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" Chris O&amp;#039;Dowd has become ubiquitous by inches. Besides his roles as nice guy Officer Rhodes in Bridesmaids and in Girls and This Is 40, O&amp;#039;Dowd&amp;#039;s oeuvre is comprised of tiny projects (everything from an amateur genealogist in improvised HBO comedy Family Tree to a creepy butcher in John Michael McDonagh&amp;#039;s theatrical meditation on Catholicism, Calvary, in theaters today). Which makes O&amp;#039;Dowd Hollywood&amp;#039;s foremost mainstream niche artist, a position that allows him to remain likable and enigmatic even as he covers magazines and stars in Lance Armstrong biopics. We spoke with the charming Irishman about wedding dress reality shows and why he&amp;#039;s really the younger, better-looking version of Richard Gere. ESQUIRE.COM: I had to install a program on my computer to watch Calvary and so I called IT. CHRIS O&amp;#039;DOWD: Stop it.  ESQ: I was like, Oh, I&amp;#039;ll really impress the IT guy. And I said &amp;quot;Oh, you know The IT Crowd? I&amp;#039;m going to talk to the guy who answers the phone with, &amp;#039;Have you tried turning it off and on again?&amp;#039;&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;That really works for PCs more than Macs.&amp;quot; Not impressed. CO: I remember when the show was still on and I had a problem with my laptop. Something very basic, like I spilled something. It was a hand-to-mouth problem I had. And I brought it into this place and it was a Polish guy, and he looked at me and clearly recognized me from the fking show. And he says, &amp;quot;Well, have you tried it?&amp;quot; And I said, &amp;quot;Tried what?&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;You know.&amp;quot; It was a very difficult time in my life to get reasonable computer service. ESQ: Thankfully you&amp;#039;ve reached a point in your career where you have minions who do that for you.  CO: Now I can just throw it out and buy a new one. ESQ: So Calvary: watching that movie feels like having a bad dream... in a good way. But it&amp;#039;s not a pleasant movie. Why did you want to do it? CO: I love the writing in it. I love Brendon Gleeson, I think he&amp;#039;s just this kind of bastion of integrity, particularly in Ireland. He&amp;#039;s a big hero of mine. I mean, it&amp;#039;s the kind of character I don&amp;#039;t get to play very often. And I love what it talked about with religion. I think the filmmaker feels similar, probably, to me in his relationship with God. Or lack thereof.  ESQ: How Catholic are you at this point? CO: That&amp;#039;s a good question. I guess I&amp;#039;m an atheist. But I would say I have very good relationships with the priests that I grew up with. I was an altar boy growing up, and the men of God in my life have always been really lovely, intelligent, well-informed, kind men. So I feel very loyal to their beliefs as much as anything else.  ESQ: Did you worry about how they would feel about the film when they saw it? CO: I did not worry, but I was very curious, for sure. The movie&amp;#039;s already been out in Ireland, so I did speak to my kind of childhood priest about it and he was very positive about it. Ya know, the one character in it that&amp;#039;s incredibly \u2014 maybe not heroic but certainly redeemable \u00AD\u2014 is the priest. So I think there&amp;#039;s a lot to be gleaned from that. ESQ: Well, Brendon Gleeson is such an incredible actor. And when I interviewed Martin McDonagh, he said Brendan is an incredible swimmer. Like, he can just go for miles. CO: That is the most random piece of trivia I have. There&amp;#039;s a part of me that thinks Martin was taking the piss. But no, ya know what, now that you say it, I feel like there&amp;#039;s a spark of memory of somebody saying that to me before about Brendan. Maybe that&amp;#039;s true. Also, ya know what? He is an incredible fiddle player. ESQ: Really? CO: Oh, he&amp;#039;s an amazing fiddle player! You remember that movie Cold Mountain? He was in that and they put him with Jack White, and they were a band. Him and Jack White from the White Stripes playing the fiddle.  ESQ: It would never have occurred to me that he was really playing. CO: I&amp;#039;ve seen him play a lot, like he plays in Ireland a lot in pubs and stuff. ESQ: How often do you get back to Ireland?  CO: I actually get back a lot now, because I write and direct a TV show called Moone Boy, which is filmed in my hometown, and we shoot that most summers. Or the last three, anyway. So I actually get to go home more than I have in the last ten years because of that, which has been really lovely. ESQ: Are your parents celebrities in Boyle now? My vision of them is making everybody come over to watch it when it airs.  