In person, Éanna Hardwicke is a total charmer. He has the same strong facial profile that his former Normal People co-star Paul Mescal has built a career on. He speaks with a distinctly Corkonian lilt, reassuringly intact despite his post-pandemic move to London. Although, it’s not as if he’d have to worry about his accent budging in rehearsals for a play set in deepest County Mayo. John Milligan Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, which sparked riots when it first premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1907, is written in a lyrical Hiberno-English that is best suited to accents thicker than creamery butter. The National’s casting department has leaned into this, assembling an Avengers-style line-up of generational Irish talent — Siobhán McSweeney, Nicola Coughlan, Declan Conlon, and Marty Rea among them — to bring Synge’s infamous play to life.

At the centre of it all is Éanna Hardwicke playing Christy Mahon, the play’s central character who enters a shebeen one night boasting that he has just killed his father. For Hardwicke, it’s a moment his career has been building toward. “This has always been the role I’ve wanted to play more than any other,” he tells us earnestly. At drama school – Dublin’s prestigious Lir Academy – he saw a stripped-back presentation of a few scenes from Playboy that completely enthralled and inspired him. The director of those scenes was Caitríona McLaughlin, who now directs him in this production.

Barry Pierce: Where did acting begin for you?
Éanna Hardwicke: I took part in a lot of youth theatre when I was growing up in Cork. I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up there, because it’s one of those cities that’s small enough that it doesn’t feel too daunting and yet it has some amazing culture going on. But I tried lots of things. I played sports, I played music, and none of them… I lasted about a week in violin class. I played soccer for two or three years. And then I went into an acting class and I thought, “All of this feels right.” It felt like a very safe place, and I just fell head over heels, if that’s not a too-lovey thing to say. I was also lucky that my family were very encouraging. There was never anything odd about doing something in the arts. It was never discouraged, it was always fully endorsed.

BP: Did you take part in any productions in Cork when you were younger?
ÉH: I did one production for Corcadorca [a pioneering Irish theatre company], who were not just an amazing theatre company but one that worked in a way that I think no one else did in the country. I was in [Georg Büchner’s] Woyzeck when I was ten-years-old.

BP: Oh, god.
ÉH: I know. I know for a fact that I didn’t understand lots of what was going on in the play because it was all very skillfully hidden from me. In a lot of the more explicit scenes, I was told to stand in basically the opposite direction from the action. [Laughs] I met incredible actors in that production who I have worked with since, in a bizarre turn. But that could not have been more thrilling as an experience. I have yet to have the pleasure of being on the [Cork] Opera House stage, but when I was in the National Youth Theatre, we did three nights in the Everyman [Cork’s oldest theatre] and that was a dream come true. I think one of the first professional plays I saw was Druid Theatre’s A Whistle in the Dark [by Tom Murphy] and that was in the Everyman. Marty Rea, who I’m working with now, was in that production, as was Niall Buggy, Aaron Monaghan, and Eileen Walsh. I watched that and thought, “This is just beyond belief.”

BP: What was the transition like going from doing youth theatre in Cork to then going up to Dublin, to the Lir, and fully immersing yourself in acting as a career, rather than a hobby?
ÉH: I think it’s a human trait to be slightly wary of fully committing to something, because what happens if it doesn’t work out? Thankfully, acting training takes it out of your hands, because you’re in there from nine to six every day, and then usually after for a few hours too. But I do remember asking myself whether this was a good career. And I don’t mean good in terms of secure, I mean good in terms of, is this a noble career? I had this idea that maybe I should do something more important. But when I look back, the thing I thought was more important was studying classics and English or something. [laughs]
However, I had serious doubts for two or three months. I remember being slightly uncomfortable with the fact that we were working in art, and talking about art all the time. There was a bit of me that was going, “Isn’t this all a bit lofty?” But it wasn’t. It’s the opposite of lofty. Acting training is very down-to-earth. It’s you, your body, and all the people in the room.

“I remember being slightly uncomfortable with the fact that we were working in art, and talking about art all the time. There was a bit of me that was going, ‘Isn’t this all a bit lofty?'”

