Cork actor Éanna Hardwicke: ‘There is a shift. Young men are more open’

Éanna Hardwicke is on a roll. When I last chatted to the Corkman, just before Christmas, he was still processing the acclaim for his role as a manipulative fraudster in the BBC TV series The Sixth Commandment. His engines were burning fiercely. He had been to Cannes with Lorcan Finnegan’s Vivarium in 2019. He was part of the Normal People contingent a year later. In 2023 he won acclaim for his performance in Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney’s drama Lakelands. Look at him now with his bushy moustache and all.

“It’s for Chekhov!” he says.

Ah, yes. What did that playwright not quite say? If you hang a moustache over the fireplace in act one make sure it’s discharged by act five. Hardwicke is receiving raves for his performance opposite Nina Hoss in The Cherry Orchard at the Donmar Warehouse, in the West End of London. The production got five stars from the Guardian. “Éanna Hardwicke makes a brilliantly funny stage debut as the bookkeeper Epikhodov,” the New York Times said. Now we’re about to see him in Michael Kinirons’s excellent Irish film The Sparrow.

And there’s more. In March he received a Bafta nomination as best supporting actor for his performance in The Sixth Commandment. He couldn’t get past Matthew Macfadyen on the Succession juggernaut, but the nomination surely offered confirmation, if any more were needed, that he’d arrived.

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“It was an incredible day,” Hardwicke says. “I was rehearsing for The Cherry Orchard at the time. I turned my phone back on and had 50 messages or something like that. I didn’t realise the nominations were coming out. It was an incredible feeling. Maybe in flights of fancy, when you’re growing up, you think it’d be lovely to stand up at that stage one day. It would be nice to get that recognition. Then you go through phases of thinking that stuff doesn’t matter. But, as a recognition of something you’re really proud of, it’s a lovely feeling.”

It is worth pondering the success of that series, which is based on a real case. Hardwicke plays Ben Field, a conman who exploited and eventually murdered a mild-mannered teacher Peter Farquhar, in the Buckinghamshire village of Maids Moreton in 2015. Timothy Spall plays Farquhar. Sheila Hancock and Anne Reid are also among the cast. It is harrowing material, but The Sixth Commandment became appointment viewing when broadcast in July of last year. What was it that so captured audiences?

“I think it probably surprised people,” Hardwicke says. “Maybe the first step in getting any kind of emotional reaction – or a strong reaction – from audiences is to maybe present something in a way it hasn’t been presented before. So I think people watched something that was ostensibly about a crime but then became so much bigger than the cruel, horrendous actions of one man. It became a story about, in the face of all that, enduring love. About people in the face of the most horrendous grief, in a nightmare situation, still doing the right thing.”

The Bafta night must have been fun.

“It was an incredible ceremony – to be to be there with my mum and for the show to win best limited series and for Tim to win and speak as brilliantly as he did about this job,” he says. “If you haven’t seen the speech, he just speaks so well about how silly but sometimes brilliant this job is.”

Hardwicke’s rampaging visibility may have helped The Sparrow land a belated spot in cinemas. When the film opens here, next week, it will be almost exactly two years since it premiered, to many hoorahs, at Galway Film Fleadh. Winning best first Irish feature at that event, the film – like Lakelands, which also debuted at that Fleadh – addresses the stubborn pressures for young men to conform to ancient expectations of masculinity.

Ollie West plays the sensitive, shy son of an aggressive father in picturesque west Cork. Hardwicke is his more conformist, more swaggering brother. It would be giving too much away to reveal the fulcrum of the plot, but, though not the lead, Hardwicke’s character is a vital component of the film’s defining crisis.

“It is just really hard to get a cinematic release for a film,” he says of the delay. “Which is what most directors want. And this, in particular, doesn’t feel like a film that’s best suited to watch on your laptop or at home by yourself. It’s beautifully shot. And it kind of feels to me like it needs to be seen on a cinema screen.”

Hardwicke, as a proud son of Cork, is keen to stress that the landscape is a character in the film. The backgrounds are beautiful. But this also looks like a place where it would be easy to feel lonely. Perhaps there would be more obvious routes of escape for the oppressed protagonist in a busy city.

“I remember being really taken aback by the idea that I was actually talking to a director about doing a film in west Cork,” he says. “That’s not something I ever thought I’d get to do. Because I’ve spent half my life there. To feel that’s going to get its cinematic day in the sun was really wonderful and surprising. It was just a lovely turn in my own life and career. It had a really strong masculine identity. West Cork is extremely beautiful but also has a kind of weightiness to it. The landscape is beautiful, but you can feel it trapping you.”

