Thomas Bernhard

I had been at FSG and I was in this wonderful bookstore in New York, which is still there called, in the West Village called Three Lives and Company, one of my favorite bookstores, just browsing.

And there was a young man, a bookseller working there who was recommending the work of Thomas Bernhard, which is one of my favorite novelists.

to some other dude in the bookstore and he had never heard of him and was sort of telling him, this person in the bookstore was telling this customer, and I said, oh, that's a great book.

And the bookseller turned around and he said, you've read Thomas Berenger? And I said, oh yeah.

And I had my first piece ever published in 2008. which was published by this very slim literary publication as part of The Economist.

It used to be called More Intelligent Life.

And it was actually an essay about Thomas Bernhardt.

And that was my first ever published piece.

Whether that's delivering ice-cold terror as Agent Smith in the Matrix trilogy, commanding the outback in Pink Chiffon in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, or playing ruthless anti-heroes, like Harkness in Apple TV's Slow Horses.

Irish audiences will also know him for his phenomenal work made here, hunting deserters through the bleak famine landscape of Lance Daly's Black 47 and dominating the stage at Dublin's Gate Theatre in the blistering production of Thomas Bernhard's The President, in which he starred alongside his friend and collaborator Alwyn Foray.

Now, the Australian actor steps into the manic home of an international transit terminal as a man running from his own past while trying to solve everyone else's crises in The Airport Chaplain, a project which came in a roundabout way through his Irish connections, as we'll hear.

Sinead Egan recently caught up with Hugo Weaving to talk about The Airport Chaplain, which is currently available on Netflix.

And Colin was working at the Sydney Theatre Company for many years prior to coming back to Dublin and working at the Gate.

And he introduced me to Olwen, who had a show.

called River Run which was running at the Sydney Theatre Company we clicked instantly and got on very well and then she had this play that she had seen many years before and would like wanted to do and it was called The President by Thomas Bernhardt we read the play over three years we read it about four or five times every time we read it we were excited by it and thrilled by it and kind of blown away by it actually.

And we kept thinking, how are we going to do this? So that was the question we kept asking ourselves.

I don't know, twee little bakery that sells like three loaves and the owner is out foraging mushrooms and, you know, and they barely, you know, so take what you want, leave your money here, this sort of thing we've all encountered of like, how in the world does that work in the world? It wasn't, in a sense, I mean, I love that kind of satire.

I love that kind of snark.

And Powell's cultural criticism reminds me, I mean, it's much lessened, but it reminds me a bit of one of my very favorite authors, Thomas Bernhardt.

austrian gadfly um they used to call him the nest soiler because of his his criticisms of austrian of austria and austrian culture and um powell isn't that extreme but i love the sort of whipping himself into a froth over i don't know the the ways in which um you know, modern day nouveau riche homeowners tear up the beautiful old hardwood floors and put down like vinyl flooring to make it and put a gigantic useless droning kitchen hood, like oven hoods that don't really do anything.

Um, It sort of speaks right to me.

That was great.

You never want to meet your heroes.

I love my Thomas Bernhardt, but would I have wanted to resurrect him and have dinner with him? Absolutely not.

So the, the sort of production side, which is all moving ahead at pace because it's being published in January.

Um, I-- In matters cultural, I'm reading a Austrian novel called Extinction by Thomas Bernhard that, um, a friend of mine whose judgment on books I very much respect gave to me.

Um, it is hilarious.

It's also quite hard going in that it has no paragraphs, and it's just a sort of constant rant about how much the author hates Austria.

It seems like this is somebody that you have read and thought about quite a bit.

Definitely a real touchstone for me, maybe even more than, you know, he's famously influenced Kafka and Thomas Bernhardt and many others whom I love.

But I think maybe it's just easier to rip off like the older fellow.

So I think I feel actually closest to this guy.