Over the last year, Anthony Boyle has established himself as a rising young actor. With performances in Masters of the Air, Manhunt, and now Say Nothing, Boyle has proven that he can give varied, multi-layered performances. He’s all but unrecognizable from one role to the next. Of those three productions, Say Nothing is the most personal for Anthony. Depicting the decades-long time of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, Say Nothing is a powerful 9-episode series that covers the Civil War in Belfast, and the fight between the IRA and the British over their colonization. Anthony was born in Belfast and walked the streets where these events took place. For him to sign on to Say Nothing was a leap of faith. Based on the book by Patrick Radden Keefe, the series offers an ambiguous look at the perilous era in which people lived. One that pitted friends and family against one another.
In our conversation, Boyle talks of how things were, how they are now, and his work on the show playing the man known as “The Dark,” former IRA (Irish Republican Army) member Brendan Hughes.
The Contending: Before we get to the main point of our discussion, I wanted to congratulate you on the announcement about The Altruists on Netflix. After I saw you in Masters of the Air, I then watched Manhunt. When Say Nothing came out, I watched that, too. You’re on a nice career roll right now.
Anthony Boyle: Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Yeah. I’m just trying to pick things that feel different from the last thing, and for Masters and Manhunt to Say Nothing, and now playing Sam Bankman-Fried in The Altruists, I’m just trying to do things that feel different.
The Contending: That’s the thing that I noticed in your work, is that in Masters of the Air, you play a US Bombardier during World War II, who is sweet and almost on the innocent side. In Manhunt, you play John Wilkes Booth, maybe the most infamous assassin in American history. And then, in Say Nothing, you play Brendan Hughes, who was an IRA (Irish Republican Army) leader. Are you drawn to historical pieces, or is this run of parts just a coincidence?
Anthony Boyle: I think I got a face for period faces and for period pieces, every time some cast instructors have said, I have a face that just looks like I can’t understand the internet (Laughs). I just keep playing these people from the past, and I look at myself, and I do, I get it. But this next role does have the internet and does a lot with it. So I’m looking forward to playing someone who can have Uber Eats or delivery or whatever.
The Contending: Your performances in those three series are so different that I don’t know who Anthony Boyle is precisely as an actor. I mean this in a good way. I can expect to be surprised.
Anthony Boyle: That’s what I’m trying to do. So it’s really nice to hear that from you. I genuinely mean that. I’m trying to do different shit all the time. I want to do the opposite of what I’ve just done.
The Contending: Say Nothing had to be very personal for you. Having been born in Belfast and with part of it being shot in Belfast, you were probably looking at street signs you recognized as a youth, and you didn’t have to use an American accent. What did this series mean to you?
Anthony Boyle: A great deal, man. Like you said, I wasn’t using an American accent. In the case of John Wilkes Booth and Harry Crosby in Masters, I’m asking myself, how did they grow up? What was their dialect like? What were they listening to? What was their relationship like with their mother? What was going on in politics at the time? Whereas with Brendan Hughes. I didn’t have to do any of that. I drank in the same bars that he was drinking in. I’m around the same sort of people that he would’ve been around. I walked past the mural of Brendan going to school every day. I. Knew who he was. I’d heard folk songs about him in bars, so it wasn’t like this big deep character dive where I had to go, okay, how does he move? Who is this guy? It felt very organic and very natural for me.
And I based him a little bit on my Uncle Snake. I’ve got an uncle called Snake who’s very charismatic. He’s good with stories, and he brings people in. And the boy, he’s very, he’s very charismatic and he’s good with stories. I felt like that’s the kinda guy Brendan was judging by what I’d seen in the clips of him, and by when I spoke to people who knew him. I loved it. And I grew up with Lola Petticrew. Lola and I were besties since I was eleven years old. We’ve done plays together and stuff. Romeo and Juliet, five people saw it, four people left (Laughs). So it was really good to do it with them. And Mike Lennox, who directed the show and set it up, cast me in Derry Girls a million years ago. And I made a short film with him and Lola.
The Contending: I think that when the troubles are depicted, American audiences don’t always grasp what the thing was When you’re making a film or a show, whether it’s Michael Collins or Say Nothing you don’t necessarily want to land on all the specifics too heavily, but it’s a complex thing to understand, there’s religion involved, but there’s so much more than that,. There’s politics involved. There’s queen and country, and divisions that are not necessarily the easiest to illuminate. This was next-level in addressing the subject, getting to the heart of it, and making it both digestible and understandable.
Anthony Boyle: I think it’s a 10. I also think you’ve got to follow the money, and in most cases, you need to look at who’s funding it and what message is allowed to be said. Because this was fully American-funded, we weren’t beholden to a British narrative or another narrative in Ireland. So it was the most impartial telling of “The Troubles” that I’ve seen. It doesn’t judge anyone. It is saying, here are the cold, hard facts. I’ve been offered a lot of opportunities to play IRA members, or to play UDA (Ulster Defence Association) soldiers on the other side, and I’ve always said no, because I didn’t ever align with whatever their political viewpoint was. Whereas this wasn’t exactly my politics, but it fairly felt like it was living in the gray area, and it wasn’t trying to answer questions. It was saying this is what was happening. When I ran it past my parents and past members in my community, they all seemed to agree, and I was really happy. I liked it more than any job I’ve ever done. It just feels like a sort of, even though it had FX and Disney behind it, homegrown show because it came from us and we shot it. I’m tremendously proud of this show,
The Contending: It is a morally ambiguous show. War is always morally ambiguous on some level. When you think about Northern Ireland and Ireland, these are Irish people. They both believe in the same God. They inhabit the same sort of sense of themselves. I think to some degree they have more in common than they don’t, and yet, the parts that they argue over are those pieces on the margin, and they become bigger than the whole, which I think is fascinating. Say Nothing is really good at showcasing that.
