I’ve gone from working with the director of Blade Runner to getting PUP
Ex-frontman of The Stunning Steve Wall on the precarious life of an actor during Covid-19, grief... and getting the band back together
I’d done some acting before, it was unfinished business
WHEN he found out he was being cast as a kind-eyed love interest in RTÉ’s latest drama The South Westerlies, Steve Wall was glad to put his bad boy image behind him.
For over the last while, from his role in Vikings to Ridley Scott’s latest HBO drama Raised By Wolves, the frontman of The Stunning has found himself portraying villains.
‘I think I’ve got one of those livedin faces,’ says the genial actor and singer. ‘I notice now when I get a request for an audition, usually the character description says something like “has a craggy face”. And I am thinking, okay, so that’s me? A craggy man’s man!’
In actual fact, Steve is a warm and friendly person in real life but since his acting career took off a few years ago, villains are his thing. ‘I am generally a smiley person but when I don’t smile, I look like I could chop your head off,’ he says, laughing. ‘I think I can look quite evil with very little effort.’
Indeed, he plays a sect leader in Ridley’s Scott’s Raised By Wolves, currently on HBO in America, a world away from The South
Westerlies’ Baz, a surfer who has returned home to find his teenage sweetheart is back in town.
‘I really enjoyed playing Baz because for me it was a relief from the stuff I have been doing over the last few years,’ he says. ‘I generally play a lot of baddies.’
Set in the fictional town of Carrigeen, The South Westerlies sees Kate, played by Orla Brady, return to her hometown as a kind of undercover agent for the energy company she works for in Dublin.
The locals are against the idea of a windfarm in their picturesque setting and Kate has been sent to try and find out what’s going on and smooth a path for the farm to go ahead. But when she arrives with a teenage son, she finds Baz has returned after two decades in Maui, like a bohemian surfer dude, still looking for love. And there’s that small matter that Kate’s son bears a remarkable resemblance to her ex to contend with too.
Because it’s set in the summertime, one of the first lessons Steve had to learn was how to act warm.
‘We started filming around the end of September and went right through to the first week of December. So there were plenty of scenes on the beach and coming out of the sea that were actually filmed in November.
‘We had to act warm because we were frozen to the core and acting warm is really hard when your teeth are chattering,’ he laughs.
‘Carrigeen is this fictional West Cork village so there was a lot of stuff filmed with us going around in Hawaiian shirts when the wind would have cut the nose off your face.’
It’s not the first big Sunday night drama Wall has been in, tipping up as he did in Rebellion. And though it might still seem strange for fans of The Stunning that the guitar-slinging singer has managed to carve out a successful career as an actor too during his mid-life, in actual fact, acting was Steve’s first love.
‘I had done acting before The Stunning and for me it was unfinished business,’ he says. ‘I was with the Druid Theatre for two years before the band, doing understudy roles, I was a sound operator on one play, I was an assistant to Garry Hynes on another.
‘That was the way I wanted to go — I was passionate about the theatre. I actually moved to Dublin to pursue an acting career and spent a year on the dole and didn’t get any auditions.
‘It was the mid-80s and I was going to see bands all the time. There were loads of great bands around — A House, The Golden Hoarde, The Subterraneans all popping up — and after a year of not getting any auditions I just realised I could start a band and I didn’t need anybody to tell me, “you can work”.
‘Literally the next day I put an ad in Hot Press and that’s how The Stunning started. The next 25 years, it was just rock ’n’ roll.’
Grief doesn’t go away... at strange times it just hits you
It’s good to do something that scares the s**t out of you
He did star in a short film at one point but it wasn’t until he bumped into casting agent Maureen Hughes, with whom he worked in the Druid, that his acting passion was really reignited.
‘She told me about a screen acting course at Bow Street School. They did a four-day workshop, I signed up for it and that was that. I was hooked again. I remembered the reason I was so interested in acting in the first place — even though at this stage I was the oldest one in the class and they were all young enough to be my kids!’
Among those kids were some people who have gone on to do great things, from Jack Reynor and Barry Keoghan to Peter Coogan and Shauna Kerslake.
‘We used to meet up every Tuesday night and practice scenes and film each other so for me it gave me a real boost.’
He had been the only member of his band who didn’t have other work outside The Stunning so acting, he says, is something he can do for himself.
‘It’s been a whole new challenge, it scares the s**t out of me at times but I am getting more used to it now the challenge of getting into a character and bringing something new to it.’
