Dermot Mulroney Talks Portraying Real-Life 'American Hero' Robert Ames in Showtime Spy Thriller 'Ghost of Beirut' (Exclusive)
Showtime's limited series Ghosts of Beirut, which follows the real-life manhunt for infamous terrorist Imad Mughniyeh, comes to an end tonight. The four-part series explores Mughniyeh's origins — which include being the founding member of Lebanon's Islamic Jihad Organization and number two in Hezbollah's leadership — as well as the men and women who worked to track him down for decades. Among the show's incredible cast is Dermot Mulroney who portrays the late American hero Robert Ames, a CIA agent who died in an embassy bombing in 1983.
Speaking exclusively to PopCulture.com about the new show, Mulroney said he found the series "staggering, really, because... it's real life and it's an important, partially untold story." He went on to discuss why he took on the project, saying, "It felt like an important part and an important project right from the first page. I was on board that way, feeling like this is an untold story. It masquerades...as a genre film, a spy thriller, but you can't believe that every note in it is exactly true to history. It was meticulously researched." Mulroney also heralded Greg Barker, who is a writer and executive producer on the series. "He's our hero, really, that put this incredibly fragmented story of all these different regions, nations, religious factions together in one storyline, in a way that plays like a movie thriller," he said.
Mulroney also shared that he felt compelled to portray Ames due to some deeply fascinating "connections" the two men shared. "For me, I took on the task and the honor of playing Robert Ames in a very deep way. I had personal connections with the character. I'm from that same part of the country, grew up at that same time as his kids did. I just felt really connected to the character and I knew that I was, although only appearing in the first part, and when he and his colleagues are taken out of the equation by the bad guy in this storyline, then the story of finding that bad guy becomes that much more important. I felt it was really important to play this role."
When it came to capturing Ames onscreen, Mulroney said he found "an incredible biography" that offered a lot of "detailed" information. "Some of the details of the actual bombing that took him out are really graphic," he shared, "in ways that you wouldn't want to even put in the film. That got me much layers deeper, just the end of his story, but most illuminating was his early life, his education, meeting his wife, his big family, Catholic family in the D.C. area."
He continued, "Now we're getting closer and closer to Dermot's life and connection to this character. Then I took on a feel for the time and the place that was exactly... that I felt... working around D.C., some of the fathers of friends worked for the State Department." He then quipped that "weirdly, they'd moved to Laos for two years," which was later a clue that something deeper must have been going on.
Redirecting his focus to Ames, who "never came home," Mulroney said, "This is an American hero who gave his life for his country. He described it so beautifully that he was the interconnecting... He educated himself, he learned these languages as a young man and he was the CIA's point guard on their approach to Middle East peace, and then he was taken out of the picture."
While there are "three more episodes" that "ensue" after Ames' death, Mulroney points out that the late CIA agent was instrumental in the "intriguing manhunt for this phantom," Mughniyeh. "They called him the ghost. They didn't have a name for him," he explained. "There weren't any photos, there wasn't any cell phone data to follow, no surveillance cameras. They finally pieced it together... and they got him about 20 years later. It took forever. It's an amazing story told incredibly by Greg Barker and Showtime and our producers."
Mulroney also spoke about "the technology of the weapons" that were available to both the terrorists and the global policing organizations who were attempting to hunt them down. "It's so easy now with the cell phone... without going into detail... those were really the organic mechanisms that took a type of person to be able to do." He then pointed out that Ghosts of Beirut very carefully handles the "good guy/bad guy" conversation that is very important when it comes to capturing the lives of everyone involved.
"Now we're really looking at it from the bad guy side, but fortunately, and unfortunately, my side was the good guy side, or at least from Western and the United States point of view," he said. "But we know in the case of Robert Ames that his motivations were good and that he really meant... He loved the Middle East. He pursued it his whole life. He wasn't just there as a job, he wasn't grinding it out. He was passionate about what he did and then he was lost in his prime. It's a really deep story and it's so beautifully told again by our intrepid director, Greg Parker."
He later added, "You get to know people on both sides of the coin and you get to know their families and everything. It is challenging, emotionally challenging that way, to know that you don't want to know some people's motivations. But once you do, it can be very confusing. And that's what the filmmakers here, or that's the line they're playing with here. Not to have you like anybody that did terrible things, but to shed light on the whole story is so challenging and it's done so beautifully here in Ghosts of Beirut."
Finally, acknowledging how valuable the Ghosts of Beirut story is for audiences to be aware of, Mulroney noted that it helps to better understand "how things went and led to 9/11 and ISIS and everything else to follow. It's all connected over these decades leading back to even a few years before our story begins. We are telling, just as ultimately, even these four episodes are only a small part of what went down."
The Ghosts of Beirut finale will air on Showtime, this Sunday, June 11. All four episodes, including the finale, are now streaming on Showtime and Paramount+ with Showtime. Those interested in trying out a free trial of Paramount+ can do so by clicking here.
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