Irish American actor Robert Burke said he dreams of working on a movie or TV show in Ireland with fellow Irish American star Denis Leary.
Burke, who starred as Ed Tucker in Law & Order and as Bart Bass in Gossip Girl, is proud of his Irish heritage. He visits his relatives in his ancestral home often and dreams of working in Ireland in the future.
He said: "My mother and father are from Galway, from around Loughrea. Over 80 per cent of the family are still there.
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"Young folks obviously travel to Australia and New Zealand and Canada but a great many of the family are still in the Galway area.
"For my mother’s part, she didn’t have a great affinity for Ireland in some aspects. She wanted to go and was going to go with her brother. Her brother had to cancel so she said she was going ahead with it.
"My father, I don’t think he wanted to come to America at all, but he had been dating my mother for many years and after another year, he came out.
"My mother came here in 1949 and my father in 1950. They were very much in love and settled in Manhattan and raised a family."
Burke, who also appeared in RoboCop 3, Boston Strangler and Black Panther, said he has the authentic Irish experience every time he visits the Emerald Isle.
Speaking on the Tis Yourself podcast, he said: "I haven’t seen much of the country. I go to Galway and I sit in the kitchen and I drink tea and we talk.
"All of a sudden, 10 days have gone by and that’s all I’ve done. I’m very content to do that.
"I was there with my father and my aunt yelled ‘well, get off your ass and take him to see a bit of the country’ and my father slammed the table and said ‘he just came from one city. He’s not going to see another’. And nobody moved.
"So they left me and I’ve never been to Dublin. That was in 1979. There’s so much of that country that I’ve never seen."
Burke, 63, became good friends with Denis Leary, whose parents moved from Co Kerry to Massachusetts, while working on Rescue Me. The actors still work together for Leary Firefighters Foundation, which funds equipment, vehicles, education, training, and technology for firefighters across the US.
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He said: "Denis Leary and I worked together for seven years on a show about the fire department called Rescue Me. We still work together doing foundation work for fire departments.
"After 9/11, I became a volunteer firefighter in my community. And Denis had already had the Leary Firefighter Foundation going in 1999 so it wasn't until two years later that we actually got together and three years or four years that the television show started.
"We still do events each year. A lot of foundation work peters out and goes by the wayside. His seems to just gain momentum each year, which I really respect and it's a privilege."
The Irish American actors hope to work together in Ireland on a TV show or movie in the future.
He said: "Was it Denis Leary, I said ‘if we could get a movie in Ireland..’ and he said ‘that would be the perfect crime’. We’d be just stealing money at that point.
"I would love it. It would be a dream to work in Ireland in whatever capacity. It would be a great chance and it would be a great story, obviously. It would be a lot of fun."
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