Daryl McCormack arrives as a leading man — in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

At age 29, the stars are aligning for Nenagh-born actor Daryl McCormack. With his green eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones, he has long looked like a leading man. And now he is one.

Having played one of the incorrigible triumvirate at the centre of 2020′s Pixie — a project that saw McCormack working alongside Olivia Cooke, Colm Meaney, Pat Shortt and Dylan Moran — he will soon land at a multiplex near you in the title role of Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

Early reviews are ecstatic. “McCormack is fantastic in a role so subtle it could appear flatlined and phoney if people aren’t paying attention,” writes Amy Nicholson in Variety; “McCormack holds his own very admirably; indeed, the camera loves him,” says Leslie Felperin in The Hollywood Reporter; “Daryl McCormack [is] impossibly warm and charismatic,” adds Tomris Laffly at The Playlist. It’s next-level exposure for the young actor in every possible sense.

In the Sophie Hyde-directed, unabashedly sex-positive movie, McCormack plays a smooth-talking sex worker hired by Emma Thompson’s character, a widow hoping to find passion — and achieve an orgasm — after years of dull married life. It’s Thompson’s first sexually explicit role and first full-frontal nude scene. “This might surprise you,” reveals McCormack, “but we did not actually have an intimacy co-ordinator. Saying that, I’m so grateful for intimacy co-ordinators because I think it’s a job that’s been long overdue.

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“And obviously, it has such an important place in the industry. I’ve worked with intimacy co-ordinators and they’re just amazing people. They have an ability to tap into something that is unseen in terms of comfort zones. But there was something about the kind of tight-knit collaboration we had on this project. With Sophie and Emma I felt that we were really in good hands to go and explore and find our own language for this film. And the language we worked out between the three of us was pretty special, I think.”

McCormack and Thompson’s detailed collaboration required drawing and describing each other’s bodies, to create their own choreography of consent. As Emma Thompson put it, while speaking to a panel at the Sundance Film Festival: “It’s very challenging to be nude at 62.”

“We had this amazing exercise of tracing our bodies on a big piece of paper,” says McCormack. “And then circling the areas that we loved and the areas that we didn’t love. We shared the stories behind each part of our bodies. Over the course of a few hours, we removed one piece of clothing each until we were fully unclothed. And then we moved on to the intimacy stuff. By then, we had created this incredible sense of safety.”

McCormack has previously shared less-graphic scenes and screen time with Alec Baldwin (Pixie), Rosamund Pike (in the Amazon fantasy drama The Wheel of Time), and Lesley Manville (in the Channel 4 anthology series I Am…). Working with Thompson, however, created a sense of imposter syndrome to reckon with. “A lot of it came down to just trusting myself,” he says.

“I’m still kind of new to my career and in some sense, it’s hard to trust yourself and trust that you’ll be capable of holding a two-hander with someone like Emma Thompson, who has done everything. So that took its own process. I remember auditioning on the Wednesday, meeting Emma on the Saturday, and then she texts me the following morning saying that she wants me to play Leo. So within the space of five days, my world did a somersault. I was so excited until the day before we started shooting when I started having a meltdown. Thinking, like, how have I gotten myself into this mess? How am I going to hold my own with one of the greatest actors in the industry? But the director Sophie Hyde was just so incredible and we all fell in love with Katy Brand’s script and the potential of the message within the script. We all have our own journey with intimacy. This film plays with that and reverses expectations quite consistently.”

He laughs: “And obviously Emma is amazing. So that helps.”

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande enjoyed its world premiere at Sundance in January — where the film was scooped up by Searchlight for $7.5 million — followed by a post-Covid, live-audience unveiling at the Berlinale. “This was my second project after Covid; I did do a small thing for Channel 4,” says McCormack, whose previous big-screen turn (in Pixie) was greatly affected by restrictions and cinema closures. “But this was the first undertaking of this size. I didn’t think I was going to get this lucky and get a project like this or to get to Berlin and back into those spaces where we can see films together and celebrate.”

