Actor and writer Peter Sheridan has always been open about his battle with alcohol. It was an addiction that nearly destroyed his marriage and sent him on a downward spiral through the late eighties. But the actor also developed a cocaine habit that could have finished him.
Speaking on The Green Room Sheridan tells how he travelled to Los Angeles in the mid-eighties to stage his latest play and became convinced that this was the place to be. The party lifestyle also appealed to the writer and no party was complete without bags of cocaine being handed about.
“I developed a very very strong cocaine habit when I was in LA. I loved coke, I really loved..it…. it’s a very seductive drug."
"I had access to coke in LA that was just outrageous. One of my best friends was a coke dealer. A Cuban guy. ‘Cuban Mike’ they called him, so I had a free supply of coke whenever I wanted it.”
Explaining why cocaine was his drug of choice in the US, Sheridan replies:
“You feel great about yourself. You feel like a very creative person, you love everybody. It’s like you want to be sexual with everybody.”
The problem Sheridan concedes is “when you stop doing it, it whacks you over the head..it says ‘No, do me more, have another line.’”
Sheridan’s career took off in Ireland around the same time and his love affair with LA and cocaine dwindled although his battle with drink continued.
His latest stage production Break A Leg, based on his memoir of the same name tells the story of Sheridan’s life up until his attempted move to LA and a number of years before his appearance in his brother Jim Sheridan’s film In The Name Of The Father.
Asked if the film could have been made today, Sheridan says it was “different back then”. The film he believes played a crucial role in the peace process.
“The film had a huge impact on Hilary and Bill Clinton. They rang Jim from the White House after watching the film and said something has to be done. From a cultural point of view, it was the most important thing in terms of the peace process.”
The playwright is less comfortable about the latest extension of friendship between Ireland and Britain.
Asked about his thoughts on the President’s first state visit to Britain and his meeting with the Queen, Sheridan answers:
“I’ve always been a republican. I don’t subscribe to the idea that anyone by dint of their birth is better than me, I believe we are all equal.
It doesn’t mean that I hate them. I don’t hate them. It’s good to move on from the violence and the hatred and all that. But they did a lot of bad stuff to us. We need to acknowledge that without saying we want to kill you.”
“There are aspects of this rapprochement that make me uncomfortable,” Sheridan says.
Break A Leg runs at the Project Arts Theatre in Dublin from April 29th –May 10th 2014
Listen here for the full interview with Peter Sheridan on The Green Room with Orla Barry
