Man on fire: 'Kin' star Sam Keeley on acting, Iceland and Joe Exotic
Sam Keely as Eric 'Viking' Kinsella in RTÉ's Kin, concluding tomorrow night on RTÉ One.
You could say Sam Keeley’s latest role was written in the stars. In his Twitter bio, the 30-year-old actor gives his location as Reykjavik/London/Los Angeles. While the last two are typical thespian hangouts, the first piques my interest. So what brings a lad from Tullamore, Co Offaly, to the Land of Ice and Fire?
“I’ve always wanted to go there. My mum’s family name [Grimes] is originally from when the Vikings were here in Ireland. I’ve always had very romantic ideas about that. I went to Reykjavik by myself one New Year’s Eve and I hung around and made some friends. I loved it so much I would rent airbnbs and go back there whenever I was off work. Then eventually I decided I would settle there, and it has been great. I go back whenever I’m not working, which is not very often. It is a beautiful country.”
Serendipitously, Keeley’s latest role is as Eric ‘Viking’ Kinsella in RTÉ crime drama Kin, the son of gangland boss Frank. It is Eric’s rash actions that set off a tumultuous chain of events and leave the Kinsellas fighting for their business, and their lives. The name may have been a coincidence but in the role, Keeley certainly embodies the ‘Viking’ spirit with an impressive attitude and physicality.
“The name was a coincidence. I originally read for Jimmy (Eric’s cousin, played by Emmett J Scanlan) but I was too young and then they asked me to read for Viking. I had grown out my beard and I had my head shaved. The look was already there. I thought well, if the name Viking was given to him, that says a lot about who he is — he has that brash, raiding, pillaging, forward-moving energy. Everybody else in the show is very contemplative and measured, they are very sure of where they are in the world, except Viking, because for him everything is a problem, he is affronted by everything. He is still trying to figure out his position in the world and in the family. The physicality was a big part of it.”
Keeley was working in Toronto in Canada when the pandemic hit, and just made it back to Iceland before everything shut down. His lockdown training routine came in handy when he landed the role of Eric.
“I have trained for years, I am a martial arts hobbyist, I have always studied a bit of it here and there. I was fortunate in Iceland because when we were locked down, we didn’t have much Covid, so I was doing Brazilian jujitsu three times a week. That lent itself to the character, who is into martial arts. I was in decent enough nick and I just started eating more and lifting heavier weights. I wanted him to be stocky and more formidable.”
Keeley started his acting career at 18 and quickly went on to win roles in some prestigious shows and productions, including the Lenny Abrahamson drama What Richard Did, This Must Be the Place, from the acclaimed Italian director Paulo Sorrentino and starring Sean Penn, and Burnt, the Hollywood drama about a chef, played by Bradley Cooper.
His last role before Kin was in the US military comedy-drama 68 Whiskey, in which he deployed a convincing American accent. No less impressive is his inner-city Dublin accent in the role of Eric. Rather than opting for the usual dialect coach, he turned to a friend for help.
“I got in touch with the actor Emmet Kirwan, who is a good friend, to help me out because he is very good at describing where the sounds come from for actors, and he is from that neck of the woods as well. You would think that someone from Ireland would be able to do an accent like that handy but for me, being from Offaly, it is quite complicated. It was good that Emmet was there to help me along the way, we broke down the whole script. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without him.”
Keeley’s career has been made up of varied and interesting roles but his next one is one of his most challenging yet. He is talking to me from Brisbane, Australia, where he has just wrapped filming on Joe Exotic, a US drama series based on the hugely popular Netflix documentary, Tiger King, which captured the public imagination as the first big binge watch of lockdown.
It told the bizarre story of Joe Exotic, who was eventually sentenced to 22 years in prison for trying to hire two men to kill an animal rights activist. Keeley plays Exotic’s former husband John Finlay in the US series, which will air on the NBC channel Peacock. Keeley admits to having doubts about taking on the role, which entailed a complete transformation.
“It was a lot. I rang my agent two days before I was supposed to fly and I didn’t think I could do it. I have never played anybody who is still alive and has risen to not just fame but pop culture notoriety. And to play such a prominent character in the show, famously the guy with no teeth and the shirt off. We are talking about three and a half hours in make-up before I even stepped off the bus to go on to set. There was a lot that had to come together in order for that to be right. The production has been incredible, they are really trying to stick to the doc but also to do something it didn’t, which is to explore the characters involved as people.”
The role of Eric in Kin has also been a hugely rewarding one for Keeley, even it was strange to be working at home in Ireland for the first time in years and not be able to see his family, due to Covid restrictions.
“This is one I had to come home for and one I couldn’t let go. I think it is one of my favourite characters. It was lovely to be back home. There was an element of it that was quite sad as well, because the bars were all shut, and I couldn’t even get down to see my family in Offaly because of lockdown.
"But there were little snippets of light that were beautiful, I would go down to the Grand Canal Dock, have a cheeky glass of wine, sit down on a bench and look out at the swans, people gathering outside. We are a nation of people who love to be together and have the craic and to be told you aren’t allowed to do that because you might harm each other is a very difficult thing to wrap your head around.”
There have been many topics of discussion around Kin, chief among them being comparisons, unfavourable or otherwise, to RTÉ’s previous gangland drama hit Love/Hate. It is not something that particularly bothers Keeley.
“Ultimately, there is no denying that Love/Hate helped Irish content break through to the next level in terms of what we were able to do, that we could compete with the bigger networks with quality drama, actors and production. I think that was a big deal. You can’t make a gangland drama since then and not tip the hat to them. It is a great show and there is no doubt that we had big boots to fill. I have seen people that are like, ‘oh it’s not Love/Hate’.
"Of course it’s not, it was never going to be, you can’t make the same show again, that is not what we are doing here. To me, Kin feels like we are looking through a keyhole at the characters — watching them at their own pace, trying to be a family, amid these crazy circumstances with very high stakes. I think we have managed to achieve something unique in its own right while still paying homage to Love/Hate, which paved the way.”
Keeley is tight-lipped about the conclusion of the show and Eric’s future. “He has had to put his money where his mouth is and take responsibility for his actions — it is a fire that forges him, I think.”
Fittingly, when the final episode of Kin airs and viewers discover the fate of the Kinsella family, Keeley will be at home enjoying a reunion with his own family in Offaly.
“It is always nice to come home after being away. I have had a really busy year and I want to take the rest of the year off. I just want to be with my family and sit by the fire and soak that up. Although, the funny thing about this industry is that you provoke the universe when you say you want some time off, because you will get a job. My intention is to be at home until Christmas, then probably back to Reykjavik after that.”
Even when in Iceland though, he never feels far from home. “They are very similar to us. We forget that Ireland was a Norse colony for centuries. The Romans gave infrastructure to everyone else, the Norse gave us our infrastructure. Even in their language, there are a lot of words in Irish and Icelandic that mean the same thing. There is a kinship there between us.”
- The final episode of Kin is on RTÉ1 tomorrow at 9.30pm.