CO: There&amp;#039;s definitely a bit of that. One of my first times on TV, I remember that my priest came around our house. I wasn&amp;#039;t there, but he came around with a projector and a projector screen so that everybody could watch my first performance on television. ESQ: I looked you up in your local newspaper The Sligo Champion. They&amp;#039;re really going hard for you. Whenever they write about you, they&amp;#039;re like, &amp;quot;Heartthrob actor Chris O&amp;#039;Dowd...&amp;quot;  CO: Hold on! Why are you saying that with such... It&amp;#039;s like, What the hell are they talking about? ESQ: No, it&amp;#039;s just not the first descriptor I think of. CO: No, me neither, you&amp;#039;re right. But ya know what, I remember... It might have been The Sligo Champion or one of those kind of papers, very regional paper. The first time I was ever in a newspaper, the headline was &amp;quot;Spot the Difference.&amp;quot; And it had a picture of me, like an old headshot, and a picture of Richard Gere. I shit you not. And the weirdest thing was, I look nothing like Richard Gere. But in these photographs, I could&amp;#039;ve been his son. It was extraordinary. We both have big noses and little eyes and we were both looking the same way, and the headshot photos were kind of badly placed and soft-focused and it was just so, so bizarre. I want this to be your job, to go and find that photograph. [We found the photos:]   ESQ: That&amp;#039;s gonna be the headline: &amp;quot;Chris O&amp;#039;Dowd says he looks like a younger, hotter Richard Gere.&amp;quot; Are you still in New York right now? CO: Yeah, I am. ESQ: For how much longer? CO: I leave this weekend. Of Mice and Men [his Broadway play with James Franco] kinda finished last night, but we&amp;#039;re doing two more performances because we&amp;#039;re recording it tomorrow for National Theatre Live. And this is their first American one. It&amp;#039;s free to come, and all of the people in Broadway shows are going to come. Because that&amp;#039;s the one weird thing about Broadway \u2014 you can&amp;#039;t get to see any shows because you&amp;#039;re on at the same time as them all. But nobody has a show on a Tuesday afternoon so they&amp;#039;re all coming tomorrow. ESQ: Although, isn&amp;#039;t it what they call a mailman&amp;#039;s holiday?  CO: Busman&amp;#039;s holiday? ESQ: Yeah! CO: I&amp;#039;m hoping it&amp;#039;s better than that. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s hard for me to imagine doing the same show every day for 12 weeks. Are you always able to focus on things for a long time? CO: No. We have done 150 shows, and it&amp;#039;s certainly the longest one I&amp;#039;ve done. And I&amp;#039;ve been kind of... not impressed with myself, but I&amp;#039;ve been impressed with how it&amp;#039;s gone. Because I was worried that I would kinda lose focus and just suddenly be bad. But it&amp;#039;s been terrific, because it&amp;#039;s just a really strong cast and James was always very present and alive on stage. I guess the thing that really helps is it&amp;#039;s always a different audience, so it never feels repetitive. Weirdly, it kind of reminds me of doing The IT Crowd because they were both in front of a live audience. It&amp;#039;s just quite a buzz. ESQ: Is getting people to react something that really feeds you? CO: I guess that&amp;#039;s probably true. I mean, I definitely enjoy an audience, when I&amp;#039;m performing. As I get older I&amp;#039;m kind of less comfortable at being demonstrative. I always fancied myself as a raconteur, but that never really worked out.  ESQ: Is it you&amp;#039;re getting older and calmer, or because you&amp;#039;re getting more famous and more people are paying attention and that makes you uncomfortable? CO: Maybe it&amp;#039;s a combination. I think that you get older and you kind of, oddly, become slightly more secure. And then once you&amp;#039;ve got all the attention that you were craving, it&amp;#039;s like, Well, what the fk do I do with this? And you realize, Not very much. And then you just pang for the quiet moments. What are you gonna do. ESQ: I saw that you recovered from a hangover with I Found the Gown. Is that like a British version of Say Yes to the Dress? CO: No, it&amp;#039;s a U.S. show I think! I was watching it here. I think it&amp;#039;s exactly the same as Say Yes to the Dress, that&amp;#039;s what I&amp;#039;ve heard. But I think that it&amp;#039;s like one of those kinda TLC shows or something like that. We must&amp;#039;ve watched three hours of that that day.  ESQ: Whenever they say yes to the dress, I start crying. CO: I was crying! That&amp;#039;s what I was saying in my tweet. Otherwise, what&amp;#039;s the point? It&amp;#039;s manipulative television. I mean it&amp;#039;s essentially just cheap versions of talent show. I watch those things very little. Maybe like once a month I end up having a hungover day. That&amp;#039;s exactly what you want. That&amp;#039;s not when I want to stick on Bridge on the River Kwai. I wanna watch Say Yes to the Dress. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a29650/chris-odowd-interview/>