Gabriel Byrne has revealed he deleted his memoir from his laptop and had to rewrite it all over again.
The Usual Suspects star made the huge blunder just as he was finishing his book, Walking With Ghosts.
He said: “I had literally written The End and put a full stop. And I think then I’d wanted to change one of the sentences around. Whatever I did, I managed to lose the whole thing.”
The Dubliner brought his MacBook to Apple’s Manhattan store, hoping someone could retrieve his manuscript.
“I went to their Genius Bar and asked them if they could bring out their best genius to look at it.
“So, this timid-looking guy with bottle glasses comes out and he’s working away on it and I’m standing there as he’s tapping away and then, after three quarters of an hour, he says, ‘It’s gone and even the CIA can’t get it back.’”
Byrne thought about not re-writing his memoir but then decided a week later to start writing it again.
“I’d spent so long on it. It would have been a waste,” he told the Sunday Independent’s Life magazine.
Byrne also opened up about wondering if he never left Ireland and moved to America – but he said opportunities back home were “very limited” and he didn’t want to wind up o a soap opera for 20 years.
“The opportunities in Ireland were very limited. It was the Abbey, the Gate, Rte. And I’d already gone through the RTE situation.
“I knew I could have stayed on there and worked in a soap opera for the next 20 years, but I’d watched people who’d been in The Riordans for 17,18 years and they had become those characters.
“And I knew I didn’t want to do that.”
But Byrne did return home to star in the Quirke, the TV drama series based on John Banville’s 1950s-set Dublin crime books.
However, the end result of the show left him “disappointed”.
“We were filming on streets I had actually lived on and knew intimately. We were shooting right next door to an apartment I’d lived in with my first girlfriend.
“Quirke was an important piece to do, because it dealt with real issues. There were no nostalgic rose-coloured glasses, this idea of Dublin in the Rare Ould Times.
“Personally I had misgivings about the end product. I don’t want to go into that, but I don’t think it was given the care and the support it should have been given, which was very disappointing.”
But at 72, he said he has no plans to retire.
“Most people my age are retired, but I don’t think about retiring. For me, it’s about keeping going as long as I can and keeping my brain occupied.
“I want to keep being curious and keep trying to find new things.”
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