The things actors do to get in character for their movie roles . . . This time last year, the fast-rising young Irish actor, Stuart Townsend, had landed his first leading role in a film, cast with the American actor Dan Futterman as a couple of wily and imaginative confidence tricksters in London in Shooting Fish.
Their director, Stefan Schwartz, sent them out on the streets to devise and try out some scams on the poor, unsuspecting public.
"Do we really have to do this?" Townsend asked. Yes, they did. No way out. So there they were on Oxford Street, trying to peddle a car alarm which, they claimed, would give any intruders 250 volts in the hand. Their mission was to collect a 10 per cent deposit from anyone who would fall for their ruse.
"Dan schmoozed it brilliantly," Townsend said, back home in Dublin last weekend. "Then we do another one where he has this leather briefcase full of perfume and he's going, `Givenchy, Chanel . . . ', while Stefan's nearby with a hidden video camera.
Women come by and stop and then I come along and ask how much is the perfume. Dan asks me where I'm from and I tell him I'm Irish and visiting my girlfriend in Guildford. He suggests I get her some perfume.
"I give him a £50 note and he grabs it and runs away. I have a bag on the ground, and I'm primed to fall over it, and I burst into tears.
Then the scam sets in. I have to get £10 from each woman for my train fare to Guildford. And they gave it to me! One woman even chased after Dan and called him a bastard. It worked the second time and the third time. I felt so guilty. When we were finished, one woman actually refused to take her money back."
For Stuart Townsend, the downside of shooting Shooting Fish was the ghastly pudding-bowl haircut with which his technically adept but socially gauche character was saddled. "My hair is gruesome in it," he grins. "They got a hairdresser in to do it, but it didn't look grotty enough, so Stefan, the director, took over with the scissors."
An entertaining and often inventive romp that is over-extended in its later stages, Shooting Fish, which went on Irish release yesterday, is the first of three movies starring Stuart Townsend to arrive here within months of each other.
Now 24, Stuart comes from Howth; his father is the golf pro, Peter Townsend. "As Oscar Wilde said, golf is a waste of a good walk," says Stuart, who evidently not sharing his father's passion for the game. Stuart's mother was one of Ireland's best-known models, Lorna Townsend, who died at the age of 43 in 1994.
Like so many actors, Stuart got into the business circuitously. "I just love movies," he says, "and I happened to be going out with this girl training at the Gaiety School of Acting. I gave it a try and I loved it." He made his stage debut in the school's showcase, Tear Up The Black Sail, directed by Patrick Sutton at the Project and went on to play in two productions of Borstal Boy at the Gaiety, moving up from "two small parts the first time to being upgraded to Behan's best mate the second time I did it." He got his first major theatre role in John Crowley's critically acclaimed True Lines, which was preceded by seven weeks of improvisation and a fortnight of research. "The first time we did it, my character lived," he recalls. "The second time, I died. It changed all the time."
After appearing in a number of student films, Stuart made his feature film debut in Gilles Mackinnon's film of Billy Roche's Trojan Eddie, as the seductive young man who steals away with the bride of the elderly travellers' leader (played by Richard Harris) on her wedding day. "Ah, King Richard," he sighs. "I was thrilled to work with him. I'd been watching him in movies since I was eight, so I was just amazed and wide-eyed, listening to all his anecdotes about Bill Clinton and Peter O'Toole and so many other people, but I wasn't overawed by him."
That calling card led to landing a London agent and a leading role in Shooting Fish. Then there was a short break for a trek to Nepal before joining the cast of Carine Adler's hot new British film, Under The Skin, shown at the Cork Film Festival yesterday and opening here at Christmas. "We improvised most of that," he says. "The phone-sex scene was a great laugh to do."
Next came Marc Evans's movie of Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man, in which Stuart Townsend is centre screen as Victor Kelly, the charismatic Cagney-obsessed leader of a 1970s Belfast Loyalist gang inspired by the Shankhill Butchers. "He's a complete psycho," says Townsend.
"Brenda Fricker plays me ma, who's quite an evil woman. She loves her son and says he's in pain because of life, while I'm doing these awful things to other people. It's heavy viewing and I don't know what people in Northern Ireland will think of it. It's a very tough film, but it doesn't glamorise violence."
It has its premiere at the London Film Festival next month and opens here early in the spring. Meanwhile, Stuart Townsend is off diving on the island of Sulawesi near Indonesia before facing far chillier climes in Iceland where he will spend the next three months starring with Kate Hardie in the romantic road-movie, Sweet Bananas.
"For six months after finishing Shooting Fish, I didn't read a single script I liked." he says. "Suddenly, now there are loads of them. I can't wait to be in front of the camera again. Acting is great. You spend your whole life trying to get it right."