Getting to the Hart of a good laugh

The script for The Closer You Get made me laugh. It's not Cahiers du Cinema, it's a leave-your-brain-at-home film to sit back and enjoy.

Comedy is always contrivance and often a comedy script will have a joke on page four and another on page 98 and that's it. But this one had laughs and dignity and a good set of circumstances - a small windswept Irish fishing village where all the eligible females have left.

The unmarried men, in an attempt to lure wives from across the sea, place an ad in a newspaper in Miami inviting American women to join them for their annual St Martha's Day dance. It was originally called Bachelor Valley and the story is based on an article in a Spanish newspaper about a group of men from the mountains around Barcelona who put an ad for brides in a local paper.

I play Kieran, the local butcher. Sean McGinley, whom I worked with on Michael Collins, is my older brother Ian, and Ewan Stewart and Niamh Cusack are the couple who run the bar.

Making a film is like trying to find the Golden Fleece. You never know if you'll succeed - so you have to enjoy the making of it. We shot in Donegal, and we had a really good time.

Because Kieran decides to go blond, which he thinks will make him more of a dish, I got paid a lot of money to have my hair bleached once a week. In this film I reckon my hair's got more of a sense of humour than I have.