Front-of-camera role for Ennis man Mark

ENNIS actor and scriptwriter Mark O’Halloran has written award-winning screenplays such as Adam and Paul, Garage and the RTÉ mini-series Prosperity but taking a break from writing, he now stars in a new film which opens next week.
A Kiss for Jed, directed by Maurice Linnane and written by Barry Devlin of Horslips, will open at cinemas in Ennis, Limerick and Galway on May 18 and has critics talking on both sides of the Atlantic.
The film also stars up and coming Northern Irish actor Jayne Wisener and US actor Lee Arenberg of Pirates of the Carribean fame.
The new romantic comedy centres around Orla (Wisener), a wild 18-year-old from Ireland who goes on a reality TV game-show and is sent to New York to get a kiss from her favourite celebrity, country superstar, Jed.
Mark O’Halloran plays Ray Timmons, a 40-year-old with a great future behind him, who is dispatched as her cameraman. In New York, they meet up with porno film soundman Mike (Arenberg) and set out on their quest.
They are wildly unsuccessful but two events change the course of their journey when Ray decides to stay and rescue Orla from a fate worse than death. Neither get quite what they want but they do perhaps get what they need.
Speaking to The Clare Champion, Mark outlines his role. “I play the part of Ray Timmons, a cameraman who has possibly got aspirations of grandeur about himself but has been so exacting in his own standards that he has allowed himself to do nothing and has ended up teaching in a college in Dublin to a bunch of bored return-to-education people. His grand ideas are floundering.
“He gets asked to become a cameraman on this reality TV show, which involves a young woman having to answer questions about her favourite superstar and if she gets through, she gets to follow them around New York trying to get a kiss from them.”
Ray thinks he is above it all and ends up almost falling in love with this young woman.
“He’s in his 40s and she’s only 18 but he falls in love with her in a very caring almost fatherly kind of way. He takes care that she is not making the wrong choices in life. She starts going out with this seedy guy over there and he starts becoming incredibly protective. It’s about a blossoming of him.
“He thinks life is behind him and she jolts him into believing that you make your own life and you start in the here and now. It’s a coming of age in lots of ways for her and for him, it’s a reawakening of his life so it is a charming, lovely little film I have to say,” Mark said.
Filming for the movie involved a week’s shoot in Dublin and a three to four-week shoot in New York, which Mark describes as “a great adventure”.
Speaking his co-stars, Mark said it was a great treat to be working with Lee Arenberg and Jayne Wisener.
“Lee is huge in America at the moment – he was in Pirates of the Carribean and he is now on this TV series called Once Upon a Time, so just hanging out with him was pretty great. Jayne Wisener was in Sweeney Todd, she played Sweeney Todd’s daughter and she’s been in the Inbetweeners. She is very up and coming and it was great hanging out with them,” he said.
Mark moved from Ard na Gréine in Ennis, where he grew up, to Dublin aged 18 to study drama at The Gaiety School of Acting, which saw the beginning of his life as scriptwriter/actor.
“My career has always been a slow-moving kind of thing rather than meteoric. I worked as a theatre actor for a long time working in The Gate and The Abbey and then I took a break from that and started writing. I wrote a number of plays and then I wrote a screenplay called Adam and Paul and that was a real changing point in my career. I got to make choices and things and for a while, I steered clear of acting and I began just writing. I wrote TV series, plays and the film Garage. Now, at this point in my career, I’ve gone back to acting a little bit. I’ve never been involved in a film project where I haven’t been the writer so I have to just look after the acting bit so that is a delight,” he said. 
Mark is especially proud of his film Adam and Paul, which is in stark contrast to the current film he is working on.
“It is a very serious film [Adam and Paul] while A Kiss for Jed has got a beautiful gentle message about caring for people and other people caring for you. It’s about being good to people and the fact that when you get to 40, it is not the end of your life, it can be the beginning of a new phase in your life. That message that you can start again and reawaken your life is quite beautiful and charming and can put a smile on your face,” he said. 
Mark’s interest in the dramatic arts was cultivated at home in Ennis as a regular attendee of the Ennis Musical Society, where his father was a member.
“I would always go and see those. I suppose when you are young and you see your dad up there singing and you see all the people you know from town up there doing operettas and operas, it seems like such a magical thing. I always wanted to act I think and I was pretty useless at everything else. I couldn’t envisage myself doing anything else as a career path. At times, it can be very slow and painful but it is a fantastic life. You get to tell stories and play a lot of the time, you get to meet extraordinary people but you also get to try and imagine other people in life and look at life from other perspectives. It is a beautiful way to look at life,” Mark said.
In the future, Mark is touring America with the play Hay Fever following, which had a successful run last year at The Gate Theatre. He will also be bringing Trade, a play he wrote, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this summer.
Mark also has a film that is in financing and he is hoping to have the full budget together by the end of the year to get working on it.
A Kiss For Jed opens on May 18 in cinemas across the country and will be shown locally in Ennis, Limerick and Galway. See www.akissforjedmovie.com for more details.