RTE Guide

Star of the week -  Robin Tunney

Since its successful debut in 2008, The Mentalist has taken the police procedural to new heights and Irish-American actor Robin Tunney, who plays Bureau of Investigation agent Teresa Lisbon, is surely one of the main reasons for that. The great chemistr y between her and maverick consultant Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) lifts the show above the restrictions of the form, into something thrilling and often moving.
Not surprisingly, working on a demanding weekly drama has brought the pair as close in real-life as on screen. Robin describes their 14-hour working days as “gruelling. During my first year I used to call my father, crying, telling him I wasn’t strong enough and couldn’t do it. And he’d be like, ‘Robin, don’t quit! You need the money!’ Both Simon and me sleep for 45 minutes every single lunch.
“The template of our show is different. The actors on CSI, for example, don’t work every day: they have bigger casts and the work is broken up between ten or 12 people. In our show, it’s generally  myself and Simon and then three other main characters. “I can’t imagine doing that much work with anyone else. But thank God, it’s him and we’re friends – he’s like a brother to me. I see him outside work a lot too which is just ridiculous, because we’re together all the time anyway. He and his wife have become really close friends. The chemistry between our characters has grown and become stronger over the years.”
She reckons that the secret to why the show works is like “lightning in a bottle” – hard to pinpoint and even harder to reproduce. “Simon’s obviously a star; people like to watch him. When he smiles, they smile too. They have crushes on him, and that doesn’t hurt. Also, the old-fashioned nature of the show helps. Patrick has a very Holmesesque way of solving crime: it ’s not DNA or über violence. He uses wit, not science.”

Given our national habit of appropriating anyone with even the vaguest connection to the old sod, Robin Tunney has managed to stay under the radar, but she’s about as Irish as it’s possible to get without being born here.
She was raised in Chicago but she says much of her parents’ identity “is wrapped up in being Irish. My father was born in Straide, Co Mayo, and my mother is first generation: both her parents were from Clare Island. My other grandmother lived in Galway until she died, about 12 years ago, and when I was a little kid we’d go over quite a lot to visit my grandmother, although it was expensive, so not every summer.
“It was incredibly beautiful, with a really interesting culture. And the people were very generous. One thing I noticed, especially when I was seven or eight, we had these relatives who weren’t at all rich. But they’d be arguing over who you were going to stay with, who’d pay for the food – they all wanted to take care of you. They’d give you the shirt off their back, and that was really beautiful.
“I still have a lot of family over there, and being Irish has had a strong effect on my personal life. I grew up in an Irish family who were telling stories all the time. By their nature I think the Irish are theatrical people. My father’s a real performer – he was always pretending to be different characters when I was growing up, doing the accents and all that. 
My mother bar-tended, and my dad would take her place and pretend to be a gay hairdresser named Laddie! He’d be giving people advice on their hair and stuff.”

Back at CBI headquarters, this season the pressure on Teresa and her team ratchets up even further, as they battle the blowback from last year’s disastrous finale, when Red John almost killed Patrick. 
But she wouldn’t have it any other way: “I play a more interesting character than I’d ever be offered in a movie nowadays. I’m really lucky to have it.” 

(Interview by Darragh MacManus)

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