Chris O’Dowd is on Zoom from London wearing that familiar, endearing smile and a shirt covered in pictures of dogs. When I wrongly assume his famously stylish wife, bestselling author Dawn O’Porter, must have chosen it for him, he corrects me and says: “I got it probably eight years ago, in Oxfam, I’m proud of this shirt.” The couple have been back in London – they married there in 2012 – for a year now, having spent most of the past decade based in West Hollywood. Dawn Porter changed her surname to O’Porter when they got married. They are parents to two boys, Valentine (10) and Art (8) O’Porter. It’s all “fart jokes and football” around their place, O’Dowd says, appearing wearily delighted by this turn of events. He misses LA – “I loved it there” – and expresses sadness and worry about the recent spate of wildfires; “it’s grim”. The family has settled well in London. Why the move?
“I think we just felt very disconnected, very far away, and parents were getting older and all that kind of jazz, so we just kind of made a run for it.” The move was eased by the fact that a number of friends from LA with children the same age as theirs returned to the city around the same time. “Friends such as ...?” I ask, thinking the Roscommon boy-turned Hollywood head might be referring to someone well known. “Louis Theroux, who is a f**king sweetheart,” he says.
When O’Dowd drops a name – and after nearly 10 years in LA he has some big names to drop – he still manages to sound like a lad from Boyle, who was once handy in the local GAA club, marvelling at his charmed and interesting life. When I mention the fact that Rick Astley and at least one Rolling Stone call his celeb-filled London neighbourhood home, I wonder if he’s seen them around. He hasn’t but the other day he bumped into Dublin comedian and fellow former UCD student Dara Ó Briain; they were both walking their dogs by the river near O’Dowd’s new house. We laugh about the head-turning sight that encounter would have made for any passing Irish person.
O’Dowd’s hit television show Moone Boy on Sky, a comedy largely, if loosely, based on his early 1990s childhood experiences in the town of Boyle where he was raised, was a huge hit when it was released in 2012. He hasn’t worked much in Ireland since. After studying in UCD – he was an active member of the dramsoc even if he never actually completed his politics and sociology degree – and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he did that iconic comic turn as snarky tech dude Roy Trennemanon in four seasons of Channel 4’s The IT crowd. That role led directly to his big break as a loveable, witty Irish cop in Hollywood blockbuster Bridesmaids in 2011 which resulted in regular roles stateside.
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He’s been busy in America ever since, as a bad boyfriend in Lena Dunham’s Girls, an annoying A&R man in Judd Appatow’s This is 40 and a taciturn chancer in Get Shorty. Along the way, he starred with James Franco in Of Mice and Men on Broadway, for which Whoopi Goldberg sent him fan mail. Unusually, he was able to hold on to his Roscommon accent for most of those gigs, including more recently in the Apple TV+ show The Big Door Prize. This saw him playing an Irish man in the fictional small Georgia town of Deerfield where a mysterious machine, Morpho, arrives at a local convenience store. The machine gives locals cards informing them of their true potential, which causes havoc in the town. The second season was released last year.
He’d been itching to do something at home again and his latest show for Sky is soon-to-be-released six-part comedy drama Small Town, Big Story, which he directs and writes. The series explores a theme O’Dowd returns to often in his work, namely the wacky carryings-on in small towns, this time in the fictional northwest, deeply rural village of Drumbán.
![Chris O'Dowd. 'When you’re away [from Ireland] you feel more like an onlooker ... but a lot of the social changes have been massively positive.' Photograph: Nicola Tree](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/36J7IMY72BHTBLNBYQES6GZRIE.JPG?auth=eda151215a5e682ed05f932a3edc365b7746447c9c37effc973364953aac6ab8&width=800&height=1199)
O’Dowd was deep in lockdown, making a Netflix film, Slumberland, in Toronto, when he wrote the show. With nothing else to do, he shut himself up in a room and the words flowed. It’s the story of a teenage girl, Wendy Patterson, from Drumbán, who makes it big in Hollywood as a TV producer. Twenty years later Wendy (Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks) returns to her home place to make a (truly terrible) TV series called I Am Celt, stirring up old ghosts and secrets from her past in the process. Without giving too much away there are also close encounters and alien undercurrents, but ultimately the show focuses on some of those recurring preoccupations in O’Dowd’s work – small town life, identity and what happens when our ideas of what is normal or respectable are challenged.
