It's a great time for P.J. Byrne.
On the big screen, the actor with roots in Old Tappan can be seen as one of Leonardo DiCaprio's debaucherous crew in Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street." And tonight, television viewers can catch Byrne in a special preview of CBS' eagerly awaited new series "Intelligence," a dramatic thriller in which Josh Holloway stars as a high-tech intelligence operative named Gabriel, who has been enhanced with a super-computer microchip in his brain. This implant makes him the first human ever to have direct and complete access to Internet, WiFi, telephone and satellite data.
And Byrne's role in all this? He plays Nelson Cassidy, the son of the man who invented the super-chip technology that has made Gabriel what CBS calls "the first supercomputer with a beating heart." And Nelson feels a bit of sibling rivalry.
"My father sort of created Josh's character, so, he thinks of him as a son, so, by default, Josh's character is like a brother to me," Byrne says on the phone. "There's a lot of jealousy that's going on, because my father dotes on him."
Well, that's not the only reason for Nelson's resentment.
"I am a computer genius. I can do everything Josh Holloway can do with his computer, but I'm about a million times slower," says Byrne. "I can also beat people up or get in fights, but I wasn't trained by Navy SEALs and he was. … I can hit on women, except he's a lot more handsome. … So, there's a lot of reasons for me to be jealous."
Their characters work for the leading government cyber-security agency, which is the "final backstop," tackling cases that even the FBI, CIA or NCIS can't solve. What they do just might save the world.
Byrne's Cassidy is a world away from his "Wolf of Wall Street" character, Nicky Koskoff, who grew up with DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort character.
"He pulls me in when he opens up his own stock brokerage house," says Byrne, noting that besides getting to riff with DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, he got to work with Jean Dujardin. The Oscar winner ("The Artist") plays a Swiss banker who went to law school with Koskoff and comes in handy "when Leo's character has to hide his money."
Asked to further describe Koskoff, Byrne says, "Think of the worst person in the world you know, and then shave their head and put a wig on them and that is my character. Essentially, my character went bald at 18 and wears the ugliest toupee in the history of toupees but thinks he looks sexy and awesome. … That wig was a character in and of itself.
"This is a guy that makes love to professional women, does oodles and oodles of Quaaludes and cocaine, shaves girls' heads — that kind of stuff — on top of stealing essentially and manipulating people for millions and millions of dollars. Not a guy you want to be friends with."
Byrne — a cousin of former New Jersey Gov. Brendan Byrne — lived in Maplewood until the second grade, when his family briefly moved to Buffalo, then to Old Tappan.
"Fourth grade all through high school, that was Old Tappan," says Byrne, whose older sister Courtney was in the same Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan graduating class as Cory Booker.
At Boston College, Byrne double-majored in finance and theater. After graduating, he passed up a Wall Street job offer, deciding to continue to study acting. "And that's the day, I think, my parents officially wanted to kill me," says Byrne.
"My mom was in politics and my dad was an IBM business guy, so they knew nothing about this world." (Emma Byrne, now retired, worked as state director for Sen. Bill Bradley, and as New Jersey's consumer affairs director. His parents now divide their time between homes in Manasquan and Jupiter, Fla.)
"It took them a little while to warm up to the idea," says Byrne, who earned a master's degree in acting from the prestigious Theatre School at DePaul University. "But then they would come to grad school and see me work, and now, they're over the moon."
Byrne, 40, started out in the business by doing "tons of commercials," which was a great training ground, he says. His first "truly big break" was a role in Nora Ephron's 2005 movie "Bewitched," in which he got to improvise with Will Ferrell and Stephen Colbert.
These days, Byrne lives in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles with his wife, Jaime, and their daughter, Madison, who is named after the place in Hoboken where the couple met. "I'll have to tell my daughter one day she's named after a bar," Byrne jokes.
"Intelligence," which moves to its regular 10 p.m. Monday time slot next week, has a 13-episode order from CBS as well as, says Byrne, a killer cast. He calls Marg Helgenberger, who plays the agency's director, "the classiest woman in America" and says Holloway — who played Sawyer on "Lost" — is "the greatest No. 1 on a TV show."
"The No. 1 always sort of sets the tone for what the work environment is going to be and what the work ethic is going to be, and how people are going to treat each other," explains Byrne, who finished filming the final episode last week.
"So, not only is he the coolest guy, he's funny as heck. He's a people guy. And he's got tons of energy. Even when it's a Friday and you're shooting at 4 in the morning … he makes everyone else excited to be around him. He's a great dude."
In real life, it seems, there's no shortage of brotherly love.
Email: rohan@northjersey.com
