Why Emmett and leading lady Michelle ‘just clicked from get-go’
Irish star’s delight with role in new Netf lix thriller
IRISH actor Emmett J Scanlan has revealed how he ‘clicked from the get-go’ with British star Michelle Keegan on the set of the upcoming Netflix thriller, Fool Me Once.
Kin star Scanlan also praised his other co-star, acting ‘legend’ Joanna Lumley, who appears in the Harlan Coben adaptation.
Scanlan plays Shane Tessier in the series and shares the screen with Keegan for ‘pretty much all’ of his scenes.
The Dubliner said the former Coronation Street star was ‘hugely generous on and off set’.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘She was very collaborative, she loved to dance, loved to play. She was a shining example of a leading lady really. It was a high bar and she smashed it.’
The Our Girl actress plays an ex-army captain thrown into turmoil by her husband’s murder and the subsequent investigation.
Scanlan plays her colleague and friend, while Lumley takes on the role of her prim motherin-law.
‘I did get to meet Joanna Lumley and she’s a legend of the game and hugely respected,’ said Scanlan, who doesn’t share any scenes with the veteran actress.
‘She loved to dance, loved to play’
‘She’s got a career that anybody would be proud of and she’s beautiful – she’s amazing.’
The 44-year-old said the show’s New Year’s Day release date makes it perfect for binge-watching ‘while nursing a sore head’, but admitted he won’t be watching himself until a little later.
In fact, Scanlan revealed he didn’t watch any of his own work at all between the second season of The Fall, released in 2013, and the finale of the smash RTÉ crime series Kin, which was recently picked up by the BBC.
‘I watch TV and movies to escape and to be entertained,’ he explained. ‘And when I saw myself I was always pulled out of that journey. And I can be very, very self-critical and quite cruel to myself.
‘But at the end of season two of Kin when the last episode was airing, my parents were so proud and telling me everything their friends were saying and all that sort of stuff.
‘My mum has got kidney failure and she’s usually in bed by seven, but every Sunday she’d stay up to watch it. So I said “Okay, f*** it, I’ll come home and watch [the season finale] with you.”
And I arrived a couple of days early and went around town and the amount of people that would stop me and hypothesise about the ending.
It was just a real feverish kind of excitement and nobody got the ending correct.’ Watching with his parents and wife Claire Cooper, whom he met on the set of Hollyoaks before marrying in 2015, Scanlan was ‘so impressed’ by the show that he didn’t get ‘pulled out’ of the drama by his own presence. ‘And I said, “Well, you know what? Maybe I should start watching some more stuff.” And so I have been and it’s been a kind of love/hate relationship, depending on what f***ing show I watch!’
The Clontarf native said he has ‘no clue’ whether Kin will have a third season, but its positive reception in the UK should enhance its chances.
‘It certainly has an audience, so it just needs to find a home and somebody to love it as much as the people around the world have done. I know that if the opportunity presented itself, I would obviously love to reprise Jimmy Kinsella.’
Scanlan has a three-year-old son and one-year-old daughter with Cooper and a 21-year-old daughter from a previous relationship and said he had ‘fallen out of love’ with the festive period until becoming a dad.
‘When my daughter came along 21 years ago, I fell back in love with Christmas,’ he said. ‘I fell in love with the magic of it, the believing in Santa again.’
He said his mother has told him that three-year-old Ocean Torin is ‘even more of a handful than I was growing up’. ‘And my nickname was Damien – from The Omen – so that goes to show you what my son is like. But he’s a legend. I love him to bits.’
And baby daughter Fiáin-Luna is ‘the happiest human being that I’ve ever met in my life,’ the actor said. ‘She smiles all the time.’ The family is usually based in Chester, England, though there are some stints in Ireland for work – at the moment for an upcoming series to be shot in Dublin that Cooper will star in.
On juggling family and two acting careers Scanlan said things ‘just work out’.
‘We have no stress, no preconceived notions about how things are supposed to go. We kind of just go with the flow. That’s probably the best place to operate, not only when it comes to work, but in life.’
Scanlan had worked with Fool Me Once producer Nicola Shindler before for ITV drama Butterfly, and its writer Harlan Coben on Safe – another of the US novelist’s books to be adapted for screen.
‘I got an email from Harlan offering me the part without having read any of the scripts, and I didn’t need to read the scripts,’ he said. ‘I just needed to read Harlan’s name on the top of that email.’
‘He’s a legend. I love him to bits’
All eight episodes of Fool Me Once will be released on January 1 on Netflix.