An American World War 2 pilot, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, a Tudor detective doing King Henry VIII’s bidding and a real life IRA bomber.

Those are the roles being played this year by Anthony Boyle, the 29-year-old West Belfast actor who’s snapping hard at Paul Mescal, Ruth Negga, Andrew Scott, Cillian Murphy and Saoirse Ronan’s award-winning heels.

His respective turns as Major Harry Crosby, John Wilkes Booth, Jack Barack and Brendan Hughes demonstrate not only a refusal to be typecast, but also the willingness to take risks with his career.

I mean, what if he didn’t fill Jack Barack’s codpiece (he does) or fell off John Wilkes Booth’s galloping horse (he doesn’t)? As mentioned in the last issue of Hot Press, Anthony is a near neighbour of The Dry and The Lovers star Róisín Gallagher and regularly runs into the Kneecap boys when he’s back home. I was lucky enough to see their film the other day. Has Anthony been similarly blessed?”

“No,” he rues, “is it any good?” Absolutely fan-fucking-tastic. It’s funny, it’s moving and – perhaps most importantly of all – it’s intelligent.

“All their stuff is,” Anthony nods. “I know the guys and they’re all sound. I love their music, I love their message. DJ Próvaí, who’s a former teacher, is especially funny. “They’ll probably end up winning an Oscar for Best International film or something equally mad. I’m really excited to see the movie.” Does Anthony have cúpla focail?

“No, I wish I did. I spoke it a bit as a kid with my grandfather and then, when he passed, I think it was a bit too painful for me and the rest of the family. Some people learned Japanese during lockdown, I should’ve done Irish.”

I wonder if DJ Próvaí gives grinds? Asked where he hung out growing up in West Belfast, Anthony shoots back, “All the wrong places! We used to drink on the Twinbrook Pitches; that’s where we would’ve been on Friday and Saturday night. When we were allowed into bars, it would have been Madden’s and Kelly’s. We used to go to these terrible places like The Beach Club, which is a Nando’s now, and Box in the Odyssey, which was pure madness. I was in the Odyssey the other day for something and almost wanted to have a quadruple double vodka and Red Bull to commemorate it. Just stand outside and cry!”

Was there a regular cinema he went to – and was there a ‘eureka!’ moment that made him want to be actor himself?

“Yeah, Curley’s just up from the Falls Road where I saw most of my films as a kid,” Anthony reminisces. “I don’t know if I ever had a ‘eureka!’ moment in the cinema but I do remember staying up late and watching things like Bronson, Quadrophenia and This Is England. Everybody else would be asleep and I’d think, ‘How can I be in that?’ Those sort of films spoke to me and I connected with them in a big way. The likes of Ken Loach and Shane Meadows gave me a whole new window on the world. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is another one that totally consumed me.”

Like your humble correspondent, Anthony’s education came to a somewhat premature conclusion.

“What did you do wrong?” he asks gleefully. Let’s just say it was a pharmaceutical matter.

Why was Anthony expelled?

“Just a lot of misbehaving. Probably the only thing I’ve ever found discipline and a routine in is acting. I don’t really have that in my day to day life, but acting gives me a sort of laser focus. If I need to learn how to ride a horse for a role or an accent or whatever, I can lock-in and hours pass without me realising it.”

Talking of accents, his New Dakota one in Masters Of The Air is spot on. The most-watched show in Apple TV+ history, its fan club includes my 95-year-old mum who as a girl lived next-door to the airfield in East Anglia where Major Crosby and the rest of the 100th Bomb Group were based and says that its depiction of real life events is spookily accurate.

Anthony Boyle in Masters of the Air

“It means a lot that we’ve got your mum’s seal of approval because, like those guys, she lived through it and knows what she’s talking about,” says a genuinely delighted Boyle. “It was an absolutely massive production and made me think, ‘Fuck, what would I have been like, aged 19 or 20 going up there in these tin cans with a 77% chance of not making it back or being wounded?’ These kids were putting their lives on the line every single day.”

So much so that my mum and her two older sisters gave some of these brave American boys what they called ‘comfort’.

“Aw, that’s brilliant,” Anthony laughs. “I’d have been looking for comfort too in that situation!”

Filming hadn’t even commenced when Masters Of The Air executive producer, Tom Hanks, marched up to Boyle and told how much he admired his work.