McCormack’s mother Theresa met his African-American father in California in the early 1990s. She returned to Ireland pregnant, and raised Daryl in his native Tipperary, where he became an avid hurler and Gaeilgeoir. His hometown, he says, is rooting for him. “They’re so supportive. I was home one Christmas and I bumped into my old science teacher in a pub. And I remember him just putting his arm around me and saying: ‘Daryl, do you realise how proud this town is of you? Fair play to you.’ When I get home, it’s so lovely. These are the people who will keep you grounded, who will support you and show you love, and who know you as you really are.”

He has stayed in touch with his American family and speculates that his love of performance may have been inherited from his grandfather, Percy Thomas, the Baltimore playwright, actor, and founder of Heralds of Hope, a theatre company specialising in black history. “He’s been in different things,” says McCormack of his paternal grandfather. “He has been in films. He writes and directs plays. He has a major passion for the arts and theatre, for sure. He has always been in my life from the very beginning. And I lived in Baltimore for a year when I was eight. It’s such an artist’s hub with the music and the jazz scene. His big presence in my life might have rubbed off on me. Or maybe something skipped a generation and found its way across to Nenagh.”

Sure enough, McCormack has always been a natural-born show-off, beginning with the choral society at St Joseph’s CBS. He trained at the Dublin Institute of Technology’s Conservatory and the Gaiety School of Acting, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in drama in 2014. Within a year, he had essayed Romeo in a Gate Theatre production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Othello in the Theatre Royal Waterford’s national tour. “I felt really lucky to get a lot of Shakespeare training coming right out of drama school,” says McCormack. “I think it was because it was on the Leaving Cert syllabus, I ended up doing a lot of shortened performances of Othello that we brought to schools around Ireland. And taking on that character and getting months and months of practice was amazing.”

There followed a series of big and bigger breaks. He starred in 36 episodes of Fair City, the closest thing that Ireland’s acting community has to national service, and McCormack’s “first steady paycheck after doing ads for Mace and the Senate referendum”. Having relocated to London, he landed the role of Brendan in the 2018 West End revival of Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore. “I was waiting tables when I first got here in 2017,” he says. “I was hoping to get my foot in the door. And I went straight from making people coffee on to the stage in the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End. I just didn’t anticipate that. But that’s been like the nature of this job. One day, you wait tables, the next, it’s a Martin McDonagh play.”

It hasn’t always been so seamless. Aged 21, he made it through to the last round of auditions for the role of Finn in Star Wars: Episode VII. He ultimately lost out to John Boyega, although the film’s director, JJ Abrams, tipped the Irish actor as someone to watch out for. McCormack is not sorry to have missed the Millennium Falcon ride. “I don’t think I had the life experience to handle what a film like that would propel you into,” he says. “I just don’t think, as a person, I would have been capable of managing that kind of exposure. I’m 29 now and I really feel like I’ve just matured as an individual. Life has taught me to hold on to things that really matter and that bring me joy. But back then, I was a kid, barely out of drama school.”

McCormack took over the role of Isaiah Jesus in the fifth series of Peaky Blinders, following the departure of British actor Jordan Bolger, who left the show to join the cast of The CW’s sci-fi series The 100. “The fan base was already up and running by the time I joined,” says McCormack. “It was just such an adored show and, critically, it had done really well. I went in as a fan of the show and of Cillian Murphy. So I just feel grateful to have been a part of it. And it was an overwhelming experience because I was very much welcomed as part of the Peaky family.”

McCormack has just wrapped work on Sharon Horgan’s new untitled Apple series, featuring Claes Bang and Eve Hewson. He’s currently Hamburg-bound for director Alice Troughton’s The Tutor, co-starring Richard E Grant and Julie Delpy. He’s expecting a linguistic adventure. “I have Leaving Cert German,” he says. “I went to Cologne as an exchange student when I was 17. But it’s a bit like Irish. You lose it a bit. I’m still hoping I have enough to get by.”

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande opens June 17th