Fionn O’Shea on being cast as Samuel Beckett: ‘There was a moment of elation followed by crippling anxiety’

A sunny day in autumn. Dublin is looking its best as Fionn O’Shea, suave in round sunglasses, ambles into an experimentally named coffee shop. It took a bit of juggling to firm up the appointment. He is most often in London these days.

“I am a bit all over the place,” O’Shea says. “I was shooting in Cape Town for quite a while. I am basically living wherever I shoot. I am bouncing around different places. I am kind of everywhere.”

The open-faced young actor, sweet as Ned in the film Handsome Devil, sinister as Jamie in the TV hit Normal People, does indeed seem to be in the midst of a transporting cyclone. Last year he was in Budapest shooting a film that, if he will allow the facetiousness, looks to be engineered for the archetypal Irish Times reader. James Marsh’s Dance First builds a study of Samuel Beckett around memories interrogated after he accepts the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Gabriel Byrne is the older writer. Flashing back to lost-generation Paris, we find Aidan Gillen as a convincing James Joyce. O’Shea is excellent as the younger Beckett. Fraught with parents in Dublin. Inspired by Joyce in the French capital. Caught up with the French Resistance.

“It was a responsibility that was not lost on me,” O’Shea says. “When I first found out that James wanted me to do it, there was a moment of elation followed by crippling anxiety. In the meeting and audition process you’re not thinking beyond that. But then you find out: now, I actually have to do this – my idea of what I could do has to be realised for all these people.”

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O’Shea explains that he had to get past an “apocryphal” version of the writer. We extract one imagining of Beckett from the comic fatalism of plays such as Endgame and Waiting for Godot. We extract an overlapping one from the many still images – a few of which ended up pinned to the walls of student accommodation. Jane Bown’s famous 1976 photograph of Beckett outside the Royal Court Theatre, in London, ribs of polo neck at right angles to furrows in brow, is still the first impression that floats into many minds at the mention of his name. Serious. Intimidating. Aquiline.

“There is, of course, humour in his work,” O’Shea says. “But the imagery we have access to for the most part is saying: this is a morose man. Early on I read an interview with one of his close friends. He was talking about the imagery around him and how people view the lines on his face as those of a man who’s lived an anguished life. He was saying that those lines are more laughter lines than they are frown lines.”

Most viewers will approach this striking monochrome film with little idea how Beckett sounded. There is no requirement to put on an eccentric voice as, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toby Jones did when playing Truman Capote. Indeed, O’Shea, now a nimble 26, comes from the same sort of leafy South Dublin suburb that gave us Beckett. The writer was raised in Foxrock. The actor is from…

“Sandymount.”

Roughly the same manor? The same ’hood?

“Your words, not mine!”

We learn a bit about Beckett’s complex relationship with his mother, before the film takes us to Bohemian Paris. This take on Beckett clearly views Joyce as a creative inspiration. He has a testy relationship with the older author’s troubled daughter, Lucia (Gráinne Good). He squabbles with Joyce’s wife, Nora (a fine, waspy turn from Bronagh Gallagher). The relationship eventually chills. One senses Beckett’s later style being formed amid the family tumult.

“I don’t think he would have become the writer that he became without Joyce,” O’Shea says. “There is a massive Joycean influence on his work. I think working under Joyce helped him find his own voice. But, although the circumstances in which he fell out with Joyce weren’t ones he was hugely proud of, I think, for his writing, that distance in space was probably a good thing.”

What went on there?

“He had an extremely complicated relationship with pretty much every member of the Joyce family,” O’Shea explains. “He really disliked Nora Joyce.”

There are some great taut moments between O’Shea and Gallagher.

“I love Bronagh. But I think, in the biography, he called Nora Joyce ‘deathly boring’. I think those were the words that he used. And obviously his relationship with Lucia was a bit more complicated.”

Dance First allows O’Shea to add another weapon to a creative arsenal he has been building since juvenile years. As far back as 2007 he had a role in New Boy, Steph Green’s Oscar-nominated short film. He had ambitions to move on to adult work but got momentarily caught up in the dreaded “backup plan”. It is amusing to note how many earlier interviews dwell on his brief engagement with a business-studies course. What properly fixed his ambitions were a strong part opposite Jamie Dornan in the war film The Siege of Jadotville and the lead role in Handsome Devil, John Butler’s rugby-school dramedy. The world of high finance would have to do without him.

“It was such a short-lived university experience doing the business degree,” O’Shea says with a smile. “The only thing I learned was about the Henry Ford school of manufacturing. That had nothing to do with the teaching. Retrospectively, there was a youthful naivety. I thought initially I could do both. But that was impossible.”

Handsome Devil was greatly loved. O’Shea was charming as the amiable newcomer unnerved by institutional devotion to the oval ball at a posh Irish school. He admits that leading a feature film was daunting. But he says he feels more professional pressure now. In what sense?

“I think there was a conscious effort to protect me from what that pressure could do to me,” he says. “And now people don’t see me as a child. Back then the responsibility was relieved from me. That responsibility I now have to shoulder.”

He seems to have done all right with that. O’Shea was among a clutter of actors who profited from the unexpected success of Normal People during lockdown. He admits that, in Sally Rooney’s source novel, the character of Jamie was more physically imposing. But he convinced the directors he could find another, equally effective line on the abusive cad.

“Jamie in the book is not written like me at all,” O’Shea says. “He’s a big rugby player. Reading the book, I remember thinking, I know this is written so different physically to me, but I really think I could do something interesting. A lot of the people I encountered who were like him – the people who got away with that behaviour – were never the people who were physically imposing.”

We forget that the acclaim for the series all came online. People weren’t talking about it in pubs, because the pubs were closed. The water coolers were deserted. Rush-hour buses were scantily occupied.

“I did a big shop once a week,” O’Shea says. “So my only experience of who watched the show was the person who works in this shop. In that respect it was way too small a focus group. It was either going to be 100 per cent or zero per cent of people. That’s the only person that I was seeing”

His sample size was too limited?

“Yes. But once the sanctions were lifted, a second wave happened. You realised this was not just happening online. So I think there were two waves.”

At any rate, just as the careers of Paul Mescal, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Éanna Hardwicke were boosted, so too did Fionn O’Shea find himself kicked up the ladder. Early next year we can see him on Apple TV+ among a starry cast – Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, Callum Turner – in Masters of the Air, a US-air-force companion to Band of Brothers. The ongoing actors’ strike prohibits him mentioning that American show, but he can tell us about his admiration for Beckett.

When I was at university the author was still alive and (just about) writing. He died nearly two decades before O’Shea was born. Yet I get no sense he thinks of Beckett as someone from the dusty past.

“I always remember that when people talked about his work, or even when I experienced his work for the first time, it felt contemporary,” O’Shea says. “Given the way people talk about him now, it still feels like that.”

Dance First is on limited cinema release from Friday, November 3rd, and on Sky Cinema from Thursday, December 14th