“That was a little bit of a shock,” he deadpans. “It’s very flattering when those sort of people not only give you their seal of approval, but also actively want to work with you. He was shooting The Fablemans in America at the time so wasn’t on set, but Steven Spielberg was heavily involved in the script and the production of the show, which is another of those career boxes ticked!”

I know that CGI does a lot of the heavy lifting these days, but nevertheless Masters Of The Air must have been a bit of a physical challenge.

“Yeah, particularly the scenes in the plane where we were 50 feet up in the air on these electronic gimbles and getting bashed about. The bruises were real, man!”

It was Anthony’s first time appearing with both Barry Keoghan and Austin Butler who was also sorts of wonderful in Baz Luhrman’s Elvis.

“Barry’s one of the best actors working at the minute,” he declares. “He’s got great presence, great energy. Austin was fantastic to work with too. He has that Paul Newman quality about him – a proper old school movie star.”

Having started out as a seventeen-year old in theatre, Boyle’s big TV brake came in 2014 when he landed a bit part in the fourth season of Games Of Thrones. If you fancy freeze-framing your way through it to see him as a Bolton Guard, the episode is called The Laws Of Gods And Men.

“I’d just done my first two days of drama school when I flew back to shoot it,” he recalls. “I got picked up in a big Merc and my whole family and street came out to wave me off to the hills of Hollywood… which were actually in fucking Strabane! I only had a couple of lines, after which Gemma Whelan’s character Yara Greyjoy slit my throat. They wanted me to do a northern English accent but I couldn’t, so I’m the only cockney person in Westeros. Despite all of that, it was my first big movie set and a great reminder when I went back to drama school of what I was working towards.”

Two years after Game Of Thrones, Anthony made his London West End bow as Scorpius Malfoy in Harry Potter And The Cursed Child, which won a record-breaking nine awards including a coveted Laurence Olivier statuette.

“It was a laugh, man,” he beams. “You had forty-two actors on stage and, because it was Harry Potter, some hysteria around it. The word I’d use is ‘mayhem!’ I left my drama school a year early and moved to London. I got a phone call around Christmas time saying I was going to be in it, picked up a twig in the garden and went up to my dad and said, ‘Expelli-fucking-armus!’ and he was like, ‘You’re joking? You got it, you got it!’ So we were jumping round the kitchen having the craic. We also went to Broadway with it, which was a whole other crazy experience.” Where, I think I’m right in saying, he was nominated for a Tony Award.

“Yeah, I was, and went with my brother to the awards ceremony, where we got fucked up; we were steaming!” Anthony winces. “The next day we were on our balcony in Manhattan having Pot Noodles and our kid says to me, ‘Look, you got nominated and this guy Nathan Lane won but no one gives a fuck, no one’s going to remember this tomorrow.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, you’re right’, turned round and saw them putting an 80ft poster up of ‘Nathan Lane, Tony Winner’. There was some grim poetry in that!”

There was more grim poetry when Anthony thought he was going to be starring alongside Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney as the young Ian Paisley in The Journey but “ended up on the fucking cutting-room floor. “I was actually doing promo for it – ‘Yeah, I’m playing Ian Paisley, what a challenge…’ – when I got the phone call going, ‘By the way, you’re not going to be in it,” Anthony expands. “I was like, ‘For fuck’s sake, man!’ This interview’s got off to a great start with all my failures. Next you’ll be telling me my girlfriend’s breaking up with me. Pile on the agony!”

We touched earlier on Boyle’s equestrian talents, which were required for his role as John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt.

“I’d never been on horseback till that job,” he reveals. “I turned up at this sort of cowboy camp in Savannah, Georgia in the middle of a particularly sweltering summer and had to learn pretty quickly.”

Was it him perilously leaping from Abraham Lincoln’s box on to the Ford’s Theater stage or a stunt double?

“You’ve got fucking harnesses and stuff but, yeah, it’s me. That whole sequence in the theatre – which is the most famous bit of the assassination story – was really cool to do. Two thousand extras screaming at you, ‘He shot the President!’ It’s kind of surreal. “I’m also very proud of the fact that in 70% of the scenes it’s my own moustache and not a faker. I had three months to grow it after Masters Of The Air finished, so along with reading books and watching documentaries that was part of my prep for Manhunt.”

Did he feel any affinity with Wilkes Booth who, like him, was in his late twenties and an actor when he tried to alter the course of American history. “No, no, no,” Anthony stresses. “The similarities stop with the acting, the cowboy boots and the moustache. He was a narcissistic racist arsehole… and I’m just a narcissist. No, I’m joking! He was a dick and I wouldn’t like to think I share too many qualities with him.”