The show was partly inspired by The Visit by Friedrich Durrenmatt, “this mid-century European play about a woman who comes back to an industrial town that’s on its arse and says ‘I’m going to make everything better’ and all you have to do is kill the local grocer who treated me badly”.
“I thought it’s such a great set-up, the revenge story of somebody coming back, and I was looking to shoot something back around home again, because I haven’t done it since Moone Boy for no other reason than I just hadn’t really gotten around to it. They’re very different kinds of shows but the essence of them is very similar, both small towns where something slightly untoward is going on.”
The other more cosmic elements, he says, were born out of a need for escapism. “At the time [during Trump’s first presidency] everything felt so divisive, I thought that Covid was going to somehow be this – it sounds so foolish now, but in the very early days of it, do you remember there being this little glimmer of hope that Covid was going to be the thing that brings us all together?” He laughs at the naivety. “Then I went back to America and they were burning masks so that didn’t last long.”
He had Hendricks in mind for the lead from the start but no notion of how to persuade the Mad Men star or even how to contact her. Then one day his wife called and said “you’ll never guess who was in the kitchen today”. O’Porter had made a fashion-related connection with Hendricks and after O’Dowd went for dinner with her to pitch the show she was sold. Hendricks is also named as an executive producer and with her red hair and pale complexion, fits right in with the locals in Drumbán. Paddy Considine stars as Doctor Proctor, the local GP and pillar of the community, whose life is turned upside down by the return of Hendricks’s character.
The opening episode depicts the battle between two Irish towns to host the show as Hollywood descends on the country: it’s a battle between Drumbán and O’Dowd’s hometown of Boyle. Watching it you can’t help wondering how he got away with not setting the show in his hometown. “You see how much a big deal I had to make out [of] Boyle, to make it look amazing. I literally had to shoot a f**king tourist commercial for the place ... I was happy Boyle could be a bit of a character in the show.” The town does look delightful, in fairness.
Directorially, he had a specific look of a place in mind. He wanted the mythical looking mountains and the shimmering lakes around north Leitrim and south Fermanagh – “it’s so beautiful up there”, he says. And while Drumbán is supposed to be a border village in the northwest, most of the series was shot in Co Wicklow, all the better for the Twin Peaks, Nordic-inspired, forest visuals he favoured.
What themes did he want to explore? “It’s really people going through an identity crisis, like all of these people’s reputations or lives are about to be kind of changed in a fairly major way. You want them to be on the precipice. We talk a lot about The Crucible in the show, for example, which is entirely about reputation. Paddy Considine’s character, the doctor, has been kind of a pillar of the community. And something happened in the past that changes everything for him ... it’s the idea of the identity we give ourselves and how that can change at our own will or at somebody else’s will. That’s what all of these characters go through at a different point. They’re going through different changes in sexual identity, national identity, things are changing for them in terms of respect, reputation, fame.”
I can’t remember anybody in England who ever thought that Ireland was anything other than a great place and that they shouldn’t be anywhere near it. That’s the genuine truth. Nobody
— Chris O'Dowd
Eileen Walsh is another standout in the cast. She plays Catherine, Dr Proctor’s wife, a disgruntled secondary schoolteacher and wheelchair user. She has a lot of illicit, often hilarious, sex in the show. O’Dowd did his research beforehand.
“We went to talk to the right people. I told them, ‘this character, right, I want her to shag a lot.’ They said ‘that’s great, we’re never depicted like that’ so it was cool that she wasn’t a goody-goody, that she was unfaithful. This is not how we usually see those characters.”
David Rawle plays the son of Catherine and Dr Proctor, which is a gorgeous piece of casting considering he is the actor who played the lead in Moone Boy, now all grown up. “He has turned into a lovely actor and he was just perfect for the role,” says O’Dowd. “It felt really nice that he was on board. Like, we made him famous at 11. And we didn’t ruin him. I’m like, just so glad he’s normal.”
