The luck of the Irish
Irish actor Daryl McCormack might have been a sports star. Instead, he’s playing a sex worker opposite Emma Thompson, fulfilling his grandad’s movie dream, writes
You wouldn’t think of Daryl McCormack, 29, as a chameleon of an actor. Chiselled face, green eyes, leading man material, sure, but not a shapeshifter.
In the film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, however, he looks like a guy in an advert for a £60,000 watch. In the opening shots, it’s faintly grating, like being sold the story rather than told it; as it moves on, you realise his selfassurance and slick, complicated perfection is just part of the texture and subtlety.
In Peaky Blinders, which he joined in season five, he looks, let’s just say for brevity, pretty comfortable with a gun in his hand, and in person, the Irishman looks open, unassuming and affable, as if he can’t wait to help you with something. Versatility is a constant theme, and not just in the roles he chooses: had he fulfilled his promise as a 12yearold in Tipperary, he would have been a champion hurler.
‘‘I had a golden era in hurling,’’ he says, with exaggerated sincerity, ‘‘and then I didn’t hit my growth spurt the same way other young men did. That peak and then the fall . . . my ego at 14 was taking a hit. But I lived to tell the tale.’’
He fleshes this out with piquant details, as if I might not believe him. I definitely do.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande sounds like a young actor’s anxiety dream: a fulllength feature with no other actor besides McCormack and Emma Thompson, no set besides a single, characterless hotel room, and a challenging premise that can’t afford to put a foot wrong. There is nowhere to hide in this movie; every word, every gesture, has to be perfect.
Thompson plays a retired teacher, recently widowed who, after a lifetime of uninspiring sex with one man, hires McCormack as a sex worker. At the start, she worries constantly at the ethical dimension of her decision, as if she’s picking a scab — surely he’s being exploited, doesn’t he mind, what terrible thing must have occurred to make him do this, who’s the oldest person he’s ever had sex with, why is he so vain?
There’s a lot of levity to McCormack’s performance, but also pride and selfrespect.
‘‘I really didn’t want to put on my shoulders that I would be representing sex workers. To me, that was too much of an undertaking for one man.’’
He sometimes has quite a courtly turn of phrase, the gift I imagine of really only concentrating at school when he was playing hurling or doing Shakespeare, then going straight to Dublin Institute of Technology, and afterwards to the Gaiety School of Acting, the National Theatre School of Ireland.
‘‘Of course, I was exposed to
Irish actor Daryl McCormack and Emma Thompson in a scene from
the idea of the degradation of sex workers, seeing those stereotypes, because it’s shown in films and stories so often. And then I spoke to real sex workers via Zoom, and I met people who had gone on their own individual journey, found their own sense of authority, power and identity. I
was speaking to people who weren’t victimised, who had a sense of who they were and who found a lot of joy and vocation in what they did.’’
Thompson’s jangly, almostunwatchable anxiety and bodyshame recede, and she becomes very taskdriven: she wants oral sex both ways, she wants it doggystyle, she wants it all in their second session because he’s quite expensive; it’s so human that it’s excruciating, and her brusque todo list is another mask.
‘‘I think you see him opening doors for her and then saying it’s safe to step through,’’ he says.