As the series unfolds, we get a better understanding of why Booth pulled the trigger that fateful April 1865 night.

“It was before the industrial revolution, so America was built on slavery,” Boyle notes. “Booth felt that to end it was madness and would run the country into the ground.”

Another big Apple TV+ ratings-grabber, Manhunt also features the considerable acting talents of Tobias Menzies, Lovie Simone and Hamish Linklater, has Bryce Dessner from The National supplying the score and is every bit as binge-worthy as Masters Of The Air.

In between being a World War II flying ace and a narcissistic what-have-you, Anthony also found time to zip off to Hungary, Romania and Austria for the filming of Shardlake, which has just landed on Disney+. “It’s a four-part whodunnit set in the 1500s, which finds Sherlake and Jack Barack going to a monastery to investigate the murder of a monk,” he explains. “It doesn’t sound very exciting but, I promise you, it is!

“Sean Bean, a great guy and the sort of actor you want to emulate, plays King Henry VIII’s henchman, Thomas Cromwell, in it with considerable relish.”

Anthony Boyle in Shardlake

What’s the process involved in Anthony deciding to take a role?

“If they think it’s something I might be interested in, my agent sends me the script, which I read and then, if I like it, I’ll check out the director and the cast involved. Sometimes it’s a character that makes you go, ‘Jesus Christ, I have to play them’, other times it’s the story.

“Shardlake was a bit of both – I really liked the murder-mystery element of the script, which is a bit Sherlock-ish,” he continues. “I’d just done two things where I’d played real people in intense dramas and this felt lighter and more fantastical. There’s also a love story element with Ruby Ashbourne Serkis and I, which also felt different to what I’ve done before and, of course, Sean Bean was attached, as was Arthur Hughes who I’d seen in a play and thought was great. Justin Chadwick, the director, had previously done The Other Boleyn Girl, so he understood that world.

“Funnily enough, what sealed the deal was Justin saying to me, ‘I don’t want it to feel like a period drama, I want it to feel like The Sopranos.’ Then day one I’m up this fucking hill in Budapest freezing, wearing tights and a codpiece. I thought, ‘I don’t feel like Christopher Moltisanti at this minute!’”

If it’s any consolation to him, Anthony comprehensively fills that codpiece.

“Put that in writing: ‘Anthony Boyle fills his codpiece.’ That’s your fucking headline!” Is Jack Barack the sort of person you’d go for a pint with?

“Absolutely, he’s cocky Jack The Lad guy who meets your mum and says, ‘I didn’t know you had another sister.’ He’s the direct antithesis to Shardlake who’s hunchbacked and all about the rules.”

Did he remember King Henry VIII and all that head chopping-off malarkey from school?

“I don’t remember anything from school!”

The TV series is based on Scottish writer C.J. Sansom’s six Shardlake novels, which have a fervent cult following. Is Boyle nervous about living up to their nerdy expectations?

“If they like it they like it, if they don’t they don’t,” Anthony reasons. “When I’m filming I’m not thinking about the audience or the end product. I’m just thinking about the person in front of me and telling my truth. I hope people like it. One of the producers told me they’d been looking at the online community you’re referring to enjoying the trailer.

“Here’s a strange one for you – my grandad passed in and around the time I was offered the role, and when my dad was cleaning out the house he found the Shardlake books in his room. I thought that was a sort of cosmic nod to me being on the right path. It was the cyclical nature of the universe that he’s read those books and then, when he died, I was stepping into the world he’d imagined.”

If at this juncture you’re not dabbing your eyes with a hankie, you’ve ice in your veins.

The horsey skills he acquired doing Manhunt must have come in handy for Shardlake and Jack Barack's  riding through the marshlands.

“They were impressed when I said I could ride, but then I realised I’d learned in Savannah which was western cowboy as opposed to Tudor English, which is a completely different system. Anyway, I’ve now broadened my riding portfolio and am only taking jobs where horses are involved! If Scorsese calls and wants me to do a drama without a horse in it, I’ll have to say, ‘No.’”

Will he have a sneaky look online to see what the reaction to Shardlake is? “No, that way madness lies,” he warns. “I used to read reviews and google myself when I was younger and doing theatre, but I don’t think it’s healthy. As you get older, you’re like, ‘Fuck it, I’ve done it, it’s out there’ and move on to the next thing.”

