After his first audition, Laurence Kinlan was sure he had 'mucked itup'. Six years later, he's in the Kelly gang, writes Donald Clarke.
Laurence Kinlan's story seems to write itself: an inner-city Dublin kid who has never acted before goes to an open audition and gets the part. Six years later, he sits in the Clarence Hotel talking about his role as Dan Kelly, the protagonist's brother in the latest big-screen version of the Ned Kelly legend. In the intervening years he has worked continuously and already has the sort of career that most actor-waiters would kill for. Can this be true?
"Well, yeah, it is mad," Kinlan says. "I think back then to me walking in the door of that audition, knowing nothing. Then I think of me, a few months back, walking down a closed-off street in Australia for the première. I have a free Armani suit. I have a free Louis Copeland suit. People were throwing free stuff at me. It's mad."
Kinlan heard about the audition for the 1997 Channel 4 film Soft Sand, Blue Sea at his local youth club. Up to that point, he had never even considered acting and admits that when producer Alan Bleasdale called him back after the first reading he didn't understand the significance.
"I thought that meant I had mucked it up. I went back with a few mates and then got a phone-call and heard that I had got the lead role out of 7,000 kids. I simply couldn't believe it." Soft Sand, Blue Sea didn't make a huge impact, but Kinlan's performance was impressive enough to attract the attentions of the Lisa Richards Agency, which eagerly signed the young actor. Since then, he has somehow found time to appear in 10 feature films, among them Angela's Ashes, Saltwater, Veronica Guerin and Intermission.
The 20-year-old's tight, pinched features have been used by directors to suggest both vulnerability and resilience. He can be angry and robust, as in Ned Kelly. And he can be utterly broken, as he was in Veronica Guerin, in which he played a young heroin addict. I ask where he found that character.
"Well, you don't have to look too far," he says. "I live straight in the city centre. We've had drug problems, so we know all about it. I won't go into the details. But there have been drug problems in my family." Despite having forged a lucrative career over the past five years, he still lives with his mother in Dublin's north inner-city and shudders at the suggestion that he might some day have to do his own laundry. "But I was away in Australia for six months, so I have had the experience of living on my own," he says, slightly defensively.
As somebody with such an attachment to family, he, inevitably, remains sad that his father, who died in 1993, never got to see his success.
"I'd love my Da to be here to see it all," he says. "But then again if he was here, would I be doing the thing I'm doing now? It was all about in the right place at the right time. Maybe I wouldn't have been there if he had been around. You never know." Kinlan already shows signs of developing a sober philosophy about the pressures and benefits of his career. He angrily dismisses movie stars who complain about press intrusion, pointing out that attention is part of the job, and constantly returns to the theme of his own good fortune. But he is pragmatic and unpretentious about the art of acting itself.
"Nobody in my family had ever acted," he says. "So when I went into that audition I thought, I can't act, so, instead, I will just try and say it as I would say it in real life. I will say it as if it was me, rather than act it." Lance Daly, who directed Kinlan in the nano-budgeted 2001 feature Last Days in Dublin, and who recently finished shooting the upcoming The Halo Effect with him, is enthusiastic about the energy the young actor brings.
"He's just so hungry," Daly says. "I would always try and find a part for him. But I must try and write a part for him where he's not playing the little gurrier. He does always seem to be cast in those parts; the gurrier with a conscience." Kinlan laughs at the suggestion that he may be a victim of typecasting so early in his career: "I'm showing a different side of myself in Ned Kelly.
"You get to see a soft side that you maybe don't see in Veronica Guerin or Intermission. It's nice to show people that you can do other things. But as long as I'm working, I don't give a shit." Kinlan almost missed his shot at Ned Kelly. When he was offered the part, after director Gregor Jordan spotted him in Billy Roche's On Such As We at the Abbey, he was contracted to do the second series of RTÉ's GAA drama, On Home Ground. Eventually, he was released to make the film, but it was a difficult time. "It was like giving candy to a baby and then taking it away again. I thought this chance might never come again." There is plenty to like about Ned Kelly. It does a good job of capturing the rugged, unwashed textures of 19th-century outback life and is ornamented with the big skies and the unforgiving terrain of the best westerns. But its principal virtues are to be found in the performances. Heath Ledger is a fine hero and Kinlan, Orlando Bloom and Philip Barantini all do good work as the other members of the gang.
"It was the best experience I have ever had," he says. "How could it not be? Firing guns and riding horses. You could not pay for that. We spent all day of every day together. We went go-karting, we had meals together, went out on the piss. It really was a bunch of lads having a laugh together." Jordan, director of the controversial Buffalo Soldiers, decided to emphasise the Celtic roots of Kelly and his family. There are flavours of several Irish counties as well as hints of the emerging Australian accent in the characters' voices. "I would get these calls from the dialogue coach," he laughs.
"Do it this way. Do it that way. I'm Irish, I know how to do my own f--king accent." Kelly still divides Australians into those who view him as a freedom fighter and those who just see the outlaw."It's black and white with them. Two out of 10 can't stand him and the other eight love him."
Unsurprisingly there was great interest in the shoot. "We were all across every newspaper. The first day on set helicopters were landing trying to get the first photos of the Kelly gang. Mad things like that." The Halo Effect, with its modest budget, must have been a very different experience. How did the catering on Daly's urban drama compare with that on Ned Kelly? He laughs. "In Australia it was all spread out under this massive tent whereas here it was from a truck. But, you know, I preferred the truck." They haven't spoiled him yet.
