LAW and Order star Robert Burke has said he spends all his time in Ireland drinking tea and catching up with family.
The New York actor is known for his roles in Robocop, Law and Order SVU and Gossip Girl.
Both of his parents emigrated to the US from Galway, so he spends any spare time he can coming back to their homeland, where he said ‘80 per cent’ of his relatives still live, near Loughrea and Barratoor.
He revealed: “My father, I don’t think he wanted to go to America at all but he had been dating my mother for many years.
“My mother came here in 1949 and my father in 1950 and that was that. They were very much in love and settled in the city in Manhattan and raised a family.”
And while he visits quite a bit, he has never been to the capital and said he spends most of his time in his family’s kitchen.
The actor said: “I’m not really out when I’m in Ireland. Every once in a while we’ll go into town but I’m usually with my family.
“I haven’t seen much of the country. I go to Galway and I sit in the kitchen and I drink tea, I look out the window and we talk.
“Then all of a sudden ten days have gone by and that’s all I’ve done. I’m very content to do that and they’ll tell you that.
“I’ve been to Clare and Kerry and that’s it. Never been to Dublin, never been to the South, never been North.
“Years ago I was there with my father and my aunt yelled at him, ‘get off your ass, take him to see Dublin, take him to see a bit of the country’.
“And my father slammed the table and goes, ‘he just came from one city, he’s not going to see another’.”
But Robert, 63, said he hopes to one day get to tour more, and has plans to bring his son Liam surfing in Donegal and Sligo.
He told: “There is so much of the country I haven’t seen and it happens every time I go, I get to the kitchen and I see about two or three families a day just to make sure I get to everybody but that’s the vacation, connecting with everybody. I don’t go frequently, but I don’t go infrequently.”
Both Robert and his Rescue Me co-star Denis Leary come from Irish parents so he said they think it would be “the perfect crime” to get to work on a film in Ireland.
Growing up, Robert got an internship to work in acting for his last year of high school and toured with plays.
Construction career
He then went to university to study acting but when his father died, it put his plans on hold.
He said: “So I took what was supposed to be six months away from acting and I did contracting, brickwork, carpentry, plastering, painting. The six months turned into six years in the blink of an eye.”
He was working on a patio when he got a call from an old friend, Hal Hartley, who asked him to be in his film, Unbelievable Truth.
He did that for 10 days and went back to construction but when it got picked up by a studio, his labouring days were behind him.
Since then, he has appeared in films like BlacKkKlansman and Black Panther, as well as other TV shows such as Sex and the City and the Sopranos.
‘Love guest star roles’
He told the Tis Yourself podcast: “I love the guest star roles where I play the mean guy who comes in. I always enjoy playing the bad guy because it’s just fun.
“You come in and you rattle everybody’s cage as best you can. And the more you rattle the cage, the more you can get the audience to hate you, the more you’re doing your job.”
One of his best known roles is in Law and Order, playing Captain Ed Tucker opposite the show’s longstanding hero, Mariska Hargitay.
He praised her: “That woman is a force of nature. And even in her own foundation work, the Joyful Heart Foundation, you’re an actor, you’re playing a role and all of a sudden people start to write letters to you.
“50 letters, then a hundred, then a thousand and then all of a sudden you’re getting tens of thousands of letters. Women who’ve been abused or raped.
‘Changed laws’
“Some people step back from it, but people like Mariska have stepped forward and they started the Joyful Heart Foundation. She’s been to Washington and she’s changed some laws about rape kits.
“There was a backlog, they were not testing these things and they were finding a lot of these people committing these crimes were doing so repeatedly and if you had only checked these things you’d know that.
“She’s unbelievable in terms of all the work she’s done, and the time away from her family and the time away from sitting back she could be doing. I respect her more than anybody, she’s just the best, she’s unbelievable.”
- Hear the whole chat on the Tis Yourself podcast HERE
