Legendary Irish costume designer reveals why Hollywood stars love filming here as she bags major gong

LEGENDARY Irish costume designer Joan Bergin has said top Hollywood actors love filming in Ireland because they can keep their anonymity here.

The Emmy-winner has worked on TV shows Vikings and The Tudors, and films such as Disenchanted.

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And while she has flown around the world for her career, she said she now prefers working at home.

She said: “I’ve had some incredible experiences, working in Thailand, waiting for the car and you look up at dawn and there’s a Buddha on top of a mountain that’s lit up. There are amazing moments.

“But you also become very much a family with the people you work with and with the union rules, you can bring maybe one of them, if you are lucky, to the States, maybe an assistant sometimes, but they are very strict.”

She added: “We do need more films to happen here. People argue the top A-list crews wouldn’t be here but they’ll be if the work comes. People will trade up and learn up.”

Working closely with actors on set for a long time leads to close relationships.

And Joan said these friendships are “one of the joys” of the job and they happen easier in Ireland.

She revealed: “Sometimes it’s lacking in the States where people are a bit confined to their own areas and they don’t go in for the chat like we do here.”

And the lack of ego and celebrity around an Irish set is also something the actors love.

Joan said: “They love that. The amount of them who have said to me that they can really concentrate on the part and what they’re doing and the way the director reacts to them.

“They do like it to get away from ‘so and so spotted today going shopping for bagels and they’re wearing’.

“The only time I read anything like that here was Matt Damon who was here for the Last Duel and he was seen with the Super Valu bag.

“And everyone thought that was so funny because you don’t see it that often.”

Joan grew up in Cabra, Dublin, and initially wanted to be an actress, helping to start Focus Theatre in the late 1960s.

But she soon saw her career go another way – into costume design.

She said: “I played the lead in A Month in the Country, which is a pretty heavyweight piece with Gabriel Byrne and Olwen Fouéré.

“I do remember thinking then I had a very light speaking voice, which is why I get hoarse so often.

“I just had the feeling at that time I was too interested in other things. I had a butterfly brain. Like I would be acting opposite someone and be looking at their costume. So I made a decision quite easily.”

Working with the likes of Patrick Dempsey, Meryl Streep and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, it was rare for Joan to ever get starstruck.

But she said it has happened twice in her career — the first time on Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, which starred Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, as well as rock icon David Bowie.

She said: “Meeting him was one of the great things of my life and I wish Bowie had done more screen acting, he was a wonderful actor. I’ve said this far too many times but the first time ever meeting an actor that my knees started to shake. I went, ‘my God, it’s David Bowie.’

“The other time I got slightly starstruck was with Brad Pitt — but who wouldn’t?

“I worked on the Irish end of the Devil’s Own and I went to New York for part of it as well, because he went to New York in some of his Irish wardrobe and (director) Alan J Pakula was very into that type of detail. So I got to have meetings with him about the part.”

Joan’s first TV job was on Sundays at the Gaiety on RTE and her first movie was with Daniel Day-Lewis on My Left Foot.

Joan recalled: “What a way to start! Looking back, I envy myself when I had that early time when it’s just, wow, someone like him.

“He’s into every detail, a man from heaven for a costume designer.

“He would spend an hour discussing a costume in a very important scene and what was fabulous was you could always go back to him and say ‘look, will you look at something else?’ Very openly he would do so.

“I always defend him when people talk about him staying in the role and all that kind of thing.

“I say, ‘you try that for a while. If you’re playing a paraplegic, you try staying like that.’ It’s phenomenal what he does and the results are also phenomenal.”

And while she loved the films she worked on with Daniel, including In the Name of the Father and the Boxer, another Irish job stands out for her.

Joan said: “The thing about Veronica Guerin, I think that’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was the fact that it wasn’t period.

“I used to do a lot of modern work in the beginning, and it was that thing which you gain with experience of not just interpreting what all the gangs were but you dress them almost in a way that they might aspire to.

“It took that leap of courage of how it presented the whole thing. I thought Cate Blanchett was astonishing, her voice, just amazing. As was Ciaran Hinds, terrific.”

Joan is being celebrated at tonight’s IFTAs with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

She said: “I was delighted. One of the big reasons is I think this is the first time that it has gone to someone behind the camera.

“There have been directors of course, but crew, creative crew. So I am delighted for that reason.

“With social media, it is such a star-orientated culture. It’s extraordinary when you work on something where the productive side have been superb, it’s all about the actors. It would be nice if they did broaden it out a bit, to the making of the movie and what’s involved in it.”

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