Aidan Quinn’s almost alien blue eyes pierce the screen but nearly always from its sidelines

Aidan Quinn’s almost alien blue eyes pierce the screen, but nearly always from its sidelines. They hint at a burning intensity few directors have bothered to stoke. Since his breakthrough in Desperately Seeking Susan 20 years ago, the 45-year-old has had a strangely egoless Hollywood career. Often the under-written boyfriend, his frustrations have been more like an actress’s than an actor’s. He’s often been the unlucky one in romantic triangles, losing the girl to bigger stars like Brad Pitt, in Legends of the Fall (1994), and Liam Neeson, in Michael Collins (1996).In the latter, playing the thwarted, betrayed IRA “minister for bloody mayhem” Harry Boland, Quinn showed what he was capable of. But what Hollywood would let him do was exemplified by the eye-candy boyfriend he played in his last studio movie to date, Practical Magic (1998). So he has spent the last half-decade in the indie underground, often making personal films which explore roots he’s more tied to than many Irish-Americans, having spent his childhood being shunted back and forth to the old country by his father, who trained unsuccessfully to be a Jesuit priest.His new film, Song for a Raggy Boy, explores the evils of the religion his father so unquestioningly backed, exposing the savage sexual abuse and brutality in a Catholic orphanage in the 1930s.

It’s a subject he touched on in Evelyn (2002) too, and one of which he has personal experience. “One of my earliest memories is of refusing to say my prayers when I was four, and being caned by the brother,” he says, in his gently slurring brogue “And I went to a Christian Brothers’ school in Dublin at 13. And you were immediately told, through harsh joking that was full of jeering, always to stay away from this one brother And you knew, even then, that it was serious. Fifteen years ago, when Sinead O’Connor started talking about sexual abuse in the family and the Catholic church, everyone wanted to burn her at the stake. But everything she talked about turns out to be true.”At an early age, Quinn began to rebel against authority, starting at home.

“I tried to have strong intellectual arguments with my father; I condemned him as a hypocrite,” he says. “I saw the Father tear out an old man for being five minutes late at church, embarrassing him to younger people. How dare ye, you know? My father would say, ‘If you’re in my house you’ll do as I say’ – and so I left.”Quinn never abandoned his own religion, though, however much he despised its authorities. And in the 1980s, Martin Scorsese cast him, twice, as the lead in The Last Temptation of Christ, before America’s religious right capsized it and, at the third time of asking, he was replaced by Willem Dafoe He was ready for the role. “The more I researched his life,” he says, “the more I saw him giggling and dancing – the more I saw a man able to drink wine, and be light-hearted. A lot of that stuff’s been stripped away, by translators and bishops, to suit their own purposes.