Disappearing Act: A Multitude of Other Stories: A Host of Other Characters in 16 Short Stories

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The accumulation of things like that, where essentially your presence is omitted, you are left out. For no good real reason. That would sting. There is a big effort towards inclusion, equality and diversity across casting and hiring. I saw on social media that Netflix posted, I'm paraphrasing, 'To be silent about this is to be complicit' and I think that's right." Have you ever read something to realise that the writer has the potential to be a great writer, but the writing itself has fallen short of something essential to make it a good writing? And then they’re hoisting me up by the scruff and they look alarmed. There must be a load of blood. Their eyes are bulging and their talk is drifting in and out of my ears. I can’t hear properly. God forgive me, I don’t want to die, but on the upside … If you die in a churchyard, you’re guaranteed entry into Heaven, I’d say. Is that right, God? It’s not written down anywhere but why else would all the priests and Protestant vicars bury themselves on the church grounds? It’s hallowed, sacred ground, and I think that means I’d get a pass. Unusually for an actor, he didn’t go to drama school. He dropped out of college in Galway, where he studied film and television. It was, he recalls, a city where there was “plenty of opportunity” to meet girls. Not that, as time went on, it was always only girls. “I explored my sexuality, just to see if there were any tinges in a gay or bisexual area, but there wasn’t really for me. I gave it a few tries though.” Should the first film take off in the way that's planned, the move to Hollywood is almost inevitable; his co-stars, Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower, are already there. This year he has been over twice so far. "And it's friendlier than you think," he says. "It's all: 'Chad's having a party on Saturday, Ethan's having a barbecue on Sunday, we're gonna do brunch and hiking on Monday…' It's surprisingly easy to plug yourself in."

The results are the type of witty colourful writing that would have gotten published, even without Sheehan’s star caché. It might be easy to be cynical about an actor turning his hand to fiction — the critical mauling Sean Penn received a couple of years ago for his novel lingers in the memory — but the Portlaoise-born actor has a rare imaginative talent and has already won fulsome praise from Breakfast on Pluto author Pat McCabe no less. What are his family’s favourite of his roles? “Love/Hate is on again at the moment and my mother and father are watching that,” he says. “They really love that. They like the Irish homegrown stuff the best. They probably relate to it the most. I don’t think my dad’s even seen Umbrella Academy.”Or see her pull up outside Kay Flood’s for our appointment for a blow dry and fizz, and I’d say, ‘Well, Sinéad, sink still broke?’ And she’d give me the eyes and say, ‘Now, Liam, the thing about being married to a builder is he knows he can fix it, that’s why nothing ever gets fixed!’ And I’d roll my eyes and try and keep from letting it out, the knowing that she’s going to be giving me the shivers, through my whole body from the top down, when she’s giving me the shampoo-conditioner under the hot jets, and beaming, smiling at me and asking is there anything in the magazine.

So what does Robert think his debut book says about himself? A nervous guffaw. "I hope it shows someone who was eager to write something contentious, something provocative," he says. Has he always been provocative or contrarian, as he might put it? "I think so. I’ve tried my best anyway." Like that time he got involved with one of those organised teenage fights on the green near his family home and his father, a Garda, arrived in a squad car to investigate. He laughs again. "Joe pulls up in the police cruiser and roars ‘ROBERT!’ and I just legged it." However, I feel the reason why these stories work better than the others in this collection is because they stray the most from Sheehan's original conceit. Medusa does not offer much of Sheehan's ventriloquism and Gertie Cronin is purported to be a straight transcript of a tale told by the author's father. Robert Sheehan: The actor with the cast of Misfits at the 2010 BAFTA Awards in London (Image: Jon Furniss/WireImage via Getty Images)

Robert Sheehan, Portlaoise born star of The Umbrella Academy, Love/Hate, Misfits, Red Riding, The Mortal Instruments and Mortal Engines, is lounging on a couch in his north London flat and I'm staring at him through the camera on his laptop. He's very relaxed. "I'm loving this, man, being able to get cups of tea, slices of toast, being able to go and water the plants." Actually, there's a big potted plant incongruously sitting beside him on the couch. His hair is long. "I'm a happy bunny, man." Me learning to act was mainly kind of practising with friends who were also actors. We were all eager to prove ourselves; that helped me. In public, I took on this swaggery air — it helped in my career too. In those years, I used to do positive affirmations. They were about how good I was at acting or my health. Because I think, passively, you can go around telling yourself you’re terrible at things and there is a corrective needed for that. But that’s equally as dishonest.” His meditation practice has helped him to deal with the grief of losing his uncle, Mikey, who died in a tragic house fire in Kilorglin, Co Kerry — where Rob’s father grew up — two years ago. “That was very sad. It was unexpected. I didn’t get to see my family through that time; I was in Toronto making television. Writing helped to process the grief. I was meditating on set about three months after he died and somehow I started welling up and I started writing about him on my phone.” Were his family otherwise creative? "We did a lot of music when we were kids," he says. "We used to go to the Fleadh Cheoils. I went to France at the age of 10 with a band of musicians and the mayor of Portlaoise and the deputy mayor and mum, to do a town twinning thing. And dad [a garda] has a pretty extensive library. It's pretty impressive the amount of books that he's read . . . He was always singing songs and quoting bits and poems, so he was very influential in that way. And he has a great computer head for excerpts of things."

in which he co-starred with David Tennant) and, quite frankly, I was miserable. It was about things going on in my life; I felt like I couldn’t just ‘be’, and I was always creating drama around me. I was just exasperated, and so I started meditating. I thought, I’ll reserve judgment on it for six months and, after six months, I couldn’t have been more grateful I did it.”

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I don’t know if I was in a position to know the plights of people from minorities [who] may not have been getting the same opportunities I was getting, which is kind of shitty.