Robert Sheehan: ‘My anxiety had got to the point where if I was left alone I was a twitching mess’

“I was in a deep meditative state, very close to death,” explains Robert Sheehan. “It’s called deep sleep.” The actor logs on to our video call wearing a vest and yoga pants, apologising for missing his alarm. He is calling from a sofa in Toronto, where he is visiting his Canadian “missus” (he and “her good self” are based between Toronto and Cork in Ireland). He is knackered from a week in LA spent promoting the fourth and final series of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy. But he did actually meditate last night, in bed. Or rather, on bed. “It’s not like a horizontal lay-down, but a sitting up,” he says. He spent 20 minutes trying to make his mind grow more relaxed before sleep. “It’s a good way of shaking off the day.”
Sheehan has written a book called Playing Dead: How Meditation Brought Me Back to Life. Many will know the actor from his breakout role as the lovable motormouth Nathan in E4’s supernatural teen show Misfits, and as gang member Darren in the gritty Irish TV crime drama Love/Hate. Younger audiences may be more familiar with the 36-year-old as The Umbrella Academy’s Klaus, a gender-fluid time-traveller who suffers from addiction and can commune with the dead. On screen, Sheehan is witty and electric, with an impish sense of humour and a flamboyant physicality. That energy seems at odds with the earnest self-seriousness one associates with wellness culture. “I don’t want to slag other meditation writing off, but a lot of it neglects to include moments of silliness,” he says. “The way I try to square it is by writing a book that’s a good laugh.”
Playing Dead is part memoir, part manifesto. It includes popular science, poetry, breathing exercises, and forays into bizarre humour (at one point he offers a tongue-in-cheek ode to his central heating). Sheehan is self-aware enough to realise that going on about the path to enlightenment may sound pretentious, or “reduce your identity to cliche”, as he puts it in the book. Still, the actor’s meditation journey involves rites of passage including Tibetan singing bowls, a silent retreat, and a pilgrimage to the Goa Gajah temple in Bali.
In Bali, an innocuous sound-healing class promises relaxation, but ends with Sheehan face-down on the floor, sobbing uncontrollably for more than 30 minutes after passing “a huge emotional stool”. Sheehan writes with self-deprecating humour about his “resting bitch face” as he searches for inner peace. “I don’t think this is just an Irish thing, but being Irish doesn’t hurt in this regard,” he says. “You can take the piss and humble yourself when you’re talking about quite serious things.”
It was a serious thing that first prompted Sheehan to experiment with meditation back in 2017. On paper, things were going well. He was travelling the world, booking movies and making decent money – the “material things” that he told himself would bring him contentment. But he was depressed and lonely, self-medicating with alcohol, weed and casual sex. As his fame increased, he retreated into himself. Sheehan doesn’t dwell on specifics in the book, but describes alcohol and weed as substances that returned his dwindling social appetite. “Everything was about work; everything was, ‘When I get to this stage, I will be happy.’” While shooting the thriller Bad Samaritan with David Tennant in Portland, it dawned on him that he very much wasn’t. In the book, he writes that he was a ball of anxiety who had gotten to the point where “if I was left on my own, even for a short while, I was a twitching mess”. Alone in his rental apartment and snowed in for three days, Sheehan attempted to sit with his thoughts. Meditation, he says, allowed him to observe his sadness differently.
He clarifies that he’s “all for speaking about the things that weigh on our conscience”. Confession, catharsis, therapy: as coping strategies, these are all good things, he says. “But I had an intuition that what I was going through was as universal to human beings as growing hair.”
Sheehan started acting professionally at the age of 14, when he was cast in the period film Song for a Raggy Boy. “People don’t really look back at this stage of their lives, so looking at the way my mind causes me stress in love or work was interesting.” That stress stemmed back to his childhood, when he would receive attention and applause for his performances in plays. “The real world had a set of rules that I had learned through my peer group: don’t show emotional vulnerability, and show confidence, and all these things you learn when you’re young,” he says. In the audition room and on stage, however, Sheehan could “have contact with some dormant stuff in myself”. It was a reward system that taught him his emotions were valuable – but only as acting currency. Sheehan says he didn’t realise any of this until he started writing.
“For me, meditation took the thorny, tangly emotions off of the most personal stuff,” he says. Treating those heavy feelings like changing emotional weather was a technique that Sheehan learned from one of his Umbrella Academy co-stars. “Mary J Blige is one of those people who’s really gained agency and a sense of dominion over things I think could really destroy other people,” he says.
When the first series of The Umbrella Academy debuted in 2019, Netflix claimed that 45m households watched it globally. Sheehan remembers being approached by fans at a bar in Toronto, the summer after the show had launched. “People relate to you and the show differently, because of its distribution,” he says. Sheehan squirms in his seat, recounting the deference of the encounters. “I was having people come up to me in a quasi-religious manner, like: ‘I just want to shake your hand.’” The increased level of recognition made him feel “a bit strange and awkward”.
Ambition had once been bound up with “making my value higher in other people’s minds”. It led to taking jobs on studio films (such as the Peter Jackson-produced Mortal Engines, a commercial and critical flop). Now Sheehan has realised the work that brings him the most joy is in the theatre: “It’s this perfect closed ring of performance, audience and immediate high stakes.” The last two years have seen him taking to the stage with more frequency, with Frankie Boyle in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame at the Gate theatre in Dublin in 2022, and this year leading a theatre adaptation of cult film comedy Withnail and I at the Birmingham Rep, as well as starring in the family drama Reunion, which debuted at the prestigious Galway international arts festival. He has come to terms with pursuing “a present ambition versus a future ambition,” he says.
Released from a behemoth Netflix production whose contractual obligations spanned several years, Sheehan’s present ambitions involve developing projects with his friends and “creating our own stuff” on “a more manageable scale”. He is keen to put down roots and renovate a house in Cork, where he’s been living for the past 18 months. Sheehan says it took him a long time to admit that Ireland is “where I’m the most relaxed version of myself”.
He would like to see the country reunify in his lifetime, a sentiment shared by plenty in Ireland (the spiritual metaphor, however, is all his own). “The relief would be like my sound-healing class in Bali; the release of trapped energy from a chakra the size of the whole country,” he writes in the book. “I really think if Ireland became one country again, the relief and the freedom and the spaciousness within people would just be massive,” he says with an audible exhale. “Removing this strange status quo that only feels normal because it’s been there for so long – it would be a really nice thing.”
To be clear, Sheehan does not claim to be some kind of enlightened guru. “I want the tone of the book to be a confirmation that that’s not what this is,” he says. He is simply sharing his story of how meditation has improved his mental health. For Sheehan, it’s a tool he wants to encourage others to access. He hopes other people will discover that meditation doesn’t require them to sit solemnly at an altar in themselves. “Instead, it can just be a light thing and also a laugh, and creative, and all aspects of what it means to be alive.”
Playing Dead by Robert Sheehan (Ebury Publishing, £18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.