Music

Interview with U2’s Larry Mullen on His Acting Career

For the guy who speaks the least in any U2 group interview (trust me, I know), Larry Mullen Jr has been quite loquacious this week, chatting up the possibility of not one but two new albums this year.  He also spend time talking to the Irish Times about his budding acting career.

After 36 years as U2’s “plumber”, Larry Mullen jnr wanted to try his hand at acting, but starring opposite Donald Sutherland in Man on the Train was jumping in at the deep end, he tells Tara Brady

IT’S A BRISK January day and Larry Mullen jnr and I have left our respective Dublin 13 abodes (his is the bigger one) and made for Clontarf Castle. Put it down to good cheekbones: at 51, he walks in the door and is still instantly recognisable as “the boyish-looking one” from U2.

He’s easy to spot and yet slips in and out of the building, unnoticed and unmolested. Curious. Maybe it helps that he’s a local. Though Artane was where he grew up, Howth, his current postal code, was the place “for scouts and fishing and taking girlfriends”.

“I’ve never imagined myself living anywhere else,” he says.

Then again maybe he gets to wander freely because he’s the guy down the back. Or, as he modestly puts it, “the ‘shut up and hit something guy’ down the back.”

Know any good drummer jokes? Larry certainly does. In the 36 years since he founded U2, he’s had the opportunity to build up a sizeable repertoire of percussion-related punch-lines.

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Alan Cross

is an internationally known broadcaster, interviewer, writer, consultant, blogger and speaker. In his 40+ years in the music business, Alan has interviewed the biggest names in rock, from David Bowie and U2 to Pearl Jam and the Foo Fighters. He’s also known as a musicologist and documentarian through programs like The Ongoing History of New Music.

Alan Cross has 37980 posts and counting. See all posts by Alan Cross

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