I’m interested that both Lakelands, in which Hardwicke played a GAA player facing up to injury, and The Sparrow deal with old-fashioned notions of masculinity. Born in the mid-1990s, Hardwicke was educated at Ashton School in Cork before making his way to the Lir, the National Academy of Dramatic Art, in Dublin. This may be gross oversimplification, but his generation seems less confined by those gender stereotypes. They seem more open to blurring the boundaries.

“It’s always dangerous talking in a generalised way,” he says. “But I definitely feel from my own time in school that I didn’t feel those pressures. Maybe that was just who I was hanging around with, or where I happened to grow up or whatever. But, even a couple of years on, seeing my younger brother go through secondary school and becoming a man, I see even less of those pressures put upon him. There is a shift. Young men are more open.”

Hardwicke reminds me of conversations we had a few years ago about his role in Normal People. In that all-conquering adaptation of Sally Rooney’s second novel, he played a young man who, though life and soul of the party at school, stumbles in the outer world and ends up taking his own life. Both The Sparrow and Normal People have things to say about the consequences of mishandling psychological trauma.

“It just felt so true and well observed,” he says of Normal People. “If you hadn’t experienced it yourself, you knew someone who did, whether that was depression or suicidal ideation. It was something that was so prevalent in our culture that I just wanted to get it right. And to honour that. One of the great things to come from the show was that it’s been lovely to meet people who have said that story, in Sally’s novel and then the series, meant something to them. It rang out as being truthful. That’s the role of good storytelling, to show these things that are going on in society.”

As we speak, Hardwicke is still reeling from a Normal People revival. On June 16th the cast came together for a marathon screening, in aid of charity, at the Prince Charles cinema in Soho. Andrew Scott was there to MC. Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones were on stage to reminisce about a singular success. Who would have thought an adaptation of a literary novel would generate such a following?

“Normal People was such a private thing for people – in the cocoon of lockdown,” Hardwicke says. “All of that in the context of Covid. To watch it in a cinema full of people who are fans of the story was amazing. Because it was just a collective emotional experience. Yeah, it was really, really strange. It was great.”

It is, astonishingly, 15 years since Hardwicke first turned up on screen. Back in 2009 he had a juvenile role in Conor McPherson’s The Eclipse. Appearing opposite the likes of Ciarán Hinds proved an inspiring and formative experience. He continued to mess about in youth theatre throughout secondary school. That appearance in Vivarium, an unsettling horror film, made good – if uncharacteristic – use of his long frame as the sinister son of Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg. Since then he has solidified his reputation as a warm actor with an empathetic instinct. He got to play a young version of Stanley Townsend in the Isabelle Huppert film About Joan. The camera is accommodating to his sort of angular charm.

I wonder if The Cherry Orchard feels like a different job altogether. Today he will be getting himself in the right frame for another packed audience in an intimate space. That feels like a more pressurised business than the security of a film or television set.

“It’s so liberating to be on stage,” he says. “Because you’re not watching yourself. You’re in this brilliant flow where you get to follow your instincts. The ethos of Benedict Andrews, who directed it, the one thing he was really driven by, was creating a space where actors can connect and improvise every night. The idea that we’re taking Chekhov’s pretty-much perfect play and improvising with an open heart was what he wanted.”

People do tend to forget that Chekhov is funny.

“Really funny. Yeah. Epikhodov was, I suppose, traditionally a kind of vaudevillian comic figure. But he’s also a deeply tragic figure. The form allows you to really stretch as an actor in a way that, yes, you can definitely do on screen, but it’s maybe harder to come by.”

Hardwicke has a hush-hush film on the way. We meet in the middle of another exciting project that hasn’t quite gone public yet. We do know, however, that we will soon see him as a BBC producer in the TV series A Very Royal Scandal. The follow-up to A Very English Scandal, about the Jeremy Thorpe affair, and A Very British Scandal, about the Argyll divorce, stars Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew in the story of … well, you know what that’s about.

Smart, funny, big moustache, Éanna Hardwicke has the momentum with him. But he hasn’t forgotten his duty.

“Promoting The Sparrow. Got to get that plug in,” he says, laughing.

We’re happy to oblige.

The Sparrow is in cinemas from Friday, July 5th