Were his family otherwise creative? "We did a lot of music when we were kids," he says. "We used to go to the Fleadh Cheoils. I went to France at the age of 10 with a band of musicians and the mayor of Portlaoise and the deputy mayor and mum, to do a town twinning thing. And dad [a garda] has a pretty extensive library. It's pretty impressive the amount of books that he's read . . . He was always singing songs and quoting bits and poems, so he was very influential in that way. And he has a great computer head for excerpts of things." However, I feel the reason why these stories work better than the others in this collection is because they stray the most from Sheehan's original conceit. Medusa does not offer much of Sheehan's ventriloquism and Gertie Cronin is purported to be a straight transcript of a tale told by the author's father.

His parents, he says, “inflated me with a sense that I could do anything I want to do. There was no talk of, ‘Oh it’s not the most practical thing.’ They put me ahead of themselves, particularly my mother, driving me all over the country to auditions. When I was a teenager, I was with a young person’s agency and going up for the odd class on Sunday and there might be an audition that day.” There are stories in this collection that are genuinely worthy of merit, for example the weird and memorable Medusa, which ponders the question: what exactly would Medusa's sex life be like? Or Gertie Cronin: Memories of a Young Guard by Joseph Sheehan, which is an evocative tale of a hard-as-nails Corkonian.

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Klaus is queer. Sheehan is straight but he has, in his own words, “had a few tries, a few goes. It just wasn’t for me . . . [On camera], it was slightly daunting kissing a man with love . . . But it’s just a lady with a beard . . . Love is love really. You can choose to emphasise the gayness of the love, or the love itself. It rang nicely with people because it placed no emphasis on the fact that it was a man with a man. [The characters in Umbrella Academy] are flawed but they’re certainly not prejudiced in any kind of way. They live in a world where if you can get a bit of love [you] cling to it because it’s like gold dust.” Was he as hard on other people as he was on himself? “Absolutely. In relationships, I had a tendency to be rather selfish at times.” Would he apologise to any of his exes? “I’ve done that. It is a good idea. It’s as much about you as it is about them but, if you’re doing some spiritual housekeeping, I think it’s no harm to reach out.” Shrieks and cries and screams ring out and echo through the church now like hysterical prayer. I can’t move in the pew. I’m frozen to the spot. I look up and Sinéad’s crystal eyes are ablaze and burning a hole in mine. She points and screeches, ‘He tripped him! I saw him! Liam?!’

Robert Sheehan grew up in Portlaoise, one of four children of Joe and Maria Sheehan. Disappearing Act, which comes with a warning (Contains Adult Material) is dedicated to his father, who instilled his son with a love of literature and the arts. Both parents were supportive of Robert, who used to play the tin whistle and bodhrán in his days performing at the Fleadh Cheoils. "I don’t really play any more," he says (although he was 'hammering’ a bodhrán recently for his music-mad landlord). He forgot about the essay style he’d been tinkering with fitfully — for a piece on shadow puppetry, of all things. And instead, on the notes app of his phone, he “wrote a very anecdotal piece in a voice of how I would chat to someone. The story, I suddenly understood, is just what it is in the moment. I tried to make it more like the oral tradition, little rambling meditations.” Robert Sheehan began dating actress Sofia Boutella in March 2014. Robert was open about his baby fever during the relationship, but the pair called it quits in 2018. People dress up as his character at these conventions, he says. “It’s taken to quite a profoundly creatively extreme level. You get a lot of girls [dressing as Klaus]. They always paint on quite a big goatee, a more generous goatee than anything I could cultivate, to be honest.” in which he co-starred with David Tennant) and, quite frankly, I was miserable. It was about things going on in my life; I felt like I couldn’t just ‘be’, and I was always creating drama around me. I was just exasperated, and so I started meditating. I thought, I’ll reserve judgment on it for six months and, after six months, I couldn’t have been more grateful I did it.”Truly, how exactly is the reader meant to react when we are told the story we are about to read was written “in an Uber in London”? Robert's acting career started at a young age. When he was just 16, he appeared in the Australian television show Foreign Exchange. This was followed by roles in The Clinic and The Tudors. He started meditating a few years ago, when he was at an unhappy period in his life. “I was around 30 and I was doing a film called

He sighs, setting his green eyes on me. "You do know I'm going to get in so much trouble for telling you this." Now the problem here is, none of the stories take time to introduce the characters or the ongoing events. Readers are thrown right in the middle of some crisis or occurrence and you have to figure out what's going on, by listening to the rambling thoughts of the narrator. As all 16 of the stories are unrelated to one another, it takes quite a good amount of time to figure out what's exactly happening. And the thoughts jump so much, so rapidly and abruptly, from one topic to the next, in each story, that many a times, you get lost and confused in the complexities of it all. Through the noughties, his star continued on its ascent. He was BAFTA-nominated for his performance in Writing and meditating have definitely helped my growth as a person, and that’s more important than anything material that comes my way. Being able to sit with a feeling and just observe it? That’s free, and it’s like a superpower. Everybody should do it.”

Should the first film take off in the way that's planned, the move to Hollywood is almost inevitable; his co-stars, Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower, are already there. This year he has been over twice so far. "And it's friendlier than you think," he says. "It's all: 'Chad's having a party on Saturday, Ethan's having a barbecue on Sunday, we're gonna do brunch and hiking on Monday…' It's surprisingly easy to plug yourself in."