The acclaimed film star John C Reilly is bringing a vaudevillian performance of love songs by the likes of Johnny Mercer and Tom Waits and Irving Berlin to Ireland next week. He performs them in the guise of a slightly ruffled man named Mister Romantic, who emerges at the start of each performance from a steamer trunk. It’s beautiful stuff.

There has always been something vaudevillian in Reilly’s acting, most obviously in his turn as Oliver Hardy in the film Stan & Ollie, from 2018 (for which he and Steve Coogan learned full Laurel and Hardy routines), but also in his double act with Will Ferrell in Step Brothers and Talladega Nights, and in his role as the bizarre TV doctor Steve Brule in the TV show Check it Out! with Dr Steve Brule.

He started performing in musicals when he was about eight because “no one was doing Shakespeare or Ibsen or David Mamet in my neighbourhood on the south side of Chicago”, but when he first went to study at the theatre school at DePaul University in the city he wanted to be “Robert De Niro or Al Pacino or Gene Hackman”.

Musicals weren’t what serious actors did, he says. Then he was offered the role of Amos Hart in the 2002 film version of Chicago, alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger, “and I realised that not only is this a valid art form, but I’m good at it and I have these skills that I’ve built my whole life. Why would I turn my back on that?

“I also realised at that moment that the modern musical is an American invention. You can argue that opera and classical music were invented in Europe, but jazz and the American musical are really the only two art forms that we really originated here, you know?”

He looks bashful for a moment. “So that was just kind of a little appreciation of America there.”

Reilly is not hugely optimistic about the United States right now. Mister Romantic “was born from a place of despair and joy”, he says. “Because I read the news.