Young Offenders star Alex Murphy: ‘For Roy Keane to be eager to be on the show was just mad’

It was the best summer of Alex Murphy’s life. He was 17 and had been cast in a microbudget independent movie about two scamps from the northside of Cork city who cycle all the way to Mizen Head in the hope of recovering a €7 million cocaine stash that had washed ashore. Murphy had never acted professionally and had no idea that the film he was making, an irreverent comedy called The Young Offenders, would change everything for him.

“It was guerrilla film-making,” he say. To get one of the shots a cameraman was “leaning out of the back of open boots driving down the road, filming me cycling. There were definitely no stunt doubles, except for one guy going down Patrick’s Hill who wasn’t me. We were never given any expectations.”

Eight years later The Young Offenders has become an unlikely phenomenon – in Ireland but also in Britain, where a BBC spin-off of the film returns on Friday evening for its fourth season. It reunites Murphy, playing the potty-mouthed teenager Conor MacSweeney, with Chris Walley as his best pal, Jock O’Keeffe.

“It has a primetime slot on BBC One, so they obviously have faith,” says Murphy. “And the numbers are there, which is another mad reason to be so proud of it. It’s this show in Cork, a very local show – the show doesn’t talk about the outside world a whole lot; it’s very localised. To think that the bigwigs in London are happy to put it on their UK primetime slot is great. I can’t get over it.”

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The Young Offenders is like nothing else on TV, its unlikely blend of knockabout comedy and social realism landing halfway between Looney Tunes and Ken Loach. The new series maintains the ribald humour that was a feature of the original film. Still, while the chortles are perhaps an acquired taste – fans of slapstick will enjoy them – underneath the gags, Peter Foott’s script draws a moving portrait of friendship and male vulnerability.

“There is a lot of trauma involved,” says Murphy. “Conor’s dad died when he was young – but not too young to forget. He’s living with his single mum. Máiréad” – played by Hilary Rose, Foott’s wife – “never talks about her deceased husband. Jock grew up in an alcoholic household. That’s underneath everything they do. They wear these tracksuits as armour. They always end up doing things because home isn’t the nicest environment. They’re tough, but it comes out in other ways – those moments where Conor gets upset. That’s what Peter is good at. You see behind the mask: they aren’t just horrible young fellas. They’ve been through a lot.”

Cork rarely gets a look in on Irish television. But when the Young Offenders movie became an international success on Netflix, BBC took a chance and commissioned a series from Foott, who had written and directed the film. The show’s ratings have been impressive, hence its promotion from the more niche BBC Three to the mainstream BBC One. That success has been fuelled by ecstatic reviews. The Guardian has called The Young Offenders a “delightful, if coarse, rites-of-passage” comedy; the New Statesman heralded the “daft slapstick, toilet humour ... and tenderness”.

“The Young Offenders is broad, escapade-based, working-class sitcom of the sort that we don’t get enough of any more,” says Michael Hogan, London-based TV critic for the Telegraph and the Guardian. “Sure, it’s very Cork-specific, but geographical and cultural specificity often enhances comedy. Look at the success of those two other Irish exports Mrs Brown’s Boys and Derry Girls.

“Besides, the scrapes the boys get into are universal. They’re in the tradition of hapless double acts like Laurel and Hardy or Bottom’s Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson. Even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, if you want to get pretentious about it. It’s also full of heart, which doesn’t hurt. Everyone loves an underdog, right?”

Murphy is from Rochestown, on the south side of Cork city (not far from Ballintemple, where Cillian Murphy grew up). He had dreamed of working in film or TV. As nobody in his family was involved in the industry, it seemed a far-fetched ambition. But shortly after leaving school he was invited to audition for an unnamed project. With nothing to lose, he gave it a go.

“I heard some company was looking for two Cork lads to send in videos talking about themselves for five minutes,” he says. “Five minutes is a long time to talk about yourself – but I was adamant, and somewhere on an old iPad is a video of 17-year-old me talking about myself. Looking back, they wanted to see improv skills, charisma and are you nice – are you a bit of craic? Then I was asked to go in, and that’s where I met Chris, Peter and Hilary. We really just hit it off from day one.”

