Every actor has that one performance where it feels they’ve gone to hell and back. For Dónal Finn the moment of reckoning arrived on July 21st, 2024, when he was starring in the musical Hadestown, in London.
The performance itself was fine, but as he trod the boards he was acutely aware that the Cork hurlers were fighting for their lives in the All-Ireland final. Every minute on stage was a minute not watching his county battle for the Liam MacCarthy Cup.
“We had a Sunday show. The stage manager knew that I was interested in the game,” says Finn, who grew up in north Co Cork. “They were keeping me updated on the score. Then I’d go down the tunnel, and I had my iPad set up – ‘Three minutes now. I’ll watch this bit.’
“I brought a Cork flag on stage for the bows and then went straight to the dressingroom and caught the last bit of it. I’d say the show was two minutes faster that day.”
READ MORE
That evening ended badly for Cork, but Finn has gone from strength to strength. After Hadestown he swapped the West End for high fantasy in the third and final season of Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time. Now he takes on what may be his most intriguing role yet, playing a young Prof James Moriarty, immortal nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, in Guy Ritchie’s new Baker Street romp, Young Sherlock, which is about to arrive on our screens.
Finn isn’t the first Irish actor to tangle with the occupant of 221B Baker Street. Andrew Scott played Moriarty as an irritating south Dubliner opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC drama Sherlock. Finn’s take on the Victorian megavillain is altogether different, beginning with a Kerry accent patterned on, among others, the late actor and storyteller Éamon Kelly.
“I had some people in my head that I think influenced me in developing what the character’s voice is,” he says. “They would be from the southwest.”
Finn talks passionately about Kelly’s voice – its cadences, its richness, its flow. “He was very old school and theatrical in a way. It’s such a beautiful part of our culture. It would be so great to preserve that. I wanted to harness some part of that storytelling quality. Moriarty is able to hold people’s attention in such an amazing way, and that’s how the seanchaithe worked as well. They were incredible storytellers.”
[ Fintan O’Toole: Dirty minds and no holy families in Eamon Kelly’s KerryOpens in new window ]
Ritchie has set his origin story for literature’s greatest detective in Oxford in the 1870s. Holmes has gone to the city of dreaming spires on the insistence of his older brother, Mycroft (Max Irons), and sees little point in a formal education.
That’s in contrast to the underdog Moriarty, who, as an Irish man in the bastion of the British ruling class, is aware at all times of not fitting in – and is reminded of this fact in his run-ins with Sir Bucephalus Hodge, a fusty university dean played by Colin Firth.
This very Kerry Moriarty believes he has to “get ahead in a society in which he can so easily be ostracised,” Finn says. His understanding of the importance of blending in is made clear in an early scene in which he adopts a cut-glass English accent to gatecrash a party. Talk like the Kerry man he is and he’d be escorted straight to the exit.
“I’m sure he would have been an anomaly as an Irish person studying in Oxford on a scholarship. Being in that upper echelon of society, it speaks to his character that he can move between those qualities and these people, between accents and voices. There’s a quality of a chameleon that allows him to move in many circles. That was something I found the voice really helpful for.”
Young Sherlock is billed as a Holmes coming-of-age tale, but it is as much about Moriarty as about 19th-century literature’s foremost advocate for deerstalker hats. The common bond between Moriarty and Sherlock – played by Hero Fiennes Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes – is that, at this point in their lives, they are both outsiders who feel as if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Given what we know about Sherlock and where he goes and the family that he comes from, you’d assume he has all the privileges. I think that’s probably what connects them at that early point. They both probably feel a little bit like outsiders,” Finn says.
“When they meet each other at university, they recognise something in each other that’s possibly rebellious towards the people they find themselves surrounded by. Immediately, there’s this intellectual sparring that challenges them and makes them feel they’ll grow with this person in a way they probably haven’t before.”
Moriarty also has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Dingle peninsula. “He doesn’t feel he has much privilege. He’s coming to the country and the university with something to prove. That ferociousness – that internal desire to succeed – is a powerful motivator for him, and he probably lives with the mentality of ‘why not me?’”
It’s 100 per cent on brand for Ritchie, who made the series with its writer and showrunner, Matthew Parkhill, to bring us a Moriarty who sounds like Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh breathlessly narrating the closing minutes of an All-Ireland final. Ever since casting Brad Pitt as a Traveller in Snatch, the director has kept a soft spot for Ireland.
His original Sherlock Holmes, with Robert Downey jnr and Jude Law, had a scene in which the titular sleuth bare-knuckle boxes to the strains of The Rocky Road to Dublin; and The Gentleman, his Netflix series from 2024, features another group of Travellers.
Ritchie is “incredibly articulate and, a bit like Sherlock, enjoys an intellectual parlay”, Finn says. “He has an incredibly imaginative and creative mind. The scene may start in a certain place and he’ll find a way of putting his own spin on it.
“I was very grateful for the input of his style, his tone, his playfulness. Part of that is banter – he prioritises fun, making sure that characters are enjoying themselves. And that translates to the audience.”
Finn grew up in Dromina, a village near Charleville, not far from the Cork-Limerick border. Personalitywise, he has little in common with Arthur Conan Doyle’s steampunk baddie, yet his time as an actor in London does have parallels with Moriarty’s adventures in Oxford.
As a student at Lamda, the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, he shared Moriarty’s experience of being an Irishman parachuted into a British institution – although he had a far more positive experience.
“I certainly didn’t feel I came to London as an underdog or that it was me against them,” he says. “I found this amazingly accepting and welcoming community at Lamda and throughout London’s industry ...
“I didn’t really know anything about professional acting until I came to London. In that sense I probably felt like an underdog – I was motivated to work, to make as much out of my time at drama school as possible. That’s maybe a parallel.”
Acting in Ireland has long been a middle-class pursuit, where the privately educated enjoy a fast track to the top. Things were different for Finn, one of eight children raised on a farm and who paid his way early in his career by stacking shelves at his local supermarket. There was no silver spoon, no rich parents to help with the bills.
“I worked in a supermarket in Kanturk, which was the town I went to school in. I was there for a year. A lot of my friends had gone off to college in Cork, Limerick and Dublin. That was a year of working and saving money to fly over and back for auditions at drama schools.
“The fees for the applications and those things add up. I remember having a conversation with my parents that was essentially, ‘If you’re going to do all this work, you must really want it.’ Those things – saving, taking year-outs, making sacrifices – probably separate people who think they want it from those who actually do.”
Finn has a busy year ahead. After Young Sherlock he’ll star in The Other Bennet Sister, a BBC adaptation of Janice Hadlow’s novel about the socially awkward Mary Bennet, from Pride and Prejudice. Another big production – details still under wraps – will follow. But first comes Moriarty, one of those parts where the villain truly gets the best lines.
“A reason I love the show is that we’re seeing Moriarty at a point when he’s far from any sense of infamy or villainy. When he meets Sherlock they just have a different set of opinions about how they see the world.
“Because they’re both full of wit, and able to communicate well, they can discuss those differences and it doesn’t yet seem jarring. Moriarty very early on says the world is unfair, people can be unkind. There’s nothing in that opinion that makes you feel he’s a villain. And he’s not. He’s a friend to Sherlock. He’s a realist.”
To turn Moriarty into a sympathetic villain – not a villain at all, really – takes talent, and Finn’s performance shows that he has it. Don’t be surprised if he becomes Ireland’s next acting superstar.
Young Sherlock is on Prime Video from Wednesday, March 4th
