Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keeffe was Service95 Book Club’s Monthly Read for June 2024. Now, it’s been adapted into a nine-part TV series on Disney +. Here, Service95 meets one of its stars – Anthony Boyle, who stars as IRA commander, Brendan Hughes...
Anthony Boyle is used to playing real people. As he explains, putting his feet up and pointing to his facial hair during our video call from the Manchester set of his recent project, House Of Guinness. “I’m playing Arthur Guinness, so another real guy, another period piece, another moustache,” he grins wryly. Boyle, who has portrayed John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt and Major Harry Crosby in Masters Of The Air, is accustomed to the requisite research that comes with portraying a historical figure. But it is something he did less of for his latest role, playing the young IRA commanding officer Brendan Hughes in Disney +’s new limited series Say Nothing. “Let’s just say... I had the cultural framework already.”
Boyle was born in Belfast in 1994, four years before The Good Friday Agreement (a political deal created to bring an end to 30 years of ‘the Troubles’ conflict in Northern Ireland), and lived there until leaving to study drama in Cardiff aged 19. He went to school near the Falls Road, a location practically synonymous with the Troubles, which is still littered with statues and murals dedicated to the events and fallen figures that formed them.
Most of the 1960s and 1970s Belfast setting was recreated for the Say Nothing shoot in London – and Boyle shares a FaceTime to his parents had them gasping at the accuracy. “It was like I was walking through their past,” he says. Was it hard to bring his own family’s memories to a role? “At first, no,” he says, before recounting a scene from the latter part of filming, when he was shoved against a wall by a British army officer. It reminded him of a story his father had told him, about a certain soldier doing the exact thing to him each time he made his way to Gaelic football training as a young man. “Maybe it was intergenerational trauma or something, but I felt like the shadow of that came to me at that moment. I was more Anthony then, than Brendan.”
However much the Troubles are depicted as a thing of the past, their legacy remains a knotty and unavoidable part of life in Northern Ireland – nearly gone, never forgotten. For this reason, Boyle had his initial reservations about taking the part, grounded mostly in his fear that an American perspective on the conflict might be wide off the mark (the series is based on the masterful investigative book of the same name, written by US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe in 2018).
Like the book, the series uses the real-life 1972 disappearance and murder of Jean McConville, a single mother of 10, as a prism through which dozens of individuals from both sides of the political divide intersect. “I had tried to avoid doing projects which had anything to do with Belfast because I feel like it’s really hard to get right,” Boyle says. “Mostly it’s people trying to say, ‘This is exactly who was in the right. This is exactly who was in the wrong.’”
A read of Keefe’s book and a meeting with the scriptwriters assuaged his fears. “I really liked it, but I said to them, ‘We can’t try to answer any questions. We have to ask questions instead,’” he says, a grin never far away. “You know, it can’t be ‘Disney has solved the Troubles.’ I wanted it to force the viewer to think: if you were marching for civil rights, and then suddenly you were seeing your friends getting shot in the head, what would you do?”
Boyle grew up walking past murals of Hughes on his way to school. Yet playing him was a different experience altogether. “As an actor, you’re forced to have empathy for everyone in every situation, and sometimes I feel as though my morals are constantly fluctuating,” he admits. “As we went on, I feel like my opinion of Brendan changed day to day. But that’s because I never think of the audience watching this, I just try to make that person feel like a real person.”
Say Nothing’s portrayal of deeply divided communities and the unbearable violence that erupts from that could not be timelier. “When you grow up in a society that was actually divided and is now so focused on reconciliation, and you hear people stoke the fires and want more division, it’s frustrating,” Boyle says. “I just think it’s so idiotic and counterintuitive to human nature. People have different political ideas but we’re stronger together. If I want people to take anything from this show, it’s that we should approach each other with great understanding, empathy and patience.”
“That’s a nice note to end on, isn’t it?” he laughs, before we say goodbye and Anthony Boyle goes back to work on what will surely be another captivating performance – with, yes, another fantastic moustache.
Say Nothing is streaming on Disney+ now
Say Nothing was Service95 Book Club’s Monthly Read for June 2024 – discover more about the book here, including Dua’s interview with Patrick Radden Keeffe, the author’s recommended reading list and Northern Irish poet Maria McManus on the realities of growing up during the Troubles
