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South Side Story

En route to the Toronto Film Festival with Lenny Abrahamson’s film What Richard Did, a drama loosely based on the murder of Dublin teenager Brian Murphy outside Annabel’s nightclub, Irish actor Jack Reynor tells Roe McDermott about the personal, political and class-based themes of the film.

Roe McDermott, 13 Sep 2012

Though born in Colorado, Jack Reynor moved over to Ireland when he was two years old, living in Wicklow and later moved to Blackrock. Having received his first taste of fame at age six, when he landed a small part in the Kevin Liddy drama Country, Reynor found himself well and truly bitten by the acting bug. Now aged 20, the young actor has eschewed college to become a full-time actor, and has recently been making trips over to London and LA to see if there’s a market for his talent and good looks overseas. Not that it’s all glamour, Reynor asserts.

“It’s not particularly easy,” the actor says in a south county Dublin drawl. “It’s real feast or famine stuff. You spend a lot of your time sitting around on your arse waiting for a phone call. But it’s rewarding, I love it. There’s nothing else I’d want to do.”

This year at least seems to be a feast year, as Reynor appeared in Kirsten Sheridan’s critically acclaimed drama Dollhouse, and has taken the lead role in What Richard Did, the latest feature from celebrated Irish director Lenny Abrahamson (Adam & Paul, Garage.) The film is loosely based on Kevin Power’s novel Bad Day In Blackrock, which was in turn inspired by the murder of 18-year-old Brian Murphy outside Club Annabel in 2000. Reynor plays the titular Richard, a responsible, kind and confident young rugby player from an affluent background. Working intensively with Abrahamson on the script for many months, Reynor admits that the film became a very personal one, as the cast put a lot of themselves into the script.

“I love working with improv, we basically had no script with Dollhouse and I love that natural, ad-lib work – you can put so much of yourself into the role. And that’s the brilliant thing about working with Lenny, he trusts the people he works with so much and wants it to be a collaborative effort. So we invested a lot of experiences into it and things we knew about the society we’d grown up in. We invested a lot of ourselves into the film. In a way, I think that’s why it feels so natural.”



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