Slim build, T-shirt, rucksack; you could easily mistake Adrian Dunbar for any of the visiting tourists who, fortified with maps and ice-cream, are happily invading the streets of Kilkenny on a sunny summer's afternoon. You wouldn't, though. He looks younger and somehow more fragile than he does on the telly, but the sharp, intelligent face and gemstone-blue eyes are instantly familiar.
And if you don't see them in the Kilkenny Arts Festival and Theatre Unlimited's adaptation of Brendan Kennelly's The Book of Judas, which opens tonight at the Watergate Theatre, you'll almost certainly catch them on ITV in the autumn, in the two-part series called Tough Love with which Granada intends to leads its new season's drama schedules. The Kilkenny show is Dunbar's first stage venture for five years and his first ever in the Republic - "first time on stage in the South and I play Judas. Yeah, great" - but it's clear from the way he talks about the Granada series that as far as he's concerned, it, too, was a serious artistic undertaking. As was his previous outing, an independent British film called Shooters - "I don't know whether it'll get a release in Ireland or not. It seems to me you've got a million cinemas in Ireland showing the same five films" - and the screenplays he's been working on since the series finished shooting last April - "one of them I've been writing for five years and I'm a bit . . . well, I don't want to talk about it any more really until I finish the damn thing".
Actually it's hard to imagine the talented Mr Dunbar failing to take anything he does seriously - even a newspaper interview. His answers are opinionated, articulate and startlingly honest. He speaks with verve and passion about everything from his visits to the Third World as a charity fundraiser to the house he has just built in Co Leitrim. He is possessed of a witty streak as dry and crisp as a good white burgundy and, despite a CV featuring everything from King Lear at the Royal Court to The Crying Game via Cracker, he refuses to play the fame game. This even extends to debunking that totem of OTT luvviedom, Star Wars.
"Well, I did Star Wars, but I wasn't actually in the film because George Lucas called me up and said that for plot reasons he couldn't include my character - which I found a bit strange. I only had five or six lines and the only reason I was to do this one was because Lucas wanted to include me in the next two. And then he said he couldn't. It's all a bit . . . I don't know. It's all up in the air. You go in and you stand in front of a big, blue screen and there's three guys with pig's heads behind you talking in some weird language and it's just mad. Mad. "Before we did it, the director came up and said to me: `By the way, George wants you to do this with an American accent'. And I said: `That's the first I've heard about it'. And he said: `Well, that's what he wants'. So I practised a bit and got my couple of lines off in an American accent. And after I did it there was a silence. And then I heard this voice saying: `That is the worst American accent I've ever heard'. And I thought, `who the f*** is that?' I peered out through the lights - and it was my old mate Liam Neeson taking the piss."
Madness notwithstanding, he's quite happy to be "in" the next two films of Lucas's planned trilogy; "you just go on about your life, and then one day you get a call saying `we're making the next one'. Seemingly that's what happens. Very strange." Strange, too, that pigs' heads should pursue him to the highest branches of the entertainment tree - but strangely appropriate, for his first job was in the Unipork factory in his home town of Enniskillen. "I used to chop pigs' heads in half with a huge axe; that was my job when I left school. Thankfully they were dead by the time they got to me."