BP: So, when did The Playboy of the Western World enter your life?
ÉH: It started with a call from my agent, and it was all quite general, just an availability check. Then there was a second call shortly after to say it’s The Playboy of the Western World. I couldn’t believe it, because this has always been the role I’ve wanted to play more than any other. I do genuinely believe that if you follow the things that inspire you, it could be the music you listen to or the books you read, if you go towards these things that pique your curiosity, in my experience, that leads somewhere. It is undoubtedly serendipitous that I’ve gotten to end up doing this play, but I also feel, in some ways, your choices lead you there a little bit. I’m in love with this play. I think the more I’ve spent time with Synge’s writing, the more I’ve become fascinated by him. He’s an amazing character.

BP: Why is Christy the role you’ve always wanted to play?
ÉH: Because I love theatre that enlivens an audience, draws an audience in, creates a spell. And I think it’s such a difficult thing to do on the page, but The Playboy of the Western World does that. Synge has a little introduction at the beginning of the text where he explains what he was trying to do with the play – which was to represent real life, on the one hand, and bring joy and poetry, on the other. He believed that theatre needed to do those two things. At the time when the play was written, he thought that most plays were only doing one or the other. It was either music hall, or social realism that didn’t enliven the audience.

As well, the theatre that I’ve loved seeing as an audience member has always been stuff that has language that reaches for the stars and does mysterious things that you may not always understand, but you have to sit forward to get to grips with it. And Synge’s language does that. As a character, Christy is all kinds of contradictions; he’s a mystery. I just think that’s such a good starting place. There’s nothing obvious about him.

“This has always been the role I’ve wanted to play more than any other.”

BP: How do you come to terms with the fact that, for many people, this will be their first introduction to Synge’s play? Especially here in London, where I don’t think it’s as engrained in, like, the education system as it is in Ireland. It’s one of those plays where people know the title but may not be familiar with what it’s all about. You’re going to be a lot of people’s first Christy.
ÉH: I hadn’t thought about that. Thanks for telling me. [laughs] I remember hearing Simon Russell Beale say that you approach every play as if it’s a new play. Which is hard to do, actually. How could you do Hamlet as if no one’s ever done it before? Obviously you can’t do that. You’ll always have preconceptions. But I have never physically seen a full production of Playboy, outside of those few scenes that Caitríona did at the Lir. I have an idea of how Christy has been played before, however. I don’t think of it as reinventing anything, you’re just continuing something. I love the idea of inheriting all of the performances from the past.

BP: What’s it like in the rehearsal room? You’re surrounded by so much incredible Irish talent, it must feel very homely.
ÉH: It’s been a total joy. Rehearsals are always my favourite way to spend a day, I think most actors would tell you that. You go in from ten until six and you explore ideas, words, language. It’s all very playful. It helps that I’m working with people who I’ve been friends with for many years.

BP: So, no icebreakers then.
ÉH: No we’re all straight in. The best lesson I ever learned in theatre was to go into rehearsals not knowing what you’re doing, because then you have the joy of stumbling on something in the moment. Nicola [Coughlan] and I have been working away this morning and it’s hard work, because the text is demanding. But there are plenty of moments of, “I never knew those words would come out that way,” or, “That could be an interpretation of that.”

“The theatre that I’ve loved seeing as an audience member has always been stuff that has language that reaches for the stars…”

BP: I want to finish up by talking about something completely different. You’re playing Roy Keane in a film that dramatises the Saipan incident, which was certainly one of the most controversial chapters of recent Irish history. What was it like to play Roy, as a fellow Cork person? Was there any apprehension there?
ÉH: The script to me never felt like a biopic. It felt like it depicted a cultural event that became almost myth. In that sense, that relieved some pressure because we weren’t trying to tell a life story. Thankfully, so much has been written about the event and there are so many interviews from the time. You are aware of the real-life person and wanting to be true to their experience, but also it can only ever be your version of it. There’s no other real option. I think I did feel pressure, but I responded to it by jumping in with both feet. We’ve shown the film around the world a bit now, in Toronto, London, Cork and Belfast, and had a really lovely response. The filmmakers take such a unique, somewhat unexpected, perspective on this story. Watching them take that vision and make it happen on camera was really exciting.

The Playboy of the Western World runs at the National Theatre until February 28th. More information can be found on the National Theatre’s website.
Saipan is in cinemas across Ireland from January 1st and across Britain from January 23rd.