Kin star Clare Dunne on Iftas, new films and Cillian Murphy

This will be Clare Dunne’s year — as well as an Ifta nomination, she has three new movies set for release.

Sat, 20 Apr, 2024 - 12:40

Esther N McCarthy

Fresh from her second turn as the formidable Amanda — a shrewd operator who’s building an empire in crime series Kin — Irish actress Clare Dunne has three new movies on the way.

They include a supporting role opposite Cork Oscar winner Cillian Murphy as he produces his first movie, a highly anticipated adaptation of Claire Keegan’s book, Small Things Like These.

The story centres on a coal delivery man (Murphy) who makes a startling discovery while visiting a local convent in 1980s Ireland.

“Cillian is the pinnacle person in the film, but I’m part of a very rich ensemble and I was very lucky to be part of it,” she says.

“This year I got to do two independent Irish films, including Kathleen is Here which Eva Birthistle is debuting as a writer director. That will be coming out this year and I’m very excited for everyone to see her talent and to see Hazel Doupe as the main lead.”

We’ll also see her in The Cut, a British indie set in the boxing industry and co-starring Orlando Bloom and Caitriona Balfe. Away from the cameras, Dunne has also been keeping busy, developing a new feature film that she also hopes to direct.

“I’ve just submitted my draft to Screen Ireland. I guess it’s a sophisticated rom-com, it’s got drama in there — the working title is One Good Conversation. We’re just about to start different balls rolling on that with casting and funding and stuff now so that’s quite exciting.”

The Dubliner is representative of the buoyant success of Ireland’s screen talent. It shows no signs of slowing — the Ifta awards show the sheer strength and depth of Irish talent, with Dunne, Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Jessie Buckley, Andrew Scott, and Paul Mescal among this year’s nominees.

Clare Dunne: “You do a lot of hours in this business and you can end up doing a lot of stuff on your own and coming up against challenges all the time, just in the day to day." Pic: Matthew Thompson

The Rising Star nominees include Cork actress Alison Oliver, who starred opposite Keoghan in Saltburn, building on her role as the lead star of Conversations With Friends.

“I think it’s important to celebrate what is coming from Ireland and not just what’s being shot in Ireland as a location,” says Dunne. “The Iftas are brilliant at really honing in on the talent in front of camera and behind camera in all of its forms.

“There’s a lot of cross-pollination and people getting to meet each other that maybe have wanted to talk to each other but they get to talk in a more informal way and just get the sense of each other.

“You do a lot of hours in this business and you can end up doing a lot of stuff on your own and coming up against challenges all the time, just in the day to day.

“So when you have these big, special occasions it’s like they give you a little supercharge and a boost of energy, because you’re reminded that you’re not alone in it. I find it inspirational to observe and get to know other people’s personalities and the work that they’ve done.”

She may be the star of one of RTÉ’s most successful shows of recent years, but Dunne has never taken her success for granted, and credits others for helping her on her path.

“I always think people give you an opportunity that absolutely, though you don’t realise it at the time, becomes this massive turning point in your life,” she says.

“When I was younger, it was Maureen Hughes, the casting director. She started my career. I wrote to her from drama school in Cardiff. At the time my only ambition when I was 22 was to work for Druid Theatre Company in Galway.

“Maureen Hughes came over and had a cup of coffee with me in drama school, and before she saw me perform on stage, she’s sitting there and she says: ‘You’d be a great Pegeen Mike. Hang on a second’.

She gets her phone, rings Garry Hynes (artistic director of the Druid Theatre Company) in front of me, says: ‘I need you to meet this girl’. And I was sitting there thinking, what is happening?”

Following auditions, Dunne was cast as Pegeen in John Millington Synge’s iconic Playboy of the Western World. The young student was allowed have the performance included on her degree points and toured the UK and Ireland with Druid.

Actress Clare Dunne pictured at the Dublin International Film Festival.

Another breakthrough, years later, was getting to work with acclaimed theatre director Phyllida Lloyd, then working on an all-female Shakespeare trilogy in London.

“Through doing that, it literally altered my whole view on storytelling and the power of storytelling and the story we tell of ourselves in the human race.

“I started to realise that Phyllida was trying to change the world through storytelling. That was just a huge breakthrough in my consciousness. You can’t go back once you’ve learned something like that because then you read scripts in a new way.”

Years later, while writing the screenplay for Herself, Dunne remembers the support of fellow Irish actress Sharon Horgan, who was crucial in helping get the film made through her production company, Merman Films.

“I sent her the script of Herself. She read it and wrote back and says: ‘hang on a minute. I want to help you make this’. You ask what were the key moments but they were the key people. They sent the elevator back down.”

Herself, written by and starring Dunne, is a remarkably powerful tale of a young Irish mother, trapped in a cycle of domestic abuse, who sets about building a home and a new life for her young family.

During a period spent in New York for pilot season — where actors audition for numerous potential new series — she decided to write the screenplay following a conversation with a good friend.

“One of my friends was going through that thing where she got a short eviction notice and she had three kids and she just couldn’t find anywhere to live. She was telling me all about it on the phone,” Dunne recalls.

“I think I was just having a moment where it was very meta. It was like, I feel like I’m in the wrong place, that I’m trying to get discovered in Hollywood and they keep making me cover up my birthmark and do all this stuff.

“Then she is having to declare herself homeless when she’s actually the most independent hard-working woman ever but it’s because of the housing crisis. It’s not her fault. It just landed on me like a eureka moment: imagine a woman building a house for herself against all odds?”

Following extensive research, Dunne discovered that such movements and projects existed and set about telling the story of a young woman whose community helps her to build a home.

“I always saw an image of her getting up off the floor, the way a boxer gets out of the ring when they’ve been hit down and they get up and they go again. I knew in my heart that this is a film. I was like, I’m going to do this. I don’t know how I’m going to do it. But I’m gonna do it.”

Herself ended up being released by top Irish company Element Pictures and being widely critically acclaimed, and the first-time writer was inspired to create her own work. One Good Conversation is now in development and Dunne intends to direct the feature film.

She and the cast of Kin are currently waiting for news on whether a third season will get the green light. Amanda was a character she loved playing as she evolved through the course of the first two series, which have since enjoyed international success.

“She’s on the ball. And she gets things done — she’s a chess player, you know, her strength is that she is new to it all. She doesn’t get held back by old ideas or old perceptions of how the rules go. Then somebody tells her the rules and she’s like: ‘Okay, I’ll learn that better than anyone. And then I’m going to flip that, use that to my own gain’.

"The thing I haven’t finished with Amanda which I would probably only be able to get to properly in season three, is she never wanted her sons to be involved in this world. But she clearly compartmentalised any sense of guilt or responsibility to the wider world, that this is doing bad stuff to people.”