'And of course being Banville, he does have the mystery there for sure, but what makes the books and the programme interesting is that it's as much a study of character.' 'When he started to write in his nom de plume Benjamin Black I was very curious to see how he would approach the detective genre,' says Byrne. Quirke (we don't discover his first name) is the pathologist hero – or anti-hero – of a series six crime novels written by the Booker Prize winning novelist John Banville under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black. What made the experience doubly powerful for Byrne is that the BBC drama he was filming, 'Quirke', is set in mid-1950s Dublin, the decade of Byrne's boyhood – growing up the son of a cooper's labourer making wooden barrels for Guinness.

'And we shot in the theatre where I made my first professional appearance (the Olympia Theatre)… Phow… déjà vu doesn't begin to describe it.' 'By absolute coincidence, we were shooting in the very first apartment I ever had… on Pembroke Road,' says the star of Miller's Crossing, The Usual Suspects and HBO's In Treatment. When last year native Dubliner but long-term resident of New York (and before that Los Angeles), Gabriel Byrne found himself filming back in the Irish capital, the city of his not altogether happy childhood, it was experience he describes as 'crashing into my past'.

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