O’Dowd has spoken before about how his own childhood experiences shaped him; his parents separated when he was a teenager. At around that time his older brother moved out and he became the only boy in a house with three older sisters. “As a 15-year-old, I took on the behaviour of the man of the house. I was a child-man. That’s why I’ve played a lot of man-children,” he told an interviewer once.
He has an entertaining cameo in Small Town, Big Story as another of these “man-children”. He plays Jack E McCarthy, the writer of the fictional show at the centre of the story, I Am Celt, a dodgy Game of Thrones rip-off that allows Wendy’s (Hendricks’s) streaming company History With A Twist to take endless liberties with Irish mythology. “Lame of Thrones,” as one TV executive describes the finished product.
Having lived away for so long, I’m curious about how he feels about Ireland now. “When you’re away you feel more like an onlooker looking in, really ... but a lot of the social changes have been massively positive over the last few years, obviously, with the referendums and the collapse of the Catholic Church. All of that kind of stuff is probably positive for the welfare of the people.”
He’s not the religious type? “I think just, zealotry of any kind is kind of dangerous. I think that did happen to Ireland in many ways ... we talk about it in the show, in terms of Celtic history and what actually is our national identity. It’s hard to know sometimes. When people are like, ‘oh, there’s nothing more Irish than going to Mass’ I mean, I don’t know, man, there was 3,000 years of being Irish before the Mass.”
It’s history with a twist, just like the name of the American TV production company in Small Town, Big Story? “Sure, that’s what we’ve always had – history with a twist. Do you think anybody knows what British history is actually f**king like? Sure they wouldn’t be able to walk the streets without guilt. There’s no way. Our entire education system is history with a twist.”
I wonder if it concerns him that his sons are now being educated in that system. “It’s fine. The reality is, I can’t remember anybody in England who ever thought that Ireland was anything other than a great place and that they shouldn’t be anywhere near it. That’s the genuine truth. Nobody. I’ve never met a British person going ‘well, of course, we’re very fond of Northern Ireland’. They don’t give two sh**s.” He’s laughing now, an infectious giggle. “Ah, what am I supposed to say? I’m one of the luckiest people. It would be so churlish to be going around complaining.”
What’s next for O’Dowd? Last year, he filmed an episode of the hotly anticipated seventh season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, which will be out later this year. “I can’t say anything about it. They’re very secretive”.
He can talk more about the new Conor McPherson play he is set to star in on London’s West End with Brian Gleeson. The Brightening Air is set in 1980s Ireland and follows O’Dowd’s character Dermot as he returns to his family in Co Sligo with a hidden agenda. It occurred to the actor a couple of years ago that he’d never originated a role by a big writer. He had come across an old copy of Translations by Brian Friel a couple of years ago, “it first starred Liam Neeson way back, in his early 20s. I was doing something with him at the time and I said to him ‘there you are on the cover now, you originated the role in Translations’ and he was like ‘it’s good, aye’.” Soon, O’Dowd can add that to his long list of achievements.
Before he heads off, I return to the premise of his show The Big Door Prize, the question of living up to potential. Does he feel he is doing that? “Honestly, I always felt the premise made me quite depressed. The idea that something could be predestined or preordained for you makes the rest of it so redundant. So I don’t know if I’m living up to my potential, because I don’t know what that means really, but” – and that easy laugh again – “I’m definitely not. Like, you could always be doing more. But I have completely outlived my expectations.”
He says he is one of the luckiest people around but is his success not more down to talent and hard work than luck? “I do think it’s luck. I’ve worked hard but a lot of people do that and it doesn’t get them anywhere. So I think luck has to come into it. I’ve made some good decisions over the years, I suppose.”
What would he say was his best decision? “I feel like I generally kind of moved at the right time, or took the right job at the right time and turned down the wrong job at a time when everybody else was like, ‘you should be doing this’.” He feels he’s been good at “playing the long game”.
He’s been strategic? “Not necessarily. It’s more like I want to feel the value of something. I want to feel like I’m knocking off people in the right way, and then I think we’ll get good work. So it’s not careerist, it’s more, I want to have joy while I’m doing the work. And I think that that will come across to the audience, and that’s what they will hold on to.”
Small Town, Big Story airs on Sky from February 27th
