Peter M Smith: From playing Phil Lynott to Code Red action thriller
Peter M Smith in Code Red: Spain.
When Peter M Smith was a youngster, his family home backed onto that of two Irish acting legends. His closest neighbours in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh were Emmet Bergin, best known for playing Dick Moran in the iconic Irish soap and his brother Patrick, who would go on to enjoy a lifelong career after starring in early career hits including and
By the time Smith had started to fall in love with community musical theatre, Patrick was starting to make waves in Hollywood. Seeing the Bergins’ successes encouraged the young Smith, who delivered newspapers in his neighbourhood, to consider an acting career — something that was also noticed by the Bergin stars’ mother.
“I used to deliver the to his mother, and she used to buy my Crumlin United lottery tickets from me every week, a pound each — she’d buy two,” remembers Smith. “She never won anything, but she was an absolute sweetheart, Mrs Bergin. I used to see Patrick and Emmet coming and going all the time. The reason I wanted to be an actor was because of Patrick and Emmet Bergin.”
Mammy Bergin, he recalls, used to look out for him as he first took part in local theatre shows as a boy. “When Patrick was flying back and forth from Hollywood, she'd be telling him: ‘Listen, that 12-year-old kid that lives behind is a talented kid’. I’d be doing talent shows, and little baby theatre productions. You'd get a name for yourself in a small town. So he always had an eye on me.”
Just down the road in Crumlin, another artistic legend would inspire one of Smith’s future acting successes. The actor has spent much of the last year playing Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott in The musical theatre show, which explores the formative years of the iconic musician, has been a massive hit with audiences in Ireland and beyond.
“We just sold out the Hammersmith Apollo in London, and we're coming back now to do Vicar Street again in June, after a UK tour at the end of May,” says Smith of the show’s enduring popularity.
It’s the latest role Irish performer Smith is enjoying in his own run of success. Following his role in the widely viewed Netflix series Smith will soon be seen in Guy Ritchie’s forthcoming crime thriller Co-starring Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rosemund Pike, it centres on the aftermath of a despot who steals a billion-dollar fortune, and a team sent to steal it back on what would be for anyone else a suicide mission.
“My scenes are with Carlos Bardem. I'm the FBI chief who's been chasing him. The lesson I learned from working with Guy Richie was that the bigger the fish, the more comfortable they are in the ocean. He was just so relaxed and so cool. You can hear the experience — he thinks of things that you would never consider.”
In the meantime, Smith and his colleagues have been driving some work of their own. Having brought to the stage through production company Zero3 Productions — founded by Smith and his friend and fellow actor Francesca Kingdon — they make their movie debut with
The English and Spanish action thriller launches viewers into the world of Spanish crime lord Eduardo Sanchez and his wife Estelle — all under the watch of veteran soldier Solomon Pearce. Irish filmmaker Jason Figgis directs. “Jason is so collaborative, because he's a classical writer, he would have grown up watching the likes of — when Hollywood made character-driven heroes that were human and flawed and feared, but acted despite those fears,” says Smith.
He says he and Kingdon formed Zero3 out of a desire to create their own acting projects.
“My hero in terms of an actor-producer would be Ben Affleck. I love what he and Matt Damon do. They were struggling to get parts in the beginning, and they went and wrote and the rest is history. I firmly believe that the strength of a piece is the writing. Everything else is about bringing it there, making sure your performance is sharp, your research is done.”
For Kingdon, who worked on and with Madonna on early in her career, moving into film production feels timely. “It’s about making your own path,” she says.
“Although things are very tough in the industry at the minute, I think it's actually a time where there are more opportunities than ever, because we can go directly to people who want to see this. That was why we started Zero3, because we see independent filmmaking as something that's actually very exciting, and that can be when the most creative stuff comes about. Code Red is a low-budget action film, which is quite a rarity, really. It's a film with more heart than most action films you'll see.”
Kingdon and Smith are buzzing at the prospect of bringing a number of future projects to our screens, and are in talks with several bodies, including Screen Ireland, at the moment. Do they wonder if they should have set up the production company sooner?
“Lightning strikes when it's supposed to,” says Smith. “Do I wish I'd done this 10 years ago? Of course. But then a lot of the technology that exists that has enabled us to take certain shortcuts didn't exist even 10, 15 years ago, and the lessons that we've learned throughout both our careers.
"Fran, having worked with Madonna, worked as a lead in and myself, having worked in all the things that I've worked on. Any quality output that you produce is the subtotal of the work that you've put in and your experiences in the past. So it was the perfect storm at the right time, and now it's up to us.
“We've got six or seven scripts active now. It looks like in the next few years, we're going to continue this roll that we're on. And that's because we've earned the right to say, how do we approach this? What's important? What do we strip away? What do we not need? And it's a very rewarding thing, definitely.”
They have several projects in development, including another movie directed by Jason Figgis, called and a crime drama starring a number of Irish actors including his friend and former neighbour, Patrick Bergin.
- is now on streaming platforms
