had that much success. I wasn’t one of those guys that came out, was like, ‘I’m a STAR,’ immediately. Whatever success I’ve had has been kind of a slow buildup, which is a really good way to be because your disappointment is a bit lessened.”

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