THERE'S a scene in the new Irish film Gold In The Streets where Jared Harris, who plays the toughest, most cynical member of a group of young Irish emigrants in New York, smashes up his apartment in frustration and self-disgust. It's a moment of pure melodrama, and like much of Harris's performance in the movie, is uncannily reminiscent of his father, Richard, in some roles. Anyone who saw the recent film I Shot Andy Warhol, in which Harris junior convincingly portrayed the enigmatic pop artist, will be struck by the breadth of the acting range demonstrated in these two films alone.
Talking in the Shelbourne Hotel - the day after the world premiere of Gold In The Streets, which received a fairly muted reception at its Dublin Film Festival screening, Jared Harris is in ebullient form, looking forward to seeing his father's performance in Trojan Eddie for the first time later that afternoon. He sees Richard's example as a great help in his own career.
"It's helped in that I've watched someone go through it all before. You've got to go out there, make the contacts and meet people. That's a hard thing to do, but you to think of yourself as a business. My Dad's very good at that. He'll give you the impression that he's just having a laugh, and telling stories, but actually he's very, very sharp about negotiating the clever little angles."
Jared has been acting on stage and screen for 10 years, making his cinema debut in the 1988 version of Martin Amis's novel The Rachel Papers, which his brother Damian directed. After a period with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford (an experience he describes as "just lovely, like Disneyland for actors") he moved to New York in 1991. But it's in the last couple of years in particular that his performances in hip independent American films such as I Shot Andy Warhol, Wayne Wang's Smoke and Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, have raised his profile as a movie actor. He laughs off suggestions that he's part of any New York scene. "Either I'm unconsciously avoiding it, or they don't want my company. I'm certainly not hanging out with Jim Jarmusch, Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro."
Is it difficult, though, to be the bearer of such a famous name in the acting profession? "I did think very hard about whether acting was something that I should be doing. You can do it for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. If it's the wrong reasons, you might as well go into therapy. If you're doing it for the right reasons, then it's because it's something you love and like and there's a space there for you, which is very much the way I feel."
