Colm Meaney
Colm Meaney is an actor, born 1953.
Meaney has been in more good films than most leading men, almost always in the third or fourth part on the call sheet, and he has been doing it since John Huston's The Dead in 1987. He also played Miles O'Brien on Star Trek: The Next Generation, a small recurring role that grew into a series regular part on Deep Space Nine, which is an unusual way to spend a decade.
The Irish work is where the range is. He was Jimmy Rabbitte Senior in The Commitments in 1991, one of Roddy Doyle's Barrytown films. Another of them, The Snapper, brought him a Golden Globe nomination and the Silver Hugo for best actor at Chicago in 1993. He has seven nominations from the Irish Film and Television Academy and won twice, for How Harry Became a Tree and for The Journey. None of those three titles is among the credits listed here.
What he does better than almost anyone is play a man whose patience has just run out. It is there in Con Air's exasperated federal agent, in Layer Cake's Gene, in Don Revie in The Damned United, in the railway baron Thomas Durant across Hell on Wheels and the crime patriarch Finn Wallace in Gangs of London. The voice does half the work and the impatience does the rest.
He is still busy, with Marlowe, In the Land of Saints and Sinners and The Serpent Queen all recent.
Movies (57)
- Remarkably Bright Creatures (2026)
- Con Air (1997)
- Law Abiding Citizen (2009)
- The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
- Under Siege (1992)
- No Way Up (2024)
- Layer Cake (2004)
- Free Birds (2013)
- Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016)
- Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016)
- The Banker (2020)
- Far and Away (1992)
- Duchess (2024)
- Claire Dolan (1998)
- In the Land of Saints and Sinners (2023)
- Marlowe (2023)
- Tolkien (2019)
- The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995)
- Get Him to the Greek (2010)
- The Cold Light of Day (2012)
- The Damned United (2009)
- The Conspirator (2011)
- Bel Ami (2012)
- Mystery, Alaska (1999)
- Seberg (2019)
- The Commitments (1991)
- One Chance (2013)
- Norm of the North (2016)
- Renegade (2004)
- The Dead (1987)
TV (12)
Where to start with Colm Meaney
Begin with The Commitments. It is the warmest thing he has done, and it tells you exactly what kind of actor he is going to be for the next thirty years.
Then pick a lane. For television, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the deep investment, years of an ordinary working engineer inside a space opera, and the ordinariness is the point. Hell on Wheels and Gangs of London are the two best showcases for his hard side, both of them men who own things and expect to be obeyed.
For film, The Damned United gives him Don Revie and a superb amount of quiet contempt, Layer Cake is the sharpest supporting turn in a very sharp cast, and Intermission is the Dublin one worth hunting down. Con Air is the fun one.