Liam Cunningham: 'You walk into the room and you can see Cillian has something special'
Liam Cunningham in Netflix series 3 Body Problem.
Cillian Murphy was just 22 when he landed the role of ‘Pat the Barman’ in Irish drama Sweety Barrett.One of his co-stars in that 1988 movie was Liam Cunningham, who noticed the young Cork actor’s natural talent back in those early days. Like many of his peers, Cunningham was rooting for Murphy at the Oscars as he made history on cinema’s greatest world stage.
“I've done three movies with Cillian,” says Cunningham, just days before the Oscars take place. “One of his first early movies was Sweeney Barrett that myself and Brendan Gleeson are in. He played a barman, he’d a tiny little part.
“Then we did Breakfast on Pluto with Neil Jordan, and of course The Wind that Shakes the Barley. If Cillian called and said do you want to do something, drop of a hat.
“You walk into the room and you can see Cillian has something special. He’s fantastic at his job - it’s virtually him on the screen for all three hours of Oppenheimer. Everything is playing on his shoulders.
“It’s very difficult to keep up the subtlety of that and hold the attention of an audience. Cillian’s been in the game a long time now and has more than earned the position that he’s in now. He’s a wonderful ambassador for Ireland. Cillian’s been patient, and he’s been handed the sliotar, and he’s run with it.”
Cunningham has enjoyed some considerable successes of his own. Over a career spanning three decades, he has starred opposite Michael Fassbender in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, featured in Neil Marshall’s edgy action thriller Dog Soldiers, and shone in real-life Co Wexford drama A Love Divided.
His talent was mined to terrific effect in Game of Thrones, where he played Davos Seaworth over multiple series of the show that became a global sensation.
Now, the Dubliner is returning to work with GOT’s producers to bring audiences another large-scale series. Based on the hit Chinese novel, 3 Body Problem is a new sci-fi series for Netflix that sees a decision in 1960s China reverberate across space and time into the present day.
When the laws of nature unravel before their eyes early in the series, a close-knit group of scientists join forces with an unorthodox detective to confront an enormous threat to humanity.
Cunningham will play Thomas Wade, the leader of an elite intelligence operation and the strategist behind planetary defence.
“He’s a bit of a shadowy figure,” says Cunningham. “He’s quite charismatic, quite sure of himself. This guy has no self esteem problems. If we take into account that the guys who wrote it for me, the character I played in their last epic, Game of Thrones, was described as the moral compass of Game of Thrones.
“This guy most definitely could not be called that. They've taken a totally different direction with the character that I’m playing, but Thomas Wade is a major player in the story. There are various things happening to the very bright, talented, incredibly intelligent, creative people on our planet. And he gets wind of this and is heavily involved in finding out why it’s happening."
Cunningham says he purposefully avoided the original books, where his character was American. “I don’t like doing that because I don't want two voices in my ear for the character. He's got a big thick Dublin head on him, this one!”
The show’s creators opted to have Cunningham speak in his native voice. Interestingly, he says, that brings its own challenges. “You’re not hiding behind an accent or a character from a different country or whatever it may be, which is a glorious disguise because it allows you to be creative in another person’s world.”
It has become noticeable that we are seeing more Irish voices and accents on screen. That is partly, of course, due to the sheer breadth of Irish talent working internationally now. But there also appears to be a tendency among casting directors and producers to have Irish actors working in Irish accents.
“I think it’s incremental,” says Cunningham. “I think also because the business can be so conservative, an awful lot of the time you see repeat stuff because it worked last time. New is untried and untested, and I think probably The Banshees (of Inisherin) made a bit of a difference - for a smaller-budget movie to go through the roof, be Oscar-nominated. People like hearing the Irish accent - it’s easy on the ear.”
Like many of his acting peers, Cunningham is very excited at recent Irish acting successes, and is watching out for what they bring us next. “You’ve got wonderful people like Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jessie Buckley, Saoirse Ronan, Barry Keoghan.
“Without getting overly romantic about it, we do have a history of storytelling. For a very small nation we punch way above our weight on the creative side. And long may it continue. I mean, look at Ed Guiney and Andrew Lowe up for 11 nominations (for Poor Things).
“Michael D Higgins was the one who got the Irish Film Board up and running again and Ed quite rightly said that we are all children of the Irish Film Board (now Screen Ireland).
“This is a result of government money being put in, allowing creatives and from the business side of things to have some sort of budget, to have some sort of help getting their creativity going. The result is what we're seeing now, because they got an opportunity to exercise their craft and their artistry over the years.
“When you get that under your belt, when you get experience, you start having a bit more faith in what you can do. We’re not tipping our cap at people around the world anymore, we’re able to say: ‘Come to us, we’ve got the goods’.”
The actor was thrilled to work again with the Game of Thrones producers on 3 Body Problem, and is looking forward to bringing it to audiences. “They write long scenes, change-of-gear scenes, which is what keeps the viewer hooked. They’re very difficult to get right. It’s the tough stuff that you pull off that makes it exciting for the audience. And that's where the hard work comes in - because you're trying to stay one step ahead of the audience all the time and not be predictable.
“I like to go to the set in the morning and collaborate with good people and learn from good people. I love a good story. I like telling a good story. I’m very lucky to be allowed to do it.”
- 3 Body Problem, the new series by David Benioff & D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones) & Alexander Woo (True Blood), debuts on Netflix on Thursday, March 21
