Ciarán Hinds Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Ciarán Hinds was fifty-four when Margot at the Wedding opened. The Belfast-born stage actor had spent the 1990s on the British and Irish stage and in BBC and Royal Shakespeare Company productions, breaking through internationally in the Glenn Close Mary Reilly (1996) and Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady (1996), then accelerating through Persuasion (1995, BBC), The Mayor of Casterbridge (2003), Munich (2005), and the HBO/BBC series Rome (2005–2007), where he played Julius Caesar.
Dick Koosman as practiced cruelty
Hinds plays Dick Koosman in the registers his stage training equipped him for: the charming interlocutor, the writer-as-host, the man who has spent enough time sitting across from interview subjects to know exactly which question opens which wound. The bookstore midpoint is the performance's center of gravity; Hinds stays warm and curious for the first three minutes, then turns the screw without warning. The technique is invisible because Hinds has done it a hundred times on stage.
"Hinds is doing something subtle and frightening — playing a man whose charm and his cruelty are not separate qualities but the same skill applied at different angles." — Manohla Dargis, paraphrased from New York Times (2007)
Stage training and the BBC ensemble
Hinds came up at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre and the RSC in the 1980s, working under Giles Havergal and on productions with Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins, and Anthony Sher. The British theatrical training that produced his generation — Mirren, Brian Cox, the Branagh-Thompson Renaissance Theatre Company, the Steppenwolf-adjacent imports — gave actors a certain way of holding text on screen: full sentences, attention to where breath falls, no improvised filler. Hinds's Margot performance is close to that grain; he plays Dick the way one plays a Pinter character, with the unsaid running underneath the said.
"I always think of acting as listening. The voice and the face come second. If you can hear what the other person is saying, you don't have to do very much." — Ciarán Hinds, The Guardian (2017)
Casting through Baumbach's New York network
By 2007 Hinds had been cast across the prestige independent circuit — Spielberg's Munich (2005), Anthony Minghella's The English Patient nadir-piece Breaking and Entering (2006), and the Rome HBO production. The Margot casting was part of the same circuit; he was an actor working steadily but without a marquee American role yet, and Baumbach got him at a productive moment. The same year saw Hinds in There Will Be Blood uncredited, Margot at the Wedding, and the start of his recurring role in the Harry Potter franchise as Aberforth Dumbledore (eventually appearing in Deathly Hallows — Part 2, 2011). (wikipedia)
After Margot
Hinds continued at his characteristic pace through In Bruges (2008), The Eclipse (2009), Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin (2011), John Carney's The Sea (2013), Kenneth Branagh's Belfast (2021, Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination), and The Banshees of Inisherin (2022). He has continued to alternate stage and film work; the Belfast accent he brought to Belfast is the one he had tucked behind various received-pronunciation parts for thirty years.
"Belfast was the part I'd been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for it. Suddenly there I was, sixty-eight, playing my own grandfather." — Ciarán Hinds, The Irish Times (2022)