Currently it is a godsend too. The Stunning were due to celebrate 30 years of their seminal album Paradise At The Picture House with a string of gigs this year and as the guitars are languishing in their cases, Steve is on PUP payments until he can work again.
‘I am kind of anxious because there has also been no acting work either,’ he says. ‘That is starting to creep back into action a bit though. I’ve done a couple of auditions and there are a couple of things that might be happening in that area.’
Steve lives in Dublin with his partner Tiziana, who is originally from Italy, and their 15-year-old daughter Tuccia. He was born in Dublin but spent his teenage years in Ennistymon, Co Clare, where his father and other family members still live.
He still spends a lot of time there as the family have always been close and are closer still since a terrible tragedy in March 2017 claimed the life of his three-year-old niece Estlin. She was killed when a truck hit the car her father Vincent was driving her to creche in.
He suffered serious brain injuries in the crash and the truck driver was subsequently fined €750 and banned from driving for four years. Steve says Vincent is recovering well and he and his wife Amy have just had a baby, Lucy, who was born five months ago.
‘He’s doing good,’ Steve says. ‘He still has his issues — obviously they are kind of invisible to the eye but they are there.’
The shock of such a terrible tragedy is still evident in Steve’s voice as he speaks about what happened. ‘I can remember the very morning when my mother called me from the hospital in Limerick,’ he says.
‘You can remember exactly where you were and what you were doing, you can remember the sunshine and the shadows on the ground.
You can remember the details from that moment and then the rest of it starts to go into a blur.
‘It was a horrendous time and everything changes. Nothing is ever the same.’
Steve’s mother Patricia died just ten months after her beloved granddaughter.
‘She was completely heartbroken at the loss of her granddaughter,’ he says of his mother. ‘She spent an awful lot of time with her and I think we are all still feeling the loss. I suppose there’s part of you that is still grieving and you just learn how to live with it.
‘It doesn’t go away. It’s a part of you that wasn’t there before. I had never experienced grief before and now it is something that is just there and you learn to live with it. At strange times it just hits you. Sometimes I will go for walks and listen to music and a song will come on that was one of my mother’s favourites and that’s it, I’m just gone.’
He admits he has to just cry and let the emotion out before getting on with the rest of his day. This is one of the reasons he is in awe of his brother Vincent and sister-inlaw Amy.
‘I am amazed at what my brother and his wife have gone through and how strong they are and how they are living with it,’ he says. ‘At least my mother had lived a life — she was 78 when she passed away but their little girl was just coming up to her fourth birthday and she was a real ray of sunshine in everyone’s lives.
‘Her toys are still there in the corner in our house, my dad has just left them there. When she came visiting that’s the place she would head to and they are untouched.
‘You have to learn to live with grief and how to deal with it and you also have to accept it. You can think about those people and what they brought into your life and the ray of light that’s still there. You can still feel them and the effect they had on you. They are still within you.’
Having acting as something to focus on has helped, he says, given that The Stunning normally do 20 shows a year here. The anniversary gigs have been shifted to next year and the accompanying book that involved a lot of painstaking work and exclusive photography has gone on sale online.
‘We haven’t done a gig now since December 28 and we were supposed to get back on the road in March. So March 2020 in the Olympia Theatre in Dublin is now March 2021 and we are even wondering if that will happen.
‘The longer it goes on, the more anxious and worried people are starting to get, especially in the entertainment industry with the theatres closed and venues closed. For musicians, the only income now comes from performing live.
‘The income that might have come before from record sales and music is literally gone. Downloads are even gone, nobody downloads any more, it’s just streaming and the income from that you wouldn’t be able to buy a pint on.’
But Steve loves music as much as he loves acting, and despite the pitfalls for both, says he could never choose between them. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who would make him, given his success at both.
‘Music is in me and it always has been since I was a kid,’ he says. ‘It’s just there. I have had a fallow period with songwriting but there is a lot of stuff in there that I know is waiting to come out, especially what has happened in the last few years with the family.
‘But the moment hasn’t come yet where I am going to put pen to paper to write those songs. I have shifted my focus in a way into the acting thing and it has been helping me in a lot of ways.
‘It is a new learning curve and I find it a great challenge. It’s good every now and then to do something that scares the s**t out of you because it’s the only way you can progress.
‘You learn when you jump in at the deep end. You will either sink or swim but at least you’ll know.’
THE South Westerlies starts tomorrow at 9.30pm on RTÉ One