Ruairi sinks his teeth into Delicious role
Recently graduated actor Ruairi O’Connor has landed a coveted new part, but his remarkable rise is still a surprise, writes Julia Molony
HE’S only been out of drama school a wet week, but Ruairi O’Connor already has a CV most recently graduated actors would sell a kidney for.
He won over a top UK agent while still at the Lir Academy in Dublin on the strength of his end-of-year showcase. His next project, the Irish film Handsome Devil, was a hit at this year’s Toronto film festival. And this winter, he’s appearing in not one, but two major British television dramas. The first, My Mother And Other Strangers, a wartime period drama, is currently airing on BBC. In the other, O’Connor forms part of the stellar ensemble cast of Sky’s new hot-blooded, food-themed family drama. Mining the rich seam of family politics and dysfunction for drama, Delicious stars Dawn French and Emilia Fox. Ruairi plays a privileged teenage boy, the only son of a successful chef and his second, much younger wife.
His character is affable, effortlessly attractive to girls, and has the easy confidence of someone for whom good things have come without enormous struggle. Chatting to Ruairi after the first screening of the show in central London, it’s immediately clear that the casting doesn’t, for this role at least, seem too much of a stretch. He is, he admits “a lucky boy.”
But there’s no arrogance or swagger about him. His success seems to have come as a bit of a surprise to him. “I never thought I’d work with Dawn French,” he says. “I was terrified of meeting her because she’s such a British national treasure. I thought she’d probably hate me. But she slagged me a bit immediately and was really really disarming and hilarious.” The ambition to act professionally was, he says: “A quiet ambition. Because I think it’s a crazy thing to think, ‘I want to be an actor and I want to be successful, and I think I will be successful’. I’ve never really had that belief that it would happen. I’m friends with Jack Reynor, and he always said he knew he was going to be a famous actor. And he just did it. It’s great he never had a loss of confidence... I’ve never quite been like that. I feel very lucky to get every single job I get.”
In 2012, he won his first notable professional role. He was cast in What Richard Did, the Irish film that has proved a launchpad for a host of Irish talent. Ruairi, who played Niall, was going for the title role, which he lost to his friend Jack. But he’s not bitter. “I was working with Lenny Abrahamson and however little my part was, I loved it... I could just watch and observe and it was just fascinating,’’ he said. Playing private school boys from Dublin, both Reynor and O’Connor were on familiar ground — they were in the same year in Belvedere College, where they became theatre rats, hanging around The O’Reilly Theatre during lunch. He said: “We’d skip classes, we’d constantly be on stage messing with all the professional sets that were in there.”
O’Connor grew up in Howth until the age of 14, when his family took over a stud farm in deep rural Ireland. “It sounds very fancy, but it was just basically a farm with horses,” he said.
He was an only child until the age of 10, when his parents had three girls in quick succession. “It was a big change,” he says. “It was great being and only child, I got a lot of investment and I spent a lot of time with adults... When my sisters came along... I got to deal with nappies and to feel what it was like to almost be a parent while also being a sibling.
‘‘There I was wrapping a towel around my head trying to change my sister’s nappy. Because it smelled so bad. I couldn’t believe it. A baby’s digestive system is brand new!”
He lives at the moment, “halfway between London and Ireland... I don’t really even have a bedroom at the moment. Because I’m moving around so much. It kind of messes with your head a bit,’’ he says. But then, perhaps the life of an itinerant performer is in his blood. “I’ve got Traveller blood in me,” he says. ‘‘My gran died recently and it was revealed that her biggest secret was that we come from Traveller stock.” Delicious starts Friday, December 30, 9pm, Sky 1