It was a fairly typical start for a working-class teenager in the North of the 1970s, but he soon strayed off the production line, first as a bass player in the backing band of Elvis impersonator Frank Chisholm, then in amateur dramatics, where his performances eventually led to an audition with the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. "I got in," he says, still sounding surprised about it, "with my very good friend Neil Morrissey and I've been on the go ever since." His big breakthrough came with the success of Hear My Song, based on the life of the tenor Josef Locke. Or did it? "Well - it was my first leading role in a film. I co-wrote Hear My Song with Peter Chelsom. It came at a time when everybody was making movies about issues. And we decided to write a comedy - and comedies are the hardest thing to get right. It's a very, very difficult thing to do, to get people to laugh at a movie, you know? But I suppose it wasn't really a break because I did it myself - if you get a break, it's someone else giving you something. So I'm still waiting on my break, because I keep doing everything myself . . . " On the plus side, doing everything himself has meant retaining quality control. "I've managed to be involved with some really good things, and that's because of the choices I've made. I remember I had an agent who phoned me up one time and said: `This guy called Jim Sheridan's sent you a script, you won't want to do it, it's about a cripple'. You have to beware of the advice you get sometimes. Although I have to say," he adds with a wicked grin, "that my agent at the moment is wonderful." So does bad advice account for the number of stars who make big-screen boo-boos, signing themselves up to appear in shockingly second-rate movies? "That's the American system, and I really don't know how it works. I imagine that if Hollywood gets used to seeing someone in a certain way, then they don't like them breaking out of that mould. I mean, Steve Martin tried to be a serious actor for a while and they just wouldn't wear it. And I think he is a very good actor. Anybody who can do comedy can do all the rest of it; it doesn't work the other way round, but if you can be funny you can easily do the rest. "Then of course there are so many people round them - publicists, personal assistants, agents, all with a say in what they do. And Hollywood is about creating an image for yourself so that when you walk on screen you're the hero. There's a great story about Kirk Douglas, who played Vincent Van Gogh. There was a screening of it and after the screening, John Wayne took him out on to a balcony and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. `You know,' he said, `we have a responsibility to the public. The public looks up to us. You can't just go round playing guys who cut their ears off and go mad' . . ."
And here Dunbar is, playing Judas. "Well, you know, it struck me in rehearsal that when you're a child your mother allows you to hate Judas. It's alright to hate Judas because he betrayed Jesus - and that's very dangerous, because if your mother tells you there's a person you're allowed to hate, then it's a logical progression that you can start blaming and hating other people. The scapegoat image is the start of the blame culture - and there's a lot of blame culture in our society. Trying to apportion blame in the North has had people running round in circles for a long time, because even if you find out who's to blame, it doesn't do you any good. It doesn't help you grow up as a person. Finding out where you have responsibilities, and acting on them, is what growing up is all about."
He regards the role as a major challenge, not just emotionally but technically. "We're taking the words of Brendan Kennelly, these fantastic words - he's a great poet and a man who's got great insight, I think, especially into the Irish character - and we have to do justice to his words, and we have to put a play together out of his words, and we have to deliver on the night. And we've got very little time to do it." It seems entirely in character that Dunbar would take on such a challenge at a time in his career when he could easily coast along on the strength of what he has already achieved. But that's something, he says, he'll never do.
"I think the older you get, the more you have to stretch yourself. It seems to me that when you're younger the roles you're getting to play are young roles - and young people don't tend to have a huge emotional range. They're either hurt or they're happy, with a few shades in between. The older you get, the deeper your understanding of the human condition has to be. It's a question of extending yourself as an artist. Whatever field you work in, you have to take on bigger challenges otherwise you get stagnant."
This is an actor who clearly loves a profession which has driven many to distraction and beyond. But can he say what it is he likes about acting? He certainly can. "I kinda like the freedom it gives you. You're a bit of a gypsy, on the road doing different gigs and meeting different people. It's insecure, but that's a drug in itself. You get used to the insecurity. Then I love doing movies because I love working out-of-doors. There's lots of things about acting that I like, but the one thing I really like is that I'm good at it. We all like to do something we're good at, and feel we can get better at. And you can. You can just keep learning and learning. "And also other actors are such decent people. I'd rather be with actors than with anybody else - they're easy to be with. I've seen what the legal professions are like. I've seen what writers are like. I've seen visual artists and ballerinas. Give me actors any day of the week."
Kilkenny Arts Festival and Theatre Unlimited present Judas, an adaptation of the poem The Book of Judas by Brendan Kennelly, examining the relationship between Judas and Jesus in a contemporary Irish setting. From tonight until August 20th at the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny. Tel: 05652175. E-mail: www.kilkennyarts.ie