Anthony Boyle: You’re telling me, brother. We still have an 80-foot wall that separates Catholics and Protestants in Belfast called the ‘Peace Lane.’ There’s working-class kids on the Falls Road and the Shank, they’ll have more in common with each other than they do with the rich people on Malone Road or whatever. There’s obviously conversations that happen in Ireland about it, but we have very few shared, integrated colleges. It’s all Catholic or all Protestant. I think that would be a good place to start. I didn’t meet a Protestant until I was about 16 or 17, and that was only through doing theater. You do Catholic things, you do Protestant things. And you don’t see each other, you don’t cohabitate spaces unless it’s for the city center, but that’s not where you are when you’re a kid. We need to integrate schools and then integrate living spaces. I have a friend, I won’t mention her by name, she’s an actress who lives in Belfast. She was put out of her home two years ago because they found out she was a Catholic. She was living in a Protestant area and they wrote “Fenian Scum,” a derogatory name for Catholics, on her wall. They put her windows through, and that was 2023. And you’re thinking, Jesus Christ, lads, this is a mother. A single mother of one can be put out of her home. It’s like we are going back to the fifties. It’s crazy, man.
The Contending: “The Troubles” officially ended in 1998. Now we know things carry on, as you’ve said just now with that incredible story. Growing up in your house, in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, how big of a topic was it in your home growing up?
Anthony Boyle: The last British personnel left in 2005. Someone said about (former Member of Parliament and IRA leader) Martin McGuinness, “He didn’t go to war. The war came to the street, knocked on his door, and he answered.” The war was in our streets. It’s not like going to Afghanistan or going to Iraq and then coming back to civilian life. You saw your best friend get shot in the street, and there’s no one coming around to counsel you. You have to walk past the place where your friend was shot in the back of the head every day to get the milk. So many mental health problems have happened to my generation now and to my parents’ generation. Suicide epidemics when we were kids, with so many kids, like 11 years old, 12 years old, were killing themselves. The studies show that’s what happens to people in war-torn areas. The generations after suffer from mental health issues. Because if your dad’s out fucking firing a gun or being shot at, he can’t come home and read a bedtime story. It’s a trauma that’s passed down–intergenerational trauma. It’s not like The Troubles was or wasn’t talked about. It was simply embedded into the society as a whole. Did I tell you that story about my dad and going to get some milk and some bread?
The Contending: Please do.
Anthony Boyle: I think oppressed people use levity when they have nothing else. My dad said that once, when the Brits and the Irish were shooting at each other in Turf Lodge, where my dad was living, there was a burnt-out bus in the middle of the road. His mother, my granny, says to him, “Go down to the shop, get some milk, get some eggs, get some butter, and today’s newspaper.” He said, “But Mommy, mommy, they’re shooting no outside.” And she said, “They’re hardly fucking shooting at you.”
The Contending: I was reading that while it was about the religious divide between Protestants and Catholics, the issues were more about politics than religion. Would you agree with that, or would you say that it was an equal mix or some other variant?
Anthony Boyle:
I would say it’s tribalism at this stage. When you look at Bloody Sunday, the Catholics were marching for equal opportunities, equal housing back then, it wasn’t one man, one vote. It was a different system. Catholics had to own property to vote. There were so many different loopholes and things that were afforded to the Protestant community that Catholics didn’t have. That’s where a lot of the civil unrest was coming from. They wanted equal opportunities, housing, and they wanted to work. There were factions of religion that would stoke up a lot of sectarian division. It’s a lot of the things you’ve touched on. The politics, religion, the socioeconomical background of the Catholics, everything.
The Contending: The depiction of the times in Say Nothing is fascinating. The idea that Gerry Adams, to this day, says he was never a part of the IRA–your show doesn’t believe that. But even with the disclaimer, Adams is portrayed here as being very much a part of the IRA. What are your thoughts on Adams?
Anthony Boyle: He was my local MP until I was 15 or 16. My dad played with his son. He was a very famous figure. He would come to your street on election time, and we’d all run down the street with him. I’m pretty sure that there’s a photo of me that we need to find, having a water pistol fight with Gerry when I was about 10 years old. My cousin Sam, Gerry Adams, and I are having a water pistol fight. I tried to find it when the show was coming out. There’s like a Belfast Pics website, like a Getty Images kinda thing, but I couldn’t find it.
The Contending: The challenge when you play real people, in a time as fraught as this period, is that people are going to get upset with their depiction, or the depiction of those they knew. Jean McConville’s family has complained about her death being used for entertainment. While I would argue that Say Nothing is much more than “entertainment,” I understand. Totally. Then, with Marian Price being shown in the series as the murderer of Jean McConville, something Price has taken issue with. But it’s something that’s strongly believed to be true. What is your take on this balance between truth and fiction, and being in a show that has to make choices and stands by them, and then puts a disclaimer at the end?
Anthony Boyle: I think this isn’t the definitive telling of the troubles. I don’t think this is exactly what happened in each instance. Say Nothing comes from is an American writer who interviewed some people in Belfast, and this might be his version of events, but it’s not the version of events. There’s brothers that have murdered each other over which splinter group within the IRA they belong to. I have great respect for Patrick (Radden Keefe). Patrick is a good friend of mine, and I would say the same thing to him. It’s not the definitive version. It’s Patrick’s version of what’s happened through interviews that he’s conducted. That’s my take on it. I don’t think it’s the definitive version. I’m sure one day in my career I’ll be working on another version.
