INTERVIEW:Her blossoming career has already taken her from Tipperary to Rome, from Martin McDonagh plays to big-budget TV series, and from obscurity to the brink of stardom - all at the age of 25. But Kerry Condon is determined and self-assured enough to play the fame game her way, writes Sarah Keating
ACTRESS KERRY CONDON is frank and feisty, and a spirited and outspoken interviewee. "I am here because of my achievements," she reminds me midway through the interview. "Not because I'm some tabloid queen. I have no time for all that 'fame' business. What would I say to those women with their famous boyfriends who'd do anything to get into the paper? I'd say: 'Get a talent! Get your own career!'"
At only 25 years old, Condon's confidence is almost intimidating, but she describes the remarkable trajectory of her early career as if it was the most natural thing in the world. However, this is a measure of her down-to-earth and practical nature more than any precocious ambition.
"I've lived on my own since I was 16," she says, "when I began working professionally. It was easy, because I always knew that acting was what I wanted to do, and I was willing to do what it took to get there. I mean I worked part-time jobs during the summer in Tipperary when I was a teenager to save money to pay for my drama classes. And every Saturday morning I would get on the train to Dublin to go to them. It was important that I paid for it all myself, because it was my way of figuring out that it was really what I wanted to do. By the time I'd finished school, I had already had roles in Ballykissangel and I'd had my big break in Angela's Ashes, so moving to Dublin was just the thing to do."
Condon enrolled in the now-defunct acting degree course at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College, "for something to do when I wasn't working, but actually I only went for one day. I mean I had a career already, so I didn't really need to go to college. I don't mean that in an arrogant way, but I was already earning, and working was more important to me than training. Then on the first day of class, I got a call offering me a role in the film Rat, and I had to choose between college - because they wouldn't allow you to work when you were studying - or taking it. It was a good role, and there were people like Imelda Staunton in it, and the money was really good - compared to working for a tenner an hour in a sandwich shop it was brilliant - so I couldn't say no.
"I always knew I'd have to move London for work," Condon says, as she counters my surprise that she emigrated when only 19. She had been offered the role of Mairead in the premiere production of Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore at the RSC and "having taken me on for that they had to give me something else to do, so I was cast as Ophelia in Hamlet as well. I was going to be in London for a year and a half - I was going to be paid to live in London for a year and half - so I moved. I hated being there at first - the noise, the number of people; I grew up in the country and I'm a countryside girl - and it took me a really long time to like it. But now I have my own house there, so it is my home."
London might have been her home for the past seven years, but Condon's voice is still pure Tipperary, which comes in handy for her latest role in another McDonagh play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, which opens at Druid Theatre on September 16th, with previews from the 12th, before embarking on a national and international tour.
"Rehearsals are going well," Condon says, but some of her character's personality traits have been having strange, unsettling resonance with her. "Slippy Helen's gas. I mean she's pure confident but for no reason at all - she's not that good-looking or anything - and she's really confrontational. It's not like I'm method acting or anything," she laughs, "but I'm feeling sort of confrontational in my own life. Maybe I'm going to have a fight with someone." There is no doubt that she'd win.
"Ah no," she continues in a more serious tone, "you do notice that the parts that you play make you feel more sensitive to things depending on the character. But you don't usually notice it until the part ends and that sensitivity leaves you, and then it's actually quite sad and you're back to your own life. To be honest, I sometimes feel like I'm more sure about the people that I play than I am about who I am. It's like I know them better than I do myself."
Condon confesses that it was her first major film, Ned Kelly, which really tested her sense of self. The film was shot in Australia over the course of four months, "and I was really, really lonely. I mean it is so far away, and it was a weird job. I was on what's known as weather cover, where you're on stand-by in case it rains, and if it does they will shoot your scene. It was Australia, so it never did. So there was loads of hanging around and loads of time to think and get depressed, and I did. I mean I was still just a teenager. It was really hard."
It was a three-year contract in the HBO/BBC series Rome that gave Condon her most prolific and most satisfying role to date. "I was living in Rome for the best part of three years, and it is the most beautiful place that I have ever been." She says she rarely gets recognised - "Thank God! I'm worried half the time that I'll get recognised by an old schoolfriend, let alone a stranger." When she does, however, it is because of Rome and usually in the US: "They all watch TV over there, but they're usually really friendly and nice about it."
Needless to say, Condon has at least one not-so-savoury story about the pressures of "being a woman in a man's world . . . this crazy publicist guy in LA was trying to get me to go to some premiere with an Olympic athlete who was on his books; to pretend that we were dating or whatever and go out on the red carpet and get our picture taken. Can you imagine? The head on me! What were we supposed to do once we got inside? Say 'See you later, thanks for the snaps!' I hate all that shit. Everything that I have achieved has been from my own effort, my own talent, and I'm not saying that to promote myself, but I think it's disgraceful when people use themselves like that, especially women. Of course it'll be a man's world if we behave like that."
Condon is particularly passionate about how Irish cinema often operates by such demeaning standards, particularly in relation to casting. "Can we be that lacking in confidence that we have to kiss the asses of Z-list celebrities by casting them in roles in Irish films when there are good Irish actors dying to work?" she expostulates. "I mean I'm not deluded, but there are loads of Irish actors capable of doing those jobs and doing them better."
Condon herself loves working more than anything else - although her Jack Russell terrier is right up there in terms of priorities - and she is eager to slip away, as there are lines to be learnt for rehearsals tomorrow.
"You'd better do me justice now," she says as she tears off into the early evening. I say of course I will. I'd be afraid not to.
The Cripple of Inishmaanis at the Town Hall Theatre Galway from September 12th. For details of the national and international tour, see www.druidtheatre.com