Even if you didn’t know P.J. Byrne’s name, you certainly know his face. A prolific character actor, Byrne has worked consistently in film and television since 2002 and given memorable performances in movies like “The Wolf of Wall Street,” “Babylon” and “A Complete Unknown.” His credits for this year alone include “The End of Oak Street,” “Coyote vs. Acme” and, his most recent film, “I Play Rocky,” the director Peter Farrelly’s film about the making of “Rocky.” It’s a movie about believing in your dreams and the people who help you to believe in yourself.
That’s a theme that Mr. Byrne relates to strongly: If a professor at Boston College hadn’t believed in him, he may never have become an actor at all.
Mr. Byrne grew up Catholic in New Jersey, spending many years as an altar server at his local parish and absorbing values that he carries to this day. “The idea of ‘men for others’—my dad would always put that into my mind,” Mr. Byrne told America in an exclusive interview. “Helping people is critical. The idea to whom much is given, much is expected. That really lives in me.”
He attended a public high school, but his family had a strong commitment to Catholic higher education: “My wife went to Villanova, my dad went to Seton Hall, my sister went to Providence.” For his own college education, Byrne attended Boston College. When I noted that he is the only one in his family who went to a Jesuit school, he laughed. “Hey, maybe the Jesuits are the best!”
Mr. Byrne’s family was involved in politics (his father’s cousin, Brendan Byrne, was New Jersey’s governor from 1974–1982) and he imagined going into “the family business” after a few years on Wall Street. To that end, he enrolled in Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and began working toward a business degree. But sophomore year, a casual decision changed the course of his future. “I randomly auditioned for a play because a buddy was going to audition,” he said. “I did it on a whim to go get drinks with him after. I got the part and he didn’t.”
Impressed by his performance, faculty encouraged him to audition for a production of Moliere’s “Tartuffe.” “The play was in iambic pentameter, and it kind of made sense to me,” he said. He committed to a double major in finance and theater, thinking that acting lessons would help with his public speaking for an eventual career in politics. Sure enough, senior year he received a job offer on Wall Street. But one of his theater professors, John Houchin, saw something more in him.
“[He] literally pulled me into his office and he says, ‘Hey, P. J., I think you should turn down that job on Wall Street. And I think you need to go to grad school to learn how to be a proper actor,’” Mr. Byrne said. “And I told him, ‘I think you need to stop drinking Jack Daniels.’” But two weeks later, Houchin called Byrne to his office again. “He has three manila folders in front of him, and he goes, ‘Look, these are the three best [theater] schools in the country. They only take like 10 kids each. I filled out your applications for you. It doesn’t mean anything; you still have to audition. But if you don’t get in, I won’t say another word.’”
Appropriate to the Jesuit setting, it was a story of a surprising and unlikely vocation. Mr. Byrne did the auditions and was accepted to the Theatre School at DePaul University—which, he noted proudly, is the school with the largest Catholic enrollment in the country. At DePaul he learned to refine his raw talent with technique. As an undergraduate, he considered himself at a disadvantage because, thanks to a relatively happy childhood, he didn’t have emotional trauma to draw from on stage. At DePaul he learned skills for tapping into emotion and making it real in a performance, even if he had never experienced it in life. He also credits DePaul with teaching him how to modulate his performances for the screen.
“Theater is like playing tennis,” he said. “You have to make these big movements to people that are like 300 feet away. And being on camera for film or TV, it’s like ping pong.” Those skills, he said, are invaluable in his career. “I say Boston College guided my life and DePaul pays for my life.”
In “I Play Rocky,” Mr. Byrne plays Irwin Winkler, one of the two Hollywood producers who take a chance on a young, hungry Sylvester Stallone (played in the film by Anthony Ippolito). Byrne called it one of the most grounded roles he has ever played (“Producers don’t move, they’re just sort of observers”) but also noted that, to his surprise, the performance has gotten some of the biggest laughs of his career at early screenings.
Winkler is a key role in the film not only because he supports Stallone but because he is tougher to convince than his partner, Robert Chartoff (played by Toby Kebbell). We see Winkler undergo a sort of conversion over the course of the film: Stallone’s faith in himself inspires Winkler, who subsequently helps carry Stallone through the rough patches of production.
In preparing for the role, Mr. Byrne was especially moved by watching footage of “Rocky” win Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1977. “In those days, you would just call up the producers, and they accept the gold trophies. But there’s a moment where Irwin Winkler grabs Sylvester Stallone and pulls him up with him and puts his arm around him with such joy, like he’s his own son. There’s such a beauty in that.”
Mr. Byrne wanted to convey that feeling in his performance. “That journey from, ‘Get out of this room,’ essentially, to ‘I’m going to mortgage my house on this kid, that’s how much I believe in him’—I think that’s such a beautiful journey.”
It certainly resonated with his own experience. Recalling Houchin’s faith in him at Boston College, Byrne said: “If you do the work and you believe in yourself and you find other like-minded people that believe in you as well, I really think that anything is possible.”
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