Barry Ward is back in the old smoke.

“I was in London for 19 years,” the chiselled Dubliner says. “I just moved back here about 2½ years ago. So I’m still kind of settling in. But I’m always over and back.”

Makes sense. There is no longer any great need for an actor to be permanently in Los Angeles or London. Auditions can be done remotely. All other important information can be passed on at the touch of a button.

It was a different Ireland in the mid-1990s, when Ward secured a juvenile role in the well-remembered Roddy Doyle television drama Family. He worked in theatre and TV regularly in the new century before making his mark as the lead in Ken Loach’s film Jimmy’s Hall, from 2014. The move across the Irish Sea then made sense.

“I think, once upon a time, it certainly was a good move just for opportunities,” he says. “Now it doesn’t matter where you are, really. Even for auditions, it’s largely self-tapes, which people do from home. Speaking to friends, and through my own experience, there’s a lot more work here in Ireland than there is in the UK at the moment.”

That is interesting. Does Ward really think so? That would be the ultimate turnaround. He recently shot the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Marian Keyes’s Grown Ups in Dublin. He is in the hit Dublin-set series Bad Sisters. As we speak he is here shooting Mary Rose, Colm Bairéad’s follow-up to An Cailín Ciúin. But busier than London?

“Yeah. It’s a much more vibrant industry here at the moment,” he says. “And I thought it seemed to coincide with Brexit. I don’t know how much of a factor that was. But there’s a lot more productions going on here than there.”

Everybody Digs Bill Evans review: A jazz movie on a par with ’Round Midnight and Bird

Ward has followed that arc for decades. At that point a film shoot in Ireland was genuinely an event.

“If a film came to town, everybody was in for it,” he says. “They were so thin on the ground that everyone knew of it. Now there’s dozens of productions. You can’t even be on top of them all and be aware of them all.”

Which leads us nicely towards the chief reason for our conversation today. Winner of the best-director prize at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Grant Gee’s Everybody Digs Bill Evans is a finely balanced marvel of a film.

From a script by the versatile Mark O’Halloran – writer of Adam & Paul – the monochrome drama follows the eponymous jazz pianist as he copes badly with the sudden death of Scott LaFaro, bassist on Evans’s Sunday at the Village Vanguard LP, in the months leading up to the release of that legendary live recording.

Rathmines and Rathgar become film set for An Cailín Ciúin director Colm Bairéad

Anders Danielsen Lie is magnetic as Evans. Ward is convincingly fraught as his older brother, Harry. The picture is set in New York and Florida. But it was filmed in neither place. It wasn’t filmed in London either. It was shot in west Cork.

“It was great to do – realising that aesthetic but being limited to an Irish shoot,” Ward says. “In the pitch I was given, they were using The Night of the Hunter as a reference.”

You can see a bit of Charles Laughton’s 1955 gothic horror in the shadowy visuals.

“The fear is, if you’re trying to re-create New York and Florida in the early 1960s in a studio in Skibbereen, it could look a bit hokey. But, thankfully, they really leaned into it and captured that world – or created a version of it that’s really pleasing.”

Maybe it’s a bit easier to fake the weather in black and white.

“Totally. Big time,” he says. “Black and white is very forgiving when you’re trying to swap out a place. I think it was largely down to having a really clever cinematographer in Piers McGrail and a really creative production-design team.

“They were really amazing. I think they cottoned that the flora and fauna might be a bit of a giveaway. So they pointed the camera upwards, because, as you say, a black-and-white sky in Ireland looks like a black-and-white sky anywhere, really. Ha ha!”

If you didn’t know the film was shot in Ireland you would never guess. What we have is a searing study of a man struggling to keep himself unravelling.

Following LaFaro’s demise in a car crash, Evans, a heroin user, shuns the piano and leans on Harry for emotional support. Still dazed, he makes his way to his mother and father’s house, in Florida. Bill Pullman and Laurie Metcalf are first-rate as parents struggling to connect with an increasingly distant soul.

Evans is among the imperishable greats of postwar jazz. If he had done nothing else put contribute those unforgettable melodic lines to Miles Davis’s album Kind of Blue, he would have secured Mount Rushmore status. His recordings as leader are just as important: Waltz With Debby, Portrait in Jazz and, of course, the 1959 album that gives the current film its title.

