‘Older people were outraged at the sex in Normal People because they never got to live that life’
Sean Doyle, who plays Connell’s friend Eric in Normal People, spoke to Donal Lynch about that Live Line furore, losing his virginity, depression and why the hit series is a like a document of his youth
WHEN Sean Doyle heard that Normal People was being adapted for the screen, like almost every actor in Ireland, he went out and bought a copy of the bestselling novel. It is something of a document of his youth — it’s set over the period that he did his Leaving Cert and he was a contemporary of Sally Rooney at Trinity College. But, more than anything, he identified hugely with the male protagonist, Connell.
“I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a character in fiction that spoke to me as much,” he says. “The descriptions of him made me feel very seen.”
The fresh faced 27-year-old specialises in playing schoolboys — he jokes that most of his roles to date have involved a school uniform at some stage and the series director Lenny Abrahamson had him on a shortlist to play Connell.
When Sean heard that his friend and sometime co-star, Paul Mescal, had been cast in the role, he was initially downcast. “When I heard that I hadn’t gotten the part, I took it pretty hard, but in hindsight, I understand that Paul was better in the role,” he recalls.
“I can see now he just was Connell — he’s perfect for it. Apparently when Lenny saw his [audition] tape, he knew straight away.”
And there was consolation in that Doyle would be a part of the series: he plays Connell’s judgemental and bullying friend Eric in several of the episodes. Doyle says he based his performance — a study in adolescent maturation — on an impression of a friend from his own school days.
“The person was toxic and a bit of a loose canon. He’d take out his penis on a bus and flap it at people. There is something quite scary, quite controlling about behaviour like that. He actually became a really nice guy in the end, though, and in my mind, Eric has a similar redemption arc.”
Further consolation came in the fact that the series has been a ratings sensation, chiming with viewers like no other drama in 2020, and launching its leads as bona fide sex symbols; Mescal’s glistening torso has made O’Neills GAA shorts an unlikely fetish item for millions.
Doyle witnessed the Live Line furore over the series’ frequent sex scenes with some bemusement. “To me, it almost seemed like people of a certain age were outraged at the depiction of sex because they never got to live that life. It’s like: ‘I didn’t get my fields ploughed, so nobody else should be allowed to either.’ They don’t want to accept that people have willies.”
He says that the sexuality depicted in the series is a useful counterpoint to the pornography and dressing room banter that were the education sources for boys of his generation.
“I think that it’s great that parents and kids are watching these scenes. When I was growing up, we never learned anything about consent. Instead of that, you got information about consent and sex from locker-room chat and pornography. And you’d sort of get the idea from porn that any time the sink stops working, it meant sex or that any time you ordered a pizza, it meant sex.
“Porn gives the impression that it’s all about the man, all for his enjoyment, all from his point of view, and if females come, well, good for them, but that’s not necessary. The sex here (in the series) is so different from that. It’s healthy.”
Doyle says that, by the standards of the day, he came to his own sexuality “quite late” in life. He used apps, but he couldn’t bear the conventions of Tinder. “I hated who I became when I was using the apps. Look at me: I’m hot, look at me: I go on holidays, look at me: I have friends. It was all so fake.”
By the time he lost his virginity, “I just turned 18 or just turned 17 — I forget which — but I took to it like a duck to water. I didn’t really have great sexual experiences to begin with. My attitude was more let’s get this over with. It’s only in the last two or three years that I’ve really got any sort of spiritual outlook in sexuality.”
He had begun seeing a girl at the beginning of the year, but the lockdown stalled their fledgling romance. “We were supposed to be in Greece touring the islands together. She’s on an island in Thailand now. She was doing a course there. I haven’t seen her in months, but I can’t wait to see her again. The plan is that we’ll isolate together when she comes back.”
Doyle grew up in Firhouse in Dublin and performance was in his blood: his father was a musician and painter. He went to Templeogue College, where a committed and brilliant English teacher, Declan Fitzpatrick, spurred his interest in literature.
He performed in plays throughout secondary school and attended the Gaiety School of Acting, which his father paid for by selling paintings door-to-door. It was a chance encounter with a casting agent at the RDS when he was 19 that really set him on his way, however.
It resulted in him being cast as
Larry Mullen Jr in 2011’s Killing Bono, a film that would mark the last performance of the great Pete Postlethwaite. “I don’t really feel I learned much from that other than how to spend per diems with cool older actors, but I had a ball and I wish I learned more,” Doyle recalls.
After school, he was initially determined to become a barrister, “but later I realised that I only wanted that so that I could stand up later in court and shout ‘objection’.”
Instead, he studied drama at Trinity, but felt like he never clicked with the college and the course. “Normal People happens as I was doing the Leaving Cert and going into first year. In my head, I was walking around with them.
“In those years, Sally [Rooney] was big in the Hist [the college debating society] and I didn’t really engage with that, so unfortunately I didn’t know her and I never had a gaff on Wellington Road. The people I was exposed to at Trinity weren’t my people.
“They asked me was I coming back or not and eventually I just said no. There was a lot of philosophy and queer theory and it was very academic
— I was more about performance.”
The cut and thrust of auditions helped him to understand what his ‘type’ was, but he says this was vastly different from his own personality. “I have these intense big eyebrows and sort of ingenue pretty-boy vibes and then I walk in and I’m an absolute goofball who’s tripping over his feet and is socially anxious.”
He dropped out of college eventually and as the work started coming in, he found his feet. “I had money for the first time and started paying money to my parents. That freedom of being young and having money for the first time was incredible.”
In 2013, when he was 21, he won the part of car-stealing trouble maker Callum Black on Fair City and he would continue to star in the soap for the next six years. He says that the relentlessness of filming was his real training as an actor.
“The speed and the vim and vigour of the whole thing, and work you have to do, it was tough overall,” he recalls. “If you can get through a soap and feel like you’ve done a good job, you can get through anything.”
He’s still close to Paul Mescal, with whom he also starred in an adaptation of Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It, and says his fellow actor has been enjoying the reaction to the series.
“I think, like all of us, he’s probably loving it. O’Neills must be having a field day too! Paul has been lucky really because there hasn’t been some big circuit of chat shows to do. A lot of the promotion for this can be done from the comfort of our own homes.”
From his teenage years, Doyle says he battled with self belief. “I struggled with depression. I don’t think its chemical and it’s not a hormonal imbalance as far as I’m aware. I think it’s just being creative and being, what’s the expression, cursed with a brain — not that I’m particularly intelligent. Feeling bad sometimes goes with the territory.”
He’s spent lockdown by himself in a bedsit in Dublin city centre. He says it’s been a few months full of “ups and downs”.
“I’m grateful and blessed that the worst I’ve had to put up with is a bit of loneliness. I’m enjoying it — coming to a grinding halt and being forced to take stock has been really invaluable. I feel like a better human, more emotionally present. I’ve been doing yoga and meditation and just practising being kind to myself, and I think when it’s all over, this will really stand to me.”
He says that the time in isolation has also given him a renewed perspective on just why Normal People has so captured the cultural zeitgeist.
“Little did we know before all this began that what people really want to watch isn’t explosions or action heroes. They just want human beings having real human dramas, they want to see people holding and touching hands and feeling pain, connecting.
“I think that’s what’s made it the perfect television for this moment and it’s been incredible to be a part of it.”
‘I struggled with depression. I don’t think it’s chemical and it’s not a hormonal imbalance as far as I’m aware’
The final episode of Normal People airs on RTÉ One on Tuesday at 10:15pm and is also on the RTÉ Player