Anthony Boyle: ‘My dad had to go to Gaelic training, and the same British soldier would throw his kit in a puddle every day’

In his teens, the Belfast actor Anthony Boyle starred in some local ghost tours. “I was paid £50 a week to hide behind a Tesco in the town and come out and say, ‘I’m the ghost of Henry Joy McCracken.’ One time this girl walking past said, ‘Nah you’re not. You’re Anto Boyle.’”

With all the attention paid to young Irish actors recently, I feel like not enough has been paid to Boyle. This may be because, although he has been in a run of high-profile US and UK TV series, he has been remarkably adaptable and chameleonlike, usually hidden behind an accent and a period costume. He won an Olivier award and was nominated for a Tony for his role in the stage version of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. He was a young Jewish-American soldier in the HBO drama The Plot Against America. He’s a US airman in Masters of the Air, on Apple TV+. And he is John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, on the same streamer’s series Manhunt. He has also been in the movie Tetris (as Robert Maxwell’s son Kevin), is about to star in Shardlake, on Disney+, and will soon appear as an IRA leader in the upcoming television adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book Say Nothing, about the abduction and murder of Jean McConville in 1972.

[ Patrick Radden Keefe: ‘Gerry Adams is sort of similar to the Sacklers, in that he seems to sleep quite well at night’ ]

Boyle has his own theories about where his acting skills came from. As a child he suffered with a bone condition that left him using a wheelchair for several years. As his friends and siblings played out on the street, he would make up dialogue for them as he watched from the window. “The Jesuit priests say, ‘Show me the boy for the first eight years and I’ll show you the man.’ Having to be on the outside of everything for a lot of time meant that, when the time came that I could participate, I was, like, ‘F*** it, I’m going to grab everything with both hands.’”

Does he really think that’s where it all started? “It comes from a whole host of things,” he says. “I remember reading Seamus Heaney’s Midterm Break when I was about 13, and I was so moved by the work and wanted to be in the poem.” He recites the closing lines: “‘No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear. A four-foot box, a foot for every year.’ I read that as a kid and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was really profoundly affected by art, paintings, films or poems ... It really stuck with me and moved me, and I wanted to be in the middle of it.”

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Boyle’s parents had “normal-people jobs”, his mother a receptionist and his father in security. His grandad painted, but for the most part the family’s lives orbited the GAA club, not galleries and theatres. He was not a diligent student. When he was 16 he was expelled from one school and moved to another. That was a turning point. He started looking for acting jobs. He got wise advice from a local acting hero, Jonjo O’Neill – “Every time I see him I buy him a pint” – and took part in the aforementioned ghost tours and in all sorts of amateur drama. “I did Romeo and Juliet, this thing set on a chessboard, with Lola Petticrew, a great actor from Belfast, as Juliet ... Four people came to see it. Three of them left.’”

Even then Boyle loved acting. “Without getting too philosophical or wanky about it, there’s something about your body being an instrument,” he says. “If you’re doing it right, you’re not Anto in the moment, you’re whoever you’re playing. The captain on the bridge” – he points to his head – “gets quieter and quieter. And the quieter he gets, the more exciting it is. [Another actor] comes in and goes a different way and all the atoms in the room are fizzing.”

Did he get that feeling from the very start? He nods. “You felt like you were a bell being rung.”

Eventually, an acting teacher, Patricia Logue, saw him in a play and encouraged him to go to the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama. While there he was cast in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which went from the West End to Broadway. There he was seen by the casting director Alexa Fogel, who “wanted me, for some reason, to play an American Jewish 1940s soldier”. That was for The Plot against America, created by David Simon, based on the Philip Roth novel. He loved that part. “The producers of Masters of the Air, the producers of Manhunt, they all saw that.” He laughs. “Only about 300 people saw it, but it was the right 300 people.”

Why does Boyle keep getting cast in period dramas? “I think I’ve just got a very generic face, and if you squint you can see me look like anyone.” He adds, more seriously, “A lot of the stuff I’ve done is political, and I think part of that is probably growing up in Belfast, growing up in such a politically charged place where your postcode is a political act, where your name is a political act. Whether your name is William or Anthony defines whether you’re Catholic or Protestant ... I’m interested in this political work because it feels familiar.”

He asks if I’ve read Close to Home, Michael Magee’s novel about a young troubled working-class man from west Belfast. He loves that book. “Michael went to the same school as my brother ... I know every street name he talks about. He worked in Box nightclub. I worked in Box nightclub.” He laughs. “For a week. That book really, really spoke to me, an amazing novel. And his brother in it is called Anto, and I’m called Anto. It’s the first time I read a book with an Anto in it ... It succinctly talks about how we were sold this promise [of a better future] but we haven’t reaped any of those rewards ... The political system of green and orange politics, and the divisiveness, is getting us nowhere.”

The Plot against America focuses on a Jewish family who are marked out as second-class citizens as fascism rises in the United States. Did he draw on his own experience of coming from a place where identity is fraught? Not consciously, he says, but he adds: “David Simon said to me, ‘I think the reason why you connected with the text of this character is because you do come from a place like that, and you understand the fraughtness and the balance and the danger.’ It’s in the body language as opposed to cerebral pontification. In acting, so much of it is how you hold yourself.”

