It’s a little odd. He’s in this amazing band... but to me, it’s just Larry
One took the music route and became part of one of the world’s top bands, the other went on to act. But to each other they’ll always just be cousins...
You play one pyscho and then everyone wants that pyscho. You have to steer things back
THEY were much like any other cousins growing up, hanging out together sharing their impossible dreams of making it famous.
But for the Mullens, Larry and Conor, their dreams did come true, with the band that Larry helped form going on to become one of the biggest in the world, while Conor has become a successful actor.
Not that fame has turned Larry’s head while Conor also remains just as grounded. ‘Ah, Larry’s great – we’re all fans of the band,’ says Conor. ‘We are very close in age, so growing up, U2 were the soundtrack to my youth.
‘It’s a little bit odd in some ways because on one hand, there’s this amazing band, and on the other you’re like: ‘well, that’s Larry’.
‘It’s quite bizarre, I suppose. I always say if everyone who said that they saw them at the (infamous 1979) Dandelion Market gig was really there, about 350,000 people would have seen them.
‘But I can at least say hand on heart that I saw them first in St. Vincent’s School Hall, and at Howth community centre!’
Like Larry, success didn’t exactly fall into his lap but all the hard work has paid off.
Conor grew up on the Northside of Dublin, where his parents, both pharmacists, had a chemist shop in Terenure.
Conor started work in sales for Guinness and, later, Wrigley’s chewing gum.
But he always dreamt of acting and took the leap to sign up with the Brendan Smith Academy of Acting.
‘When I joined the Academy way back then, there were two productions on and I ended up getting parts in both of them,’ he recalls.
‘I remember after being on the stage the first night there was such a buzz involved – the silence of people hanging on your every word. There was a real power in it and I thought: ‘I’d like to get more of that’.
‘I think even at that stage I knew that to be a movie star was way out of our realm.
‘We wanted to break into working, but anything beyond that was a bonus. When it came to training, it was a toss-up between London and New York, and I figured New York would be more exciting.’
Conor repaired to Manhattan to study acting at the renowned Neighbourhood Playhouse for two years. ‘It was pretty wild, yeah,’ he smiles. ‘I lived in Spanish Harlem, and worked in bars while doing acting classes at night.’
Fast forward and Conor is now a well-recognised character on our screens where he plays Superintendent Kevin Dunne in Red Rock, which is back on our screens on Virgin Media after a hiatus. Conor is delighted that it is. ‘I think what’s been going on for Dunne is dealing with the consequences of the Donna Burke (disappearance) case, and how he’s put his own neck on the line to help his friend Tom Callaghan.’.
‘The screws are definitely getting tighter and tighter, resulting in even more pressure.’
Ronan believes that Red Rock has come back even stronger after the break.
‘I say in all seriousness, the standard of the writing and acting, and directing, everyone has really stepped up to the plate. I think it’s the best stuff we’ve ever done.’
PRESENTED in 2015 as one of TV3’s flagship offerings, Red Rock was mooted as a soap with both style and grit.
A year later however, some cracks had started to show in the wider production. The show had been filmed at the one-time John Player factory in Dublin 8, and the sale of the premises in 2017 meant that the future of the soap hung in the balance.
Suddenly, the show with more plot twists and turns than Alton Towers was mired in its own offscreen drama.
Premiered as a twice-weekly soap, soon morphed into a darker, weekly crime drama. By August 2017, the crew and an ‘extremely disappointed’ cast were informed that the drama would cease production for the time being, and the filmed episodes due to start their run last autumn would not be broadcast until 2018.
It was a move that saved TV3 money and reportedly gave it breathing space while it worked out whether it wanted to make more episodes. In the end, cast and crew breathed a sigh of relief when the show returned to Irish screens earlier last year.
‘It was a real kick in the head,’ admits Ronan, referring to the announcement in August 2017. ‘We’d all just been through negotiations for the next season, and everything had been agreed. We were all ready to turn up for another eight-month stint of working, and suddenly we got notified that it wasn’t going to happen like that. It was a real shock, but then we started to look at it as the nature of the beast in TV land.’
Ronan and his castmates have every right to be proud of the end result, mind: the production is famed for being among one of the most gruelling and demanding in Irish TV.
That the show has had its ups and downs only adds to the determined, ambitious energy on set.
