Robert Sheehan is back to save the world, again. Well, at least his Umbrella Academy alter ego Klaus is. Donal O'Donoghue gets the lowdown from the star who brought the love to Love/Hate.
"I had a few things to do that were tricky in the crotch area to be honest."
God bless Robert Sheehan. Even with a harmless-sounding question – did you have to do any difficult stunts? – the star of The Umbrella Academy gives value for money.
"Whenever I’m asked to do stunts, I have to wear a harness that has been thrust so far up the, erm, canal area, that there is little room for anything else," he continues. "So I’m in that yoke doing these jerks over and back and they usually make me feel a bit queasy because accidents can happen. But, usually, if there is an explosion I’m the guy flying through the air."
Flying though the air, metaphorically speaking, is something the actor from Portlaoise has perfected: whether as the immortal Nathan in Misfits, doe-eyed killer Darren in Love/Hate or the charismatic Klaus, the druggie who sees dead people in The Umbrella Academy. In this tale of a dysfunctional superhero family, Klaus gets the best lines, the best clothes and the best hair, but even if he didn’t, Robert Sheehan would command attention.
"He’s poetic in even the way he speaks," said Dennis Quaid of his Fortitude co-star some years back, adding that the young Irishman could transform base dialogue into gold.
Today, Sheehan is in Zoom Land (via his London apartment) to talk about season two of The Umbrella Academy. Set in the US in 1963, we are once more on the eve of the apocalypse, with Klaus and his siblings the world’s only hope.
"I don’t know what I can or cannot say and that’s entirely my own fault," he says, even as he manages to make glitchy, grainy video entertaining: chomping on snack food, blowing his nose, using his arms to illustrate a point.
He’s dressed, by his usually exotic standards, somewhat conventionally in a grey hoodie, and paired with Tom Hopper for this call. The two actors are strikingly different: the muscled fitness fan from a mining town in Leicestershire and the rascally son of a former Garda from Laois. But they seem close, doing PR videos for Netflix (including a jaunt on the London Underground) and hanging out together socially.
During lockdown, Sheehan was busy: polishing his first book, a collection of short stories, for publication, and preparing 20 podcasts with Hopper for a series called The Earth Locker (it debuts at the same time as The Umbrella Academy). The duo 'birthed’ the podcasts, which feature interviews with billionaire philanthropists, innovators, writers and others about the future of the planet.
The line-up includes entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain and Dublin-born writer and activist, Emma Dabiri. "She told me of that low-frequency hum of industrialised, institutionalised racism which she had deal with growing up in Ireland, which was an eye-opener for me," says Sheehan.
Sheehan grew up in the Midlands: the third child of Joe and Maria. The title role in school play, Oliver with a Twist was followed two years later by a bit part in the film, Song for Raggy Boy. There was a brief academic sortie (film and TV studies at GMIT) before he waded into acting: The Clinic, The Tudors and an eye-catching role in the Red Riding TV trilogy that nailed him his role in Misfits for which he bagged a Bafta nomination. If Love/Hate made him a household name in Ireland, The Umbrella Academy is global.
"I wanted to grow Klaus up a bit and have this air of sorrow and sobriety hanging over him," he says of season two. "The show also hints at Klaus being an instrumental figure in the aesthetics of the 1960s, stuff like The Merry Pranksters."
Never less than engaging, Sheehan’s pinballing conversation riffs on history, philosophy, science, culture and whatever pops into his head. So we get Ken Kesey’s Sixties counter-culture bandwagon, the Merry Pranksters, the RTÉ Guide ("a weekly installment in our house when I was growing up"), the pacifist pronouncements of polymath Bertrand Russell, the untapped potential of the dark side of the moon, the contemporary relevance of 1984 (George Orwell is one of his favourite writers) and so on.
"We were in our trailers writing manifestos and knocking our heads together to see what subjects we could tackle," says Sheehan of brainstorming with Hopper for their podcasts. "The Earth Locker is the starting point for a million other ideas."
I bet. Right now, though, he's twirling The Umbrella Academy, one of Netflix’s most popular original series, with Sheehan’s Klaus the marquee draw. "Two weeks before lockdown, me and my agent went to Chicago for one of these Comic-Con events and if we didn’t get corona there, Jesus Christ! I must have hugged about two or three thousand people," he says.
Season two taps into the ’60s Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK and more. "The early Sixties were genuinely apocalyptic times," says Sheehan. "There’s a Bertrand Russell story I heard on Hardcore History where the famed philosopher-writer went to the US government after the Second World War and pleaded with them to nuke Russia."
Seriously? Turns out it's true, as Russell, one of the 20th Century’s most famous pacifists, did indeed argue for a pre-emptive strike before the USSR developed an atomic bomb of its own. I imagine the 32-year-old Sheehan is a sponge for all such information, absorbing history, science or politics wherever he finds it: on podcasts or in TV scripts.
Undoubtedly talented, naturally charming and someone who can wear pyjamas and pass them off as haute couture, he is a man busting with ideas. So what of the notion of time-travel and the butterfly effect of changing history, as explored in The Umbrella Academy? Would he alter anything if he could go back in time? "I wouldn’t change anything man," he says. "I wouldn’t be that arrogant."
Robert Sheehan might be always flying through the air but don’t be fooled by the trappings of the screen trade: his feet are very much firmly on the ground.