Fighting fascism is a recurring theme in Boyle’s TV roles. In Masters of the Air he plays the real-life airman Lieut Harry Crosby. “They had earmarked me for a different role, but when they sent me the script I just fell in love with Crosby ... He feels like he should be in a comedy movie from the 1990s. He’s anxious and throwing up on people. Then I got sent a clip of him speaking, and” – he slips into the accent – “he has this strange kind of rhythm in the way he spoke ... There are a few beautiful bits in the interview where he doesn’t know the camera’s recording, and he talks to the cameraman: ‘Is that good?’”

Boyle met Crosby’s family at the premiere. It was a strange and moving experience, he says. In Crosby’s final scene in Masters of Air he’s going back to the US to meet his newborn son for the first time; now Boyle was meeting that child in person, a 79-year-old man “handing me a whiskey”.

Manhunt is another show with a lot of contemporary resonances: John Wilkes Booth was a radicalised white supremacist. “I read a letter [Booth] wrote to a friend in 1863 which is basically a racist manifesto. He’s saying, ‘The black man is enslaving the white man in America.’ Crazy racist rhetoric. Then there was a mass shooting in America while we were filming, where a white guy went into a black neighbourhood and shot up a grocery store, and he had published a manifesto ... It was almost word for word the kind of racist, cancerous f***ing s**te that Booth was saying.”

They filmed in Savannah, Georgia. “There were statues of Confederates, of slavers, and people were protesting this. The restaurant beside us was called the Cotton House. Where I would go to horseride, just 10 minutes outside of the city, there were Confederate flags waving on doorsteps and in the back of cars.”

[ Manhunt review: All beard and no fun - this beautifully shot series is ultimately a missed opportunity ]

Boyle is always learning. He likes to observe actors on set just before the director calls action. “Some people are sat there punching themselves in the head [to get in character]. Other people are going, ‘Oh, I think I’ll have a bacon sandwich for lunch. No, actually, I’ll have a curry,’ and then the director says ‘Action’ and they’re crying about their dead wife.”

Where is he on that spectrum? He laughs. “A bit in the middle. Hitting myself in the head but also thinking about what I’ll have for dinner.”

How does it feel going from intensively pretending to be someone else to ... Boyle finishes the thought: “To intensively pretending to be Anto?” He talks about the muscles involved with speaking in an American accent and then proceeds to slip into one. “When you come back [to Belfast] you’ve got that Graeme McDowell, Van Morrison kind of thing. You sound like you’re halfway between Belfast and [the United States]. It takes about three or four days before I start getting more Belfast again.”

Boyle has an English accent for Shardlake, the new Disney show adapted from CJ Samson’s novels, about a crime-detecting lawyer working for Thomas Cromwell (who is played by Sean Bean). He thinks of it as “a Tudor buddy movie”. He plays the foil to Arthur Hughes’s Shardlake. “I’m wearing a codpiece, swashbuckling and cocky, and he’s a studious lawyer. They’re the direct antithesis to each other ... I wanted to try something a bit more light-hearted that wasn’t a political thing. It’s a great watch, really fun.”

The next role is a bit closer to home. In Say Nothing, the adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Troubles, he plays the IRA leader Brendan Hughes, whose nickname was The Dark. “We were filming in a studio in London, but the streets we were walking down were streets I’ve walked my whole life. I went to [school at] St Louise’s, down the Falls Road, and 30 seconds down the street there’s a mural of The Dark, of Brendan Hughes.”

What was it like to enter that world? “I’ve only ever seen the streets of Belfast look like a war zone in documentaries,” says Boyle. “So the set was like the streets of Belfast, with the Saracens [armoured vehicles] and the rubble. I sent a video to my mum and dad, and they felt very emotional. It was a sobering thing ... If I’m on a set, I’m at work. And they’re, like, ‘Jesus Christ, it was like that. Remember that we couldn’t get a car down the street. Remember the burned-out buses.’ Suddenly, I was going, ‘Oh, this real.’

“There are scenes where they’re being searched by British soldiers ... My dad had to walk up and down going to Gaelic training, and the same British soldier would pull out his kit and would throw it in a puddle every day.” Did it help him understand what his dad had experienced? “No, because you’re an actor on a movie set, [but] there’s some sort of connective tissue. I felt like him in that moment.”

What was it like using his own accent for a change? “Josh Zetumer [the showrunner] let us be very free with the wording of things. If [the script] said something like, ‘Come on guys, let’s leave,’ we’d go, ‘Yo, get the f*** out.’ He’s an amazing writer. He got the Belfast dialect so well ... There was a scene where I’m robbing a bank, and the actor has glasses on. And I said, ‘Give me the money, ye speccy bastard.’ And [Josh] was, like, ‘What did you call him, a speaky bastard..? Because he was speaking so much?’ ‘No, speccy’. ‘Speccy! Spectacles! Brilliant! It’s in the picture!’”

Boyle goes back to Belfast whenever he can. His parents are proud of him, he says; they always encouraged him. Just the day before we talk, he was walking the Mourne Mountains with friends, followed by a few pints of Guinness (“a perfect Irish day”). He has only recently started to be recognised when he goes home (if you don’t count the ghost-tour incident). “I had a taxi man the other day go, ‘Are you that wee actor from here?’ I go, ‘Yeah’, and, he says, ‘You were in that wee Game Boy film?’ I said, ‘Game Boy film? Oh, you mean Tetris?’ And he says, ‘Aye, that was f***ing powerful.’”

Shardlake is available on Disney+ from Wednesday, May 1st