Meet the Cork detective who’s about to shake things up in Dead Still
Aidan O'Hare as Frederick Regan in
As the feisty and temperamental Detective Frederick Regan in new series, , Aidan O’Hare relished the opportunity to play a savvy sleuth in Victorian-era Dublin.
Set in the strange world of postmortem photography — where the living posed with dead family members in a memorial photograph — the Cork actor has already been winning praise for his performance.
The storytelling is gothic and the humour pitch black in the series, which has already opened to strong reviews in the US and now comes to RTÉ. While producers are keeping storylines under wraps, murder, skullduggery and double-crossing are all part of the package.
“He's very much a Corkman, from Cork city and I generated a backstory that he cracked a big case and ended up being poached to come up to Dublin to work with the Dublin Metropolitan Police,” says the Glounthaune actor, who added that Regan is quite the character, and even reminds him of a classic TV detective.
“He’s bullish, quick to temper. Sharp. Witty. There's an element of a Colombo about him as well — he leads people into thinking that he's a bit of an eejit, but in fact he's anything but. And he's got a chip on his shoulder. There's a couple of instances in the scripts where John (Morton), the writer, has played into that quite nicely.”
O’Hare landed the role after learning that producers were seeking an actor to play the Corkman. “I've had an absolute ball on it actually because I know people like him. He can go from nought to 60, there's a lot to him. His wife is his confidante. He has got this outward bravado. But that mask drops, really, when he's with his wife, because the story in the case is so big, and it's kind of running away from him.”
His wife Betty, viewers will discover, is quite the super-sleuth herself. Played by Kerry-born actress, Aoife Duffin, Betty solves crimes from her kitchen table as a hobby and often nods to crucial evidence and clues on behalf of her husband. “I solve all his cases for him — that’s what I do!” jokes the actress.
“All our scenes together have been in the kitchen, poring over the cases while I pour the tea. We read these novels together as well, these detective novels. She reads one chapter, and then he reads another and, and they like solving the cases in the novel. It's like a hobby that they have.”
We meet as O’Hare and Duffin are still dressed in their Victorian costumes during a break from filming on location in Dublin. On this occasion, filming is taking place in the sumptuous surroundings of Cabinteely House, an 18th-century country house set in 45 hectares of parkland in Cabinteely Park south of the city.
Amid the decorative staircases and ornate plasterwork, it’s hard to imagine we’re just minutes from the N11 from Dublin to Wexford and the setting certainly evokes a sense of time and place.
The house, it emerges, is the family home of ’s lead character, Brock Blennerhassett, a post-mortem photographer who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery.
He’s played by the prominent Belfast-born actor Michael Smiley, who is clearly having a blast on the series.
“He’s become obsessed with this new format called photography and has devoted his life to it. He used to be an embalmer before and now he’s got into this. This series is completely different. I’ve done period drama before, but without giving too much away it’s different from a lot of stuff I’ve done before."
“There are funny bits in it and there are day-to-day interactions between family members. It’s like these characters, life’s happening around them and sometimes it impinges upon them and life can be quite gothic. The world they are in, which is Dublin in the 1880s, this is Blennerhassett’s house, his country home,” he says, adding that the series brings to life several locations around the city.
“Some of the architecture that's in Dublin, not just these amazing houses, but the terraces. Georgian and Victorian terraces with beautiful doors — that lends itself to the universe of shooting. To shoot this in London, you'd probably only have two or three streets that you could do it on. Here, you've got a plethora of choices. And so it lends itself to these sorts of stories.”
Following the phenomenal worldwide success of , which gave audiences some desperately-needed storytelling just as March’s lockdown took hold, Irish production companies are in a very strong position to produce world-class TV. As well as which filmed last year, several forthcoming productions are underway.
These include , a comedy starring Brian and Domhnall Gleeson and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. spin-off, , recently completed filming in Wicklow, as did period crime drama .
, a sci-fi series for Apple TV, currently shooting at Limerick’s Troy Studios, is one of the biggest productions ever to come to Ireland, while , a drama starring Dervla Kirwan and Seána Kerslake, is currently filming in Co Clare.
Such is the rapid growth in demand for TV that both Troy Studios and Ardmore Studios in Wicklow are undergoing major expansion plans. Screen Ireland also recently appointed Andrew Byrne as TV project manager to capitalise on growth in demand. Byrne was previously head of commissioning for Virgin Media Television.
Actors, too, are flocking to high-end TV series and the opportunity to tell stories in longer form. All has changed utterly since in the decades past, when TV was often considered a poor relative to movies.
“I think it's completely flipped,” agrees Michael Smiley.
“I think there's more television than film now. It’s multi-platforms, the people aren't watching television like they used to, people watch television on their own devices. I'm married with two children. Of an evening, we're having a family night together, I'll be on my laptop, my wife will be on her laptop, my kids will be on their screens, and we're watching four different things, and the TV will be on! You're completely discerning now. So what that does, it dictates quality. Because you can go on to Netflix, or you can go onto Amazon."
“When I grew up, there were three channels. Now we have so much choice. You can play with the format of storytelling better with television than you can with film, because you can come back to it again, you can flip it and change it. But having said that, I really love film. You know, as much as I love television, television is a different beast.”
Irish actress, Eileen O’Higgins, who plays Blennerhassett’s niece, Nancy Vickers, in the series, has also enjoyed the opportunity to work in the lengthier format: “It's longer, you stay with the character for longer, and you get to take it on a longer journey. If you're doing a film, you have a set amount of time, whereas here we've got six hours, where you get to take the character on an entire arc."
“It's an Irish story and a period drama set in Dublin, with incredible Dublin characters coming in. The colour just comes in in a way that you don't get an opportunity to see and you get more chances to have your character experience loads of different things. There are only about five characters in this that run from the start. We are in this little bubble. And then it's like this craziness. I don't want to say what happens — the premise is so ridiculous that it's brilliant, really normal people interacting with quite unbelievable things.”
Smiley was especially pleased that the story is set around Irish people and characters in Victorian Ireland, whereas typically these stories are set in Britain.
“It’s an era where things are changing, you're seeing gas lights turning to electricity. Drawings are becoming photographs,” he says.
“What really attracted me to this series was, it was unapologetically Irish. It wasn't tugging its forelock to the UK, it wasn't pretending to be a drama set in Victorian London. It was saying: in Dublin, this stuff was going on, and this was the environment at this time. For that reason, I found it interesting and hopefully the viewers will, too.”
Dead Still begins Sunday at 9.30pm on RTÉ One
