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How often has it happened that not one but two actors who are prominently featured in a blockbuster movie also happen to be appearing on stage in New York while the film is still drawing huge audiences in theaters? This is the rare distinction shared by Anthony Mackie and Brían F. O’Byrne. Both are currently treading the boards in NYC — in the Roundabout Theatre Company production of Stephen Belber’s McReele and the Manhattan Theatre Club production of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, respectively — even as their images are being splashed across movie screens in Million Dollar Baby, the Clint Eastwood film that was recently voted Best Picture of 2004 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“I just spent 40 minutes on the phone with a radio station in Ireland talking about Million Dollar Baby,” O’Byrne tells me. “It’s bizarre, because I only have a small part in the film. During the run of Doubt at MTC, people would come up after the show and say, ‘I just saw you in Million Dollar Baby!’ I guess it’s because I wear the same green priest’s costume in both things. In the public’s mind, it’s strange for me to be playing these two parts at the same time.” (Doubt, which ended its sold-out Off-Broadway run at MTC’s West 55th Street venue on January 30, has now transferred to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre; it began performances there last night and is set to open officially on March 31.)

In Million Dollar Baby, O’Byrne appears as a priest who’s of no help to Clint Eastwood’s character at a time of great need; in Doubt, he offers a brilliant characterization of a priest who is suspected of having an inappropriate relationship with an altar boy. “I’m getting in touch with the spiritual side of my life,” the actor jokes. “And it all came from playing a child killer in Frozen, so that’s interesting in itself.” His performances in the Eastwood film and the Shanley play are sharply delineated with the aid of markedly different dialects that also vary greatly from the ones he employed in Frozen and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. “I worked with Steven Gabis, the dialect coach,” says O’Byrne. “We worked together just a little bit for the Million Dollar Baby audition but he was there all through the rehearsal process for Doubt.”

O’Byrne’s first name is pronounced “BREE-uhn,” as indicated by the accent mark over the “i.” And yes, he’s still billing himself as Brían F. O’Byrne, though that’s not how his name appears in the credits for Million Dollar Baby. “There is a Brian O’Byrne in SAG [the Screen Actors’ Guild],” he notes, “and I think the movie people were so paranoid about making sure to include the accent mark that they left out the ‘F.’ It all started because my father is Brian O’Byrne, and when I was 15 or 16 and got my own bank accounts, I didn’t want him opening my bank statements by mistake and finding that I hadn’t been repaying the loans that he guaranteed. So I added the middle initial because at that time, before computers, they wouldn’t put in the accent mark. That’s where the ‘F’ came from — but, to be honest, it’s a bit of a pain in the ass.”

Anthony Mackie is thrilled by the success of Million Dollar Baby, in which he plays a cocky young boxer. “What with the movie winning the Oscar and everything, a lot of people are starting to recognize me from it,” he says. “People will wait after McReele and congratulate me, and when I’m just hanging out with my friends, people will come up to me and say they enjoyed the movie. I don’t think anyone involved with Million Dollar Baby — myself included — thought it would be such a huge hit. When you’re making a movie, it’s hard to kind of put together what exactly it will be, but we all had great faith in Clint Eastwood. The movie was shot in only 34 days. When we saw it, I think everybody was pleasantly surprised.”

Mackie and Brían F. O’Byrne have no scenes together in the film, but Mackie says, “I’m a big fan of his work. I think he’s extremely talented. He and Dallas Roberts are two people that I really admire for all the work they put in.” The young actor also cites Lou Gossett, Jr, Denzel Washington, and Don Cheadle as inspirations, and he describes as “amazing” his experience understudying Cheadle in Topdog/Underdog. “Don is one of the reasons I started acting,” he says. “Once I got that job, he really took the time to talk with me. He opened me up to a completely different side of the business and befriended me in a way that he didn’t have to. It was great.”

In McReele, Mackie plays a former death row inmate who becomes a senatorial candidate. The young actor previously appeared on Broadway in the 2003 revival of the August Wilson play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and in Regina Taylor’s Drowning Crow in 2004. Though Taylor’s work was roundly trounced by the critics, Mackie has absolutely no regrets about being involved in the MTC production. “I’ve never chosen a project for a commercial success or a reviewer success,” he states emphatically. “I wanted to do Drowning Crow because it was an amazing opportunity to work with 12 of the best actors in New York and one of the best directors in New York on a play by one of the best writers in New York in one of the best theaters in New York. I mean, imagine 12 black people doing an adaptation of The Seagull on Broadway! That’s almost unfathomable. I’ve never really bought into the idea of commercial appeal; I’m sure that I will have to at some point, but right now, all of my choices are made for artistic merit.”

Mackie is determined to keep performing on stage even as he continues to make films. “When I came out of Juilliard,” he tells me, “I was pretty clear about that with my agents and managers. That’s one of the reasons why they signed me, because they wanted to diversify my résumé. As a young black actor, I feel you have to do that. You know, if they aren’t giving me the film roles that I want, I can go back to the theater and do things to challenge myself.”