If season four of The Young Offenders doesn’t reinvent the formula, there are one or two intriguing twists. It also features some notable guests, including Pat Shortt and the writer and comedian Pat Fitzpatrick, who is perhaps best known for his Cork southside alter ego Reggie, Blackrock Road. The big talking point, though, is that it will be on the BBC long before it reaches RTÉ: as part of its post Tubsgate cost-cutting, the national broadcaster has pushed back its transmission of the series until 2025, despite being a co-producer. Cork, in all its glory, will feature on British television a year before it reaches Ireland, which Murphy feels is a shame.

“I’m happy a lot of people here have BBC,” he says. “I’m not in the room. I don’t make those decisions.”

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Much of what we see on screen is improvisation, he says. As with Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, the actors are given the outline of a scene, then invited to fill in the blanks. Some of The Young Offenders’ funniest exchanges are conjured on the spot.

“We always shoot what’s on the page. The story is there. If we have time, which we always do, we’ll go, ‘No, shoot the scene again, but in your own words.’ It’s a nice collaborative effort. Or sometimes, if the scene ends, the camera keeps rolling. A lot of the funniest stuff is what people say at the end. Awkward moments. Conor is just no good at social scenarios. He doesn’t know what to say. He always messes things up. That’s a joy and fun to play.”

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Working-class life in Cork city has been largely unexplored since the short stories of Frank O’Connor, the Chekhov of Shandon Street. There was the Trainspottingesque novel, The Glorious Heresies, by Lisa McInerney, and The Young Offenders, and that’s about it. Does Murphy feels responsibility to accurately portray Cork’s northside?

“The comedy comes from the scenarios that these people get themselves in. You could put it anywhere. It could be any class getting into those problems. They are such heightened scenarios. Conor and Jock want to make money. They hear that a tuna is worth a million. They try to get tuna,” he says, referring to one of the storylines from the first series. “There’s nothing working class about that story. These characters are doing these things. Your job is to sit back and watch the madness unfold.”

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Murphy finished filming season four a year ago and is looking forward to seeing how it has translated to the screen. He has since completed an Irish-language thriller in Donegal. But for many viewers his most prominent role outside of The Young Offenders will have been Lenny Abrahamson’s 2022 adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Conversation with Friends, in which he played Philip, platonic best friend of Alison Oliver’s Frances. It was, he says, a case of art imitating life, as he and Oliver are both Corkonians and have known one another since they were teenagers.

“That was a great gig. Lenny Abrahamson was a dream to work with. It was nice [and] it was intimidating. I’ve done loads of screen work. Most of it was with The Young Offenders. That’s all the same crew and stuff every time. So to go on set and I’m not the head honcho, it’s a new environment.”

Conversations with Friends was a learning curve, he says. “It was shot on film. Everything took a lot longer. It not being a comedy – but I never look at Young Offenders as a comedy. I grew up with Alison. We’d go to discos and stuff and hang out. We had a nice moments on set of just ... ‘Can you believe this? Look at us. This is great.’”

If you’re trying to compare Conversations with Friends to a completely different book ... It’s not even a sequel or anything

Conservations with Friends was a rare miss for Abrahamson and Rooney, an executive producer. Many viewers seem to have been turned off by the lead performance of Joe Alwyn and disappointed that the series failed to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle spark of the Rooney and Abrahamson previous collaboration, on Normal People. Murphy wonders if the critics didn’t have unrealistic expectations.

“If you’re trying to compare it to a completely different book ... It’s not even a sequel or anything,” he says. “I always felt it was a pointless comparison. But I enjoyed it.”

He’s also continuing to enjoy The Young Offenders, which has given him a trove of memories. One that stands out was the cameo in season two by the Cork soccer star Roy Keane – a northside icon just like Conor and Jock.

“For one of Cork’s sporting legends to be eager to be on the show was just mad,” says Murphy. “My dad and my mother and brother were on set that day because they wanted to meet Roy. He was a very pleasant man. He made a nice comparison where he said that when he was playing he was at the top of his game and that it was nice to work with people like myself, Chris and Hilary who are currently at the top of their game. It was appreciated.”

The Young Offenders season four starts on BBC One on Friday, May 10th, at 9.30pm