Lacy’s racy secret has come out!

The Dublin actress on battling vampires and burlesque dancing

ACTRESS Lacy Moore found herself in a situation where art was imitating life at the strt of the first lockdown. After bagging a role in the Amazon Prime vampire series Age of the Living Dead, Lacy was filming in Oxfordshire, England as the pandemic hit. ‘Age of the LIving Dead is like a modern dystopian twist on vampirism,’ she explains. ‘All the vampires are quarantined on one side of America, humans are on the other and the middle is called no man’s land where no-one is allowed to go. They just have this military base there waiting to strike the vampires on the east coast if they do break their quarantine.

‘They have a treaty where if the humans supply the vampires with blood then the vampires don’t eat the humans.’

In the series Lacy has the serious role of British Defence Minister Donahue who is watching America closely as the vampires break quarantine.

So the stakes were definitely high on set and behind the scenes as filming took place in England during March.

‘When I started filming my scenes was the moment everyone started freaking out about this novel virus that had come to Ireland and England,’ she says of the beginning of the pandemic. ‘And so the inspiration came from just looking out the window. We were the only production company to continue filming and everyone on set was genuinely petrified as we didn’t know if we were going to get sick or what might happen. So we all brought this feeling of tension and anxiety into the scenes

LACY with us.’ is glad she battled on as she has already been snapped up for series three as Minister Matilda Donahue returns. Before that, though, she will be filming a new movie with Pat Shortt, Dave Duffy and David McSavage in Co Mayo in February, pandemic allowing.

‘It’s a really dark, very funny comedy,’ she says. ‘I’ve never really played comic roles before and I’m opposite Pat Shortt so no pressure there.’

It has been a turbulent year for the Dubliner who revealed to me that she split from her long-term partner just before the first lockdown. But Lacy found that she’s enjoying the life of a singleton.

‘I was engaged to him for four years,’ she says. ‘We came to an end just before the lockdown. I have been by myself but I absolutely loved it because I really love my own company. It was really weird as I had spent four years living with this person and all of a sudden we were not together any more and I was alone. I got to know the people in my local chipper, Fusco’s, as I ended up talking to them every day as the cheese was coming off the cracker because I hadn’t talked to anyone in weeks!

‘Where I live in The Liberties is such a great community and there were a

few fitness instructors who got together and every Thursday to put together a two hour workout on the street for everyone —that was an absolute lifeline back then.’

The break up, she says, was amicable and she is happy on her own right now.

‘This is the first time in my adult life that I have been single for a while but I am absolutely loving that. All I can do now is concentrate on my career and I have no distractions.’

And a lot is happening for the plucky actress who left home at the age of 18 to learn her craft first in America and then Engl and before coming back to Dublin. And Lacy had quite a novel way of funding her acting classes, something her dad has never found out — until now.

‘I moved to San Francisco when I was 18 and I was working as a bicycle courier to pay for my acting classes,’ she reveals. But the money was really bad and a girl I’d met said she did a thing called burlesque dancing which she thought I would be good at and said I should do it with her. I loved performing so I said absolutely and ended up doing it for about three years.’

For three evenings a week, Lacy performed as part of her burlesque troupe in cabaret clubs, earning much more than she would have spending nine hours on her bike cycling up hills with her courier packages.

‘It also gave me a lot more time to rehearse my scenes at the theatre I was with,’ she says.

‘It was definitely an interesting job, usually in cabaret clubs where there would be comedy, music and spoken work and we would come out a few times a night and rehearse a routine. ‘It wasn’t nude you had clothes on and the most we stripped down to was 1940s underwear, bras, knickers, stockings and suspenders. If my father knew he would