Anthony Boyle: Say Nothing inspired family discussions on the Troubles

Anthony Boyle won the rising star gong at the Irish Film and Television Academy awards. Picture: Ian West/PA

Northern Irish actor Anthony Boyle has said Troubles drama Say Nothing led to conversations between children and the parents “who went through it”.

The Disney+ series, an adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s bestselling book, spans four decades and starts in the 1970s, where the show follows members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) while also weaving in interviews that took place years later.

The series won four gongs at the Irish Film and Television Academy awards earlier in the year, with Boyle, 31, who played Brendan Hughes, taking home the rising star prize.

Boyle had after-school acting lessons delivered by a former IRA man as a teenager, according to GQ Hype.

He said: “One day my dad was collecting me (and) was like, ‘Jesus Christ, what’s your man doing?’ ‘He’s our drama teacher.’ ‘Him? He’s the… drama teacher?’

“We weren’t doing Shakespeare; we weren’t doing Chekov. We were doing these long-form improvs: you’re an IRA member and someone is a screw or a British soldier and you have to go through these things.

“What I didn’t realise is this was probably drama therapy for this guy. He probably learned drama therapy in jail, and then was teaching us what he had learned.”

Speaking about the response to Say Nothing, he added: “A lot of people I spoke to in Ireland said they were having conversations with their kids about it, and the kids were having conversations with their parents who went through it.

Anthony Boyle was interviewed for GQ Hype (Emilia Staugaard/GQ Hype/PA)

“Belfast is really, really small, and the Troubles affected everyone, so everyone wants to chat to you about it. It’s a real honour to hear those stories.”

Speaking on whether he feels culture ties to the Republic of Ireland, he said: “There are people who have fought and died for the right for me to have my own sense of Irishness, and I always felt really strongly I had to honour that – until I started working with people from Dublin and Cork and Galway.

“They would say to me, ‘What’s it like up there? Are you still shooting each other?’ So many of them had such a… like they’d forgotten about us or something.

“It made me feel like I actually had a very uniquely Irish Catholic in the north, nationalist republican experience.”

Boyle appears in the new Netflix series House Of Guinness, which is also based on real events – this time depicting the consequences of the death of Benjamin Guinness and the fate of his four adult children, Edward, Ben, Anne and Arthur (Boyle).

Read the full feature online at GQ Hype now.