Culture That Made Me: Cork actor Éanna Hardwicke talks Paul Newman, Kevin Barry and Hilary Mantel
Eanna Hardwicke
Born in 1996, Éanna Hardwicke grew up in Glanmire, County Cork. In 2009, he caught the eye as a child actor in Conor McPherson’s horror film . Other notable screen credits include , , and the Netflix series .
He will attend the Fastnet Film Festival (24-28 May), Schull, West Cork, for screenings and Q&As of two films he stars in, The Sparrow and Lakelands. See: fastnetfilmfestival.com
I saw aged maybe six in the Capitol Cineplex on the Grand Parade in Cork. It’s gone now. It’s such a loss. It had this old, Hollywood theatre feel to it. When you went into the foyer, the popcorn was in front of you and then it was left or right to the cinema screens. I went with the entire family. I remember dressing up to go to it. It’s a film I think of when I think of childhood magic. I spent so much of my childhood pretending to be Aragorn or Legolas. I found the film thrilling and terrifying and moving. It felt completely real to me.
My dad reminded me recently that when it finished, I said something along the lines of, “Well, that was quite good.”
I remember watching starring Paul Newman. He had this magnetism that was very classic Hollywood. He was very good-looking, but he also had this gravitas. I remember thinking, 'Oh, there's something to this'. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Magnetism is something that people can generate. He had that in spades. Then I watched . I was so impressed and enchanted by him and what he could do on camera.
I watched when I was young. It really spoke to me at that point in my life — this amazing, Dickensian depiction of a cross-section of society, about systems and how the politics of the street and government interact. It’s an eagle-eyed view of the city of Baltimore. Everyone has this poetry to the way they speak. It’s a genius combination — taking an objective look at society, but the language is far from mundane.
The characters as well — Omar, Stringer Bell, McNulty — are compelling in a way more familiar to the stage or in literature. Yet the way it’s shot has this televisual reality to it. I’d never seen anything like it. I found it completely gripping.
is a Danish TV series. It’s true crime, but it’s not all about the person who committed the crime. It's about the investigation into the disappearance and murder of a Swedish journalist. She went to interview someone on a submarine off the coast of Denmark about six years ago and disappeared. It’s an amazing show made by Tobias Lindholm.
I saw a production of Harold Pinter’s in London with an amazing cast: Zoë Wanamaker, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Toby Jones. There was a moment when Toby Jones dizzily spins around the stage. It was a light bulb moment. I was in drama school at the time. I was forming my own taste. I loved his performance. He used language brilliantly. He was funny. Everything he did took me by surprise.
The thing I look for in theatre is: am I sitting forward in my seat? Does it pull me in? Watching those actors in that play, there was so much surprise, so much tension in the air.
When I was deciding to be an actor, I was maybe 15, in a youth theatre in Cork’s School of Music. A group of us were close friends. Our teacher Regina Crowley, who was incredible, brought us to see Tom Murphy’s in the Everyman Theatre. It was a production by Druid with a phenomenal cast, including Eileen Walsh, Marty Ray, Niall Buggy, Rory Nolan, Gavin Drea, and Aaron Monaghan. I was completely sucked in. I remember Niall Buggy standing on the table at the end going, “My boys. My boys.” If there was a moment when I realised, this is what I want to do — that was the moment.
Around the same time, I went to see . I went to school around the corner from The Gate Cinema in Cork. I’d go to see action films, comedies, blockbusters. This was my first time going with mates to the cinema to see a drama. We all came out shell-shocked. We stepped outside the cinema and there was a sense we had been punched in the gut.
There's something about Lenny Abrahamson’s filmmaking which is very pared back. It shook me — how real the world felt. It felt so close to reality, which absorbed me into the story. It was so credible, so then when bad things started to happen it got under your skin.
Setting out to read Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, I didn't have a particular interest in the Tudors, but she puts you so much in Thomas Cromwell’s frame of mind. It's like a camera — it cuts between the whole of England to this man's brain so quickly. It's a brilliant exploration of how one individual’s sense of themselves can shape a country.
It’s obviously an act of imagination, but it works brilliantly — bringing to life his ideas about civilisation, religion and his country’s future, and how that can influence history. It does it with a light touch. The writing is deft, funny, witty. I kept wanting to turn the page.
Kevin Barry did a radio play for RTÉ’s Drama on One called . It’s a man’s monologue, set in Cork’s Sunday’s Well. It evokes Cork so well. I love my city and how mythological it feels.
also — which is a novel set in the future in a city inspired by Cork, Porto and Limerick — felt bang on the money. It felt like all the alleyways and highways and byways of Cork. There's something special about a brilliant writer writing about where you're from. You're nodding along the whole time going 'Yeah, I know that place; that feels right'. Everything he does — his sense of character, his tragicomedy sensibility — I enjoy immensely.
I saw The Gloaming at Dublin’s National Concert Hall. It was music for the soul. They're incredible traditional musicians with a bit of a classical spin. To see them live is awe-inspiring — how connected they are as a group. Tragically, Dennis Cahill is no longer with us. The way they improvised off each other live and felt out the music together was phenomenal. It gave me an appreciation of the great traditional musicians that came before them. It’s music that instantly made me feel at home.