Can he tell within a day or two of being on set whether the finished film or series is going to be good?

“Sometimes you can give a real truthful performance; you’re cooking with gas and it feels amazing and then somewhere along the line with the director or the edit it gets messed up,” Anthony explains. “Other times you give a performance that isn’t exactly moving mountains and then you watch the edit and think, ‘Fuck, that looks alright!’

“If you’re on stage you’re in control of the pace, the tone, the setting, but TV is a director’s medium. So, no, you can never really tell until you see the finished thing.” When did he get to see Shardlake with all the CGI – Tudor London looks stunning by the way – and music added?

“A couple of months ago. Me and Arthur had a couple of pints in some recording studio, watched all four episodes on the bounce and then spilled out arm-in-arm into Soho thinking, ‘This is a good show!’ It’s moments like that which you remember as an actor.”

After clocking up serious air miles jetting around the world for roles, Anthony got to spend a decent chunk of time at home in Belfast recently when he played convicted IRA bomber Brendan Hughes in FX min-series Say Nothing.

Set in 1972, it starts with the disappearance of Jean McConville and finds him rubbing actorly shoulders with Maxine Peake, Lola Petticrew and Josh Finan.

“We wrapped it two months ago and it was amazing, man,” Anthony enthuses. “I went to an all girls’ school on the Falls Road for two years – there were ten boys and two thousand girls. Awful, right? When I came out, I’d drive home past a mural of Brendan Hughes so it was surreal to play him.”

Hughes, who died in 2008, joined the IRA in 1969 and was the operational commander of the Bloody Friday bombings in Belfast which killed nine people. After similarly masterminding the Old Bailey bombing in London, he was interned in 1974 in Long Kesh but managed to escape in a dustcart, later being recaptured and sent to the H-Blocks where he organised the 1980 hunger strike.

“Usually when you’re playing people you have to imagine what they’re like, but not this time because I’ve walked the same streets as Brendan and know members of his family. It felt like it wasn’t much of a reach. Even so, I read Voices From The Grave and other books about him. There’s lots of news bulletin footage of Brendan speaking and eye-witness accounts of his time in the H-Blocks. I did a real deep dive into his life.”

Talking to the likes of Richard Dormer, Lisa McGee, Róisín Gallagher and Colm Meaney, they all say they feel a responsibility to get it right when they’re appearing in TV shows and films about the North. Indeed, Colm once apologised to Hot Press readers for appearing in a film called A Belfast Story, which got into trouble for its balaclava and imitation nail-bomb press-kit.

“Yeah, you totally want to make sure it’s representing things properly,” Anthony agrees. “I’d spent my whole career up to this point avoiding stuff set back home because it’s so sensitive. This is a history where brothers have killed each other over which splinter group they’re going to pledge allegiance to. You have to get these stories right. I’ve seen the first two episodes of Say Nothing and it feels like the show I wanted to make. I really hope people respond to it.”

My FX spies tell me that Maxine Peake plays an absolute blinder in it. “Maxine’s a phenomenal actor, a real powerhouse. She’s one of those people that you watch in those Ken Loach/Shane Meadows sort of dramas and go, ‘Wow, they care about it.’”

On a somewhat lighter note, Anthony got to play the boy, David Donnelly, that Erin had serious designs on in season one of Derry Girls.

“I was there last week watching Derry play Dublin. I did a couple of scenes in that, in and out and it was great craic. I love those girls, they’re fucking fantastic; Michael Lennox, the brilliant director, was also in charge of Say Nothing; and Lisa McGee is deserving of all the writer’s awards she’s got for it. I haven’t worked with any of the girls since, but from time to time I see them socially and get to hear about the incredible things they’re doing like Bridgerton.”

Anthony has already mentioned Barry Keoghan, Austin Butler, Sean Bean and Tom Hanks as great people to work with, but who’s he learned the most from? “Carl Franklin, who was the director on the opening two episodes of Manhunt, was pretty special,” he concludes. “He also directed that Dahmer thing on Netflix. He won’t like me calling him this, but he’s an old guy who’s been at it a long time and just knows how to speak to actors. He was an actor himself and I learned a huge amount from him.”

• Masters Of The Air and Manhunt are on Apple TV+ while Shardlake is available for Disney+ bingeing

Read this interview ands more in our May edition of Hot Press: