Conor MacNeill: ‘The coolest moment was running around a pub shooting at Liam Neeson. It was badass’

Conor MacNeill has a glint in his eye as he recounts shooting the upcoming film In the Land of Saints and Sinners. “The coolest moment of my career was running around a pub in Donegal fighting and shooting at Liam Neeson. It was badass. If you’d asked me when I was a kid what actors do, it would be exactly that – running around shooting at Liam Neeson.”

Brawling with the godfather of action movies is some flex, even if this acting lark has seen the Belfast actor play everything from the city slicker Kenny Kilbane in the Sky drama Industry to a murder suspect in the critically acclaimed Sixth Commandment.

The film is one of many times we’ll see the 35-year-old on screen in the next few months, as he enters a purple patch in his 18-year acting career. “It’s been a steady, steady build for a few years now,” he says from his home in east London. “I’ve always had lovely roles, but they’re much more significant now.”

An age-old question: how much is down to luck and how much to hard work? “A bit of both, but I do believe in hard work. You see so many incredible actors, like Olivia Colman and Michael Shannon, come into their own later in their career – and then you realise they’ve appeared in so many projects throughout.”

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Even if you didn’t clock it at the time, any decent telly watcher will have seen him in The Fall, Derry Girls, Rebellion or Artemis Fowl. This upcoming run of appearances suggests a gathering of momentum. Besides In the Land of Saints and Sinners – which also features Ciarán Hinds, Kerry Condon, Colm Meaney, Niamh Cusack, Sarah Greene and Jack Gleeson – there’s another series of Industry in the works. He’ll also feature in the film Bring Them Down, alongside Barry Keoghan and Colm Meaney.

Before any of them there’s the second series of the BBC drama The Tourist. The first series, which was broadcast in January 2022, proved a corker of a show, telling the story of Elliot Stanley (played by Jamie Dornan), who suffers amnesia after a car crash in the Australian outback, leaving him and his confidante, Helen Chambers (Danielle Macdonald), to work out who he is and who wants him dead.

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This time around they return to Ireland and uncover more of his shady past – in particular the McDonnell family, who seek revenge. MacNeill has a meaty role, playing the garda assigned to help Helen when Elliot goes missing. But, in the true style of The Tourist, there’s far more to it than that.

The Tourist is the fifth time MacNeill and Dornan have worked together ­– they were both in The Fall, Belfast and Siege of Jadotville together, and became good friends outside of work, even writing a script together during lockdown (more of which later).

It meant the audition process was awkward for MacNeill. “Jamie didn’t know I was meeting for this job – and I was too embarrassed to tell him,” he says. “When it was going through the final stages, that’s when he saw my name come up.”

The relocation of the series to Ireland has called for a slew of new actors, including Olwen Fouéré and, from Sing Street, Mark McKenna. While the cast are largely sworn to secrecy about their characters, they all slot into the show’s unique tone. Fouéré calls the series “a unique combination of thriller, crime and a cartel sort of feel. And it’s terribly funny.” As with the first series, “there’s a pace to it which is not like your typical TV [show], which is fast cuts into this and that, and the characters are not one-dimensional at all. There’s always a secret going on somewhere.”

The success of the debut season – it was the most-watched drama in the UK that year, and nominated for Bafta, Royal Television Society and Australian Logie awards – made it a hard act to follow. But it did prove useful as a reference point. McKenna says, “When you read a script that’s so tonally strong and specific, and you’re trying to get a grip on it, having a whole season of a TV show to go back to was a massive help. We could understand what we were getting ourselves into a bit more, rather than just showing up on set and everything feeling a little strange.”

This second series was filmed in the Wicklow Mountains and Glencolumbkille, in Co Donegal, among other places. Fouéré says, “I adored the locations of season one. I love the Australian outback, I love the desert – that’s my natural landscape. But when you see the Irish locations, it transposes a lot of that same feeling on. And it really, really works. Whether it was Wicklow or the west of Ireland, somehow there’s a kind of relationship with this sense of journey.”

Filming the series was a welcome chance for MacNeill to return to – and explore – Ireland, given that he has lived in London for most of his career.

His route to the stage and screen began as a happy accident, when a family member suggested him for a part in a local theatre production because he fulfilled the criterion of playing the wooden flute. As chance would have it, he was spotted by a talent agent, who then helped land him a role in a touring children’s play called The Weather Watchers, a production of Cahoots NI. “That happened while I was getting ready for my A levels, but my principal still let me do it, which seems insane now,” MacNeill says. “But for me that was it. That first year out of school was a dream.”

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He relocated to Dublin when he was 18 to appear in plays at the Gate and Smock Alley, in addition to work at TG4. He made the move to London to appear in Brian Friel’s play Philadelphia, Here I Come! at Donmar Warehouse in 2012. “I’m pretty sure I lied at the audition and said I was London-based already,” he says. In 2016, after appearing in the Martin McDonagh play The Cripple of Inishmaan (alongside Daniel Radcliffe), and in both the West End and Broadway productions of The Ferryman, by Jez Butterworth, MacNeill appeared in the third series of The Fall. This set off the domino effect proper of his screen career: meaty parts in Channel 4′s No Offence, his signature role in Industry and, most recently, his part in The Sixth Commandment followed.

Concurrently, he has been writing scripts. The Party, set in Belfast in 1972, proved a strong opening gambit, as it was nominated for the Bafta for best short film. “I wrote my first script while I was working at a call centre, because I was getting really close to really great jobs and not getting them, repeatedly. So I wrote to focus on something else,” MacNeill says.

It’s an industry of highs and lows, and you forget about the highs as soon as there’s one low

—  Conor MacNeill

“I risked a lot to get into acting – I’m from a working-class background in west Belfast; I’m not from a family of actors; I didn’t go to university. So when I decided I was going to do it, I was probably naive in what I thought was possible – which was a great thing, because once I was here I couldn’t not achieve this, because I had no back-up plan. And if you have nothing to fall back on, you’ve got to make it work.”

Another case in point: when the TV and film industries ground to a halt during lockdown, he and Dornan grabbed the opportunity to write a script together. He’s tight-lipped about the film’s subject matter but does say it’s a yesteryear piece, set in Belfast. The pair’s initial plan was to create a story outline together over Zoom, then write separately. “But we were constantly checking in with each other, so we ended up just getting on Zoom together and writing in tandem.

“It was really surprisingly easy and flowed quickly,” MacNeill says. “What we were writing really mattered to us – we’re both really passionate about it. There were, surprisingly, never any disagreements about it. We probably disagreed more over where we were going out for lunch or dinner when we were meeting up than [over] the script.”

The project has made slow but steady progress – paused briefly by the death of Dornan’s father in 2021 – and finally looks set to be picked up by high-profile Hollywood producers. But the deal isn’t yet sealed, so that too remains under wraps; the fickle business has taught him not to celebrate anything too early.

“It’s an industry of highs and lows, and you forget about the highs as soon as there’s one low,” MacNeill says. “But the longer you do it the easier it becomes, because you know if one door shuts another will open.”

The new series of The Tourist begins on BBC One at 9pm on New Year’s Day