What did Ward know of Evans before signing up for the project?

“I knew a little bit, really, some of the bigger, more popular songs – and the live album that the movie features heavily,” he says. “But, no, I didn’t know a huge amount. I probably knew him more for the stuff he did with Miles Davis than his own output.

“So it was a real joy to dive into that during the shoot – to do a jazz for dummies. To do a deep dive, in as much as you can in a few weeks. That was really a bonus.”

What did he learn about the relationship between the brothers?

“Harry was by all accounts a better pianist to begin with,” Ward says. “The story goes that Bill broke his arm in childhood and couldn’t play for a year. So he watched Harry. And when the year was up, and he could play again, he was ahead of him. But the two of them were really amazing players. It was a great world. And I enjoyed reading some literature around it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that book by Geoff Dyer …”

But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz? A classic.

“That book is stunning, isn’t it? Adored it.”

A native of Blanchardstown, in northwest Dublin, Ward cannot claim any ancestors in the theatre. It sounds as if Family changed the direction of his life.

Directed by the famously versatile Michael Winterbottom, the series starred Seán McGinley and Ger Ryan as parents to children played by Ward and Neilí Conroy. “It stands up remarkably well a quarter of a century on, and you can see the enormous influence it has had on later dramas,” Hugh Linehan wrote of Family in this newspaper in 2019.

“I was street-cast in Family,” Ward says. “They were looking for a 13-year-old to play that part of John Paul. And there weren’t many 13-year-old actors in Ireland – or certainly there were fewer then. It was a case of holding open auditions and looking for nonactors.

“They visited my school. I gather they visited a lot of schools in north inner-city Dublin. And, after a process of six or seven rounds of auditions, they decided I could do the job. I had no interest or no knowledge of it. It wasn’t at all on my radar, and no one in my family had any – or still have – any artistic leanings whatsoever.”

His teachers (not unreasonably) suggested drama school, but Ward felt that wasn’t for him and headed off to Maynooth University to study English and philosophy.

The bug was still there. He performed with the respected Passion Machine company in the well-remembered Buddleia. He was in the TV series Plotlands. In 1999 he appeared opposite a young actor named Cillian Murphy in a plucky comedy called Sunburn.

“It was really only it was when I did my first feature movie, Sunburn, with Cillian, I thought this is what I want to do,” he says. “That was just such an amazing experience. It was a combination of many things. It being my first feature. We shot in the States, which was exciting. And I met Cillian, who has been a close friend since. It was all those factors. I thought, yeah, this is the job for me.”

Ward seems a natural screen actor. He has that gift for solid underplaying that invites the audience to intuit unexpressed emotions. And he is good-looking. He has the sort of face that stares across plains in John Ford movies. Watch him brood in Pat Collins’s flawless adaptation of John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun, from 2023.

But it wasn’t until 2014, with Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, that he got the big lead role he needed. It told the tale of the brave man who brought dancing to Effrinagh, Co Leitrim. It must have been a joy to work with the director of Kes and The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Were there any surprises?

“It was about trying to get it in the room with him,” Ward says. “And when Jimmy’s Hall came about, the circumstances made that happen. It was finally a role in one of his films that I could play. So, no, there were no huge surprises. If anything, maybe I had underestimated what I adored and loved in his movies. It was better than I could have hoped for.”

He says something that surprises me.

“As soon as I landed Jimmy’s Hall, I said goodbye to theatre.”

Really? He’s done with the live art?

“Oh, I would never say never,” he says. “But I’ve never sat in the audience and had the thought, ‘I want to be up there doing that.’ But if the right play came along with the right director, and it was the right role, I might. It’s an incredible buzz.”

As we speak, Ward’s 12-year-old son is upstairs. Does he show any aptitude for the stage?

“I think he might have some talent. And his mum is a producer and a writer too. So it wouldn’t surprise me.”

Ward has been around the block a few times. What advice would he have for any young fellow threatening to take to the boards?

“For me, even in the toughest of times and being out of work for a long period, it’s still a great lifestyle,” he says. “I guess it’s a certain personality type who can cope with the ups and downs of it.”

He smiles his sly smile.

“It’s not for everyone.”

Everybody Digs Bill Evans is in cinemas from Friday, September 11th