‘I’m Looking Forward To The Conversation That It Opens Up’

If you’re not watching Say Nothing on Hulu, you are missing out on one of the best series of the year. Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s international best seller “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland”, the series mostly takes place in West Belfast during the Troubles.

The show starts in the 1960s, with the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a single mother taken away by the IRA in front of her children. We then follow the stories of different members of the IRA in the 1970s throughout the 1990s, particularly the ones of Brendan Hughes, aka The Dark (Anthony Boyle) and Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew).

Superbly acted and gorgeously shot thanks to cinematographer Kanamé Onoyama, the show is driven with such intensity that it is impossible to look away. This year, Boyle starred in no less than 4 TV shows, including Masters of the Air on Apple TV+, the follow-up to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, produced by Steven Spielberg. The actor then portrayed the murderer of President Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth in the excellent series Manhunt on Apple TV+ as well. He also starred alongside Sean Bean in historical crime drama Shardlake on Disney+.

While Boyle has proven many times he could pull off basically any American accent, with Say Nothing, the actor is able to stay close to his home and tell a story that shaped many generations in Northern Ireland. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel anxious before I took it on,” told me the Belfast born actor over Zoom. The Troubles might have ended over 26 years ago, its shadow and the lasting impact it had on Northern Ireland is still very much there.

In order to tell a story as important and defining as this one, we might think that only an Irish writer or showrunner could do it. But when Boyle got the call and learnt that Disney was behind the project, the actor wasn’t so sure he wanted to be involved. He quickly changed his mind after reading the script.

He said, “When Michael Lennox called me with the writer, Joshua Zetumer, and said, ‘We want you to play Brandon Hughes’ and I was like, ‘Who’s doing it?’ And they said, ‘Disney’, I thought ‘Jesus f— Christ, Disney and the Troubles, this isn’t the sort of story that I want to be a part of’. Then I read the script and was like ‘This is unbelievable!’ The writer had went into such details, I felt like, if you’d have told me the writer lived on the Falls Road in West Belfast, I would have believed you, because he got the minutia of the human psyche of people in Belfast.”

He added: “He got the humor, the gallows sort of humor. And then I read the book, and I really liked it. I spoke to Patrick, they wanted people from Belfast in it. They didn’t want Americans doing Belfast accents. And I was just trepidatious to jump into it, because, you know, it was an outside perspective coming in, as opposed to being like a sort of homegrown project. But my fears were soon sort of quelled, after meeting with the creative team, and knowing that their intentions were nothing but pure.”

The show is very true to Patrick Radden Keefe’s book and Boyle made it a point that it should be as respectful and nonjudgmental as possible. The main goal of Say Nothing is to ask the right questions without necessarily answering them at the risk casting a judgment.

Boyle said, “One thing I said to them when I met them is, when brothers have sort of killed each other, over which splinter group of paramilitary they belong to, we’re not going to answer this. We’re not going to get this right because there’s no particular way to get it right. We can’t answer questions definitively. We need to just ask questions, it is mainly about what I want people to feel from it. And what I want is people to think, ‘What would I do if I was in that position?’”

He added: “Particularly an American or an English audience, who would condemn certain things, but rather them going, ‘Jesus Christ, if that was me? If I had marched at a civil rights march and then saw the British forces murder children in the street, what would I have done? What would I do like, genuinely, if that if that was my neighbor? If that was my son? Would I pick up a gun?’ And I think that the show does that really well.”

Boyle explains that the Troubles are very much part of who he is. Indeed, the actor was born in 1994 and is part of a generation called the ceasefire babies. However, his family told him everything about what it was like to live during the conflict.

Boyle explained that an outsider’s perspective was actually very beneficial for him while filming. He said, “It sometimes takes someone from the outside looking at something afresh for you to see it neutrally, you know, because I’m attached to the story so emotionally and so personally. And it’s from an outside perspective, someone who isn’t attached to it emotionally.”

Traveling to the U.S. particularly, Boyle realized that this part of history that is so engraved in him, doesn’t resonate quite the same there. He said, ‘It’s just this sort of very strange, complex, f— up time in human history that was in a very small pocket of the world.’

He added: “This is such a history that we’re well versed in. Because going to school, you walk past murals of Brendan Hughes or you walk past murals of murdered children and murals of hunger strikers. It’s so in your psyche. It’s so in your immediate geography and in your head, that when when I first moved to America, you would bring up a names like Gerry Adams or Bobby Sands, which for us would be as famous as mentioning one of the Beatles or Michael Jackson. People would go, ‘Who are they?’ And you go, ‘How do you not know about that?’ So I’m really excited and looking forward to the conversations that it opens up, particularly in England and in America.”

Tom Vaughan-Lawlor plays an older version of Brendan Hughes. As a young man in the IRA, Hughes is very much a man of action whereas Vaughan-Lawlor’s version of Hughes is more reflective of his life and past actions.

I asked Boyle how having access to these two sides of Hughes’ personality helped him understand him more and bring out his personality. He said, “Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, I’ve loved and admired him for years. He would text me and go, ‘How do you smoke? Do you smoke from the left hand side of the right hand side?’ and I would send him videos of me smoking, we were trying to get that right. He sent me a text that said, ‘It’s so strange, because in the script I’m called Older Brendan, but on set everyone’s calling me much better looking, funnier, talented Brendan.’”

He added: “When you see Brendan, the way I play him, he’s just sort of charming and personified danger. He’s like a rock star and when Tom takes over, we wanted to still have glimmers of that, like in the eyes, which he does really well. But he is kind of a man who’s been through a hunger strike, a man who’s been in jail for most of his life, a man who spent most of his life on the run, you know. I think Tom does a really good job showing that kind of more broken side of Brendan.”

Years ago, while watching an interview of Hughes, Boyle really got a glance at how physical and charismatic he was. He said, “What I remember is that there’s an interview with him in the back of a taxi, chatting about something. He just looks very confident, very in his body, very relaxed, talking with his back facing someone, he was constantly looking at this window. Like he was surveying the place constantly. So the first sort of image I had was a very physical one. I wanted to play him like a monkey, like a gorilla or something, you know, grabbing people, owning the space.”

Say Nothing is now available to stream on Hulu.