‘The demands are huge,’ he concedes. ‘We were shooting an hour of TV in four days, which is sort of unheard of. Everyone brings their Agame. It was just a question of keeping the head down and working our socks off.
‘It’s funny – you might think that when things are that fast, you might end up compromising on a little bit of time and quality, but that’s far from the case.
‘A lot of film and TV work is sitting around waiting anyway, and being ready to go when you get the call,’ he adds. ‘It’s really great that there’s not too much of that happening on this set.’
At 57, Ronan has put in more than his fair share of hard yards on stage and screen before appearing in Red Rock.
Among his most recognisable TV roles are as Stuart McElroy, Chrissie Williams’ abusive boyfriend in Holby City and Aiden Doherty in the BBC’s equestrian drama Rough Diamond. Heartbeat, Silent Witness, and the movies Ordinary Decent Criminal and The Tiger’s Tail round out a heaving CV.
A couple of years ago, he joked that he was close to being typecast as a psychopath: ‘You play one psycho, and then everyone wants that psycho,’ he smiles.
‘People see you do something and that’s what they think of. You do have to make a conscious effort to steer things back to perhaps something that’s a little less psycho. In more recent times, there seem to be quite a few figures of authority, like cops, cropping up (in role choices).’
Ronan has also been a mainstay of the Irish stage down the years, appearing regularly in the Abbey, Gate and Druid theatres.
Yet even as one of the most consistently hard-working actors in the business, he admits that the precarious life of a jobbing actor has its occasional downside.
‘It’s certainly more the case now than it was years ago when I was younger,’ he reflects. ‘When I was a much younger actor I thought going from one job to the next was kind of exciting, but then you get older and you end up with more responsibilities, like family. A lot of actors find it helps to have other strings to their bow.’
Ronan’s wife, Scot Fiona Bell, is another in-demand working actress, best known for her roles in Trainspotting (as Diane’s mum) and Gregory’s Two Girls.
The two met on the set of Soldier, Solder in 1991 and live in Howth with their two children Cassie (10) and Keir (6). Mullen has two daughters, Hannah and Georgia, from his first marriage.
Referring to juggling family life as two freelancers in the arts industry, he notes: ‘You just sort of get on with it. If it ever gets to the stage where (jobs) clash, we sit down and work out whose turn it is. One of the great benefits is that being an actor means there’s a lot of downtime, so you get to spend a lot of time with your kids.
IN Ronan’s case, he is one of the busiest voiceovers in the country (you might know his voice as that of the Irish speaking clock). And, adopting the maxim that if regular work isn’t forthcoming as quickly as one might like, it helps to create work of one’s own, he has been busy himself behind the scenes on his own projects.
‘I think a lot of the younger actors are much more open to that idea than my generation might have been, and you do see some really fantastic work coming out,’ he observes.
‘I do write, and have spent a lot of time trying to get my own movie off the ground, and I’ve started writing another project. It fell through a couple of years ago at the final hurdle but it’s now a question of just dusting myself off.’
Ronan was one of the 300 signatories on the now-infamous open letter written to Josepha Madigan this month.
The letter was signed by leading lights of Ireland’s artistic community, among them Ruth Negga, Aidan Gillen and Tom VaughanLawlor, expressing ‘their deep concern and dissatisfaction’ with how the Abbey is being run since its directors Neil Murray and Graham McLaren were appointed in 2016.
The letter noted that in 2016, the Abbey directly employed 123 actors in productions and 90 actors in readings and workshops. The following year, 56 actors were directed by the theatre, according to the letter, which is a 46% decrease. Freelancers in Ireland’s arts community, the letter said, had been ‘cast adrift’.
‘In theatre, the chance of you working 52 weeks of the year are slim, and it’s more important than ever that actors, designers, directors and theatremakers are looked after more than ever,’ says Mullen.
‘We are a real cultural asset to this country, and we have a great reputation for it, but ultimately we are wheeled out in front of the media but are pretty much cast aside afterwards. But there’s little support, financial or otherwise.
‘The argument at the moment is that the Abbey has done really well in terms of getting bums on seats, but our cultural capital should not be confused with commercial enterprise.’
Red Rock is on on Mondays at 9pm on Virgin Media One. Also, Virgin TV customers can get a first look at the next episode of Red Rock exclusively on Virgin TV On Demand.
Everyone claims to have seen U2 at the Dandelion Market. But I DID see them first