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 here.
"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.
"I can understand why religion exists; what a joy. But if you don't believe it, you don't believe it. You can't make yourself believe. I invited our parish priest to our wedding. He's a close friend, an absolute delight as a man, and we talk about religions sometimes. I find religion fascinating. I'm not anti-religion, I just don't believe in 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."
ACTOR RELISHES THE DARK SIDE
Tobias Menzies, who's been an important part of Starz's "Outlander" since the beginning, says that playing the evil "Black Jack" Randall took some special efforts. "It's a weird head space to try to get into," he says.
"But that's what's interesting about acting, that you get to sort of explore and think and maybe say things and do things that you are not supposed to do in real life, which is good. And it's certainly why I like acting, why I got into it. So I really relish those opportunities exploring the darker side of things. And, obviously, the opportunities for that in this show have been quite extensive ... It's an exploration of a sadist, someone who is interested in other people's pain barriers. That's interesting territory to explore." Fans will be able to explore new territories when Season 3 arrives on Sept. 10.
PBS EXAMINES VOYAGER FALLOUT
On Wednesday PBS will feature "The Farthest _ Voyager in Space," studying the 1977 excursion to interstellar space by Voyager. Ed Stone, the 81-year-old chief scientist on the project, says, "Voyager really gave us a new view of the solar system, revealed things that we couldn't have imagined, and really how diverse the bodies are in the solar system," he says.
"(They had) all the same physical processes that we're familiar with here on Earth, but they came out in much different forms and much different histories. And I think that's the thing which really told us that our terra-centric view of planets was really much too limited, not just a little bit, but greatly too limited. And we now understand things much better about planets and moons and rings and magnetic fields than we did just from what we learned and have learned about Earth," he says.
NBC REVIVES 'WILL & GRACE'
NBC will resurrect its former hit series "Will & Grace" on Sept. 28. This latter-day version will be a whole new show featuring the popular sitcom's original stars, Debra Messing, Sean Hayes, Megan Mullally, and Eric McCormack. David Kohan and Max Mutchnik, who created and executive produced the original, are back at the computer scribbling out new episodes.
"We spent the most time in storycamp figuring out what would be the best way to tell the audience exactly where they're at and what they're up to at this time," says Mutchnik. "And we think we came up with the right way to do that, and we just want to hold off on telling you exactly what that is because it will take away some of the fun, but it's not anything that's going to surprise you." In the meantime, WE tv is offering all-day marathons of the original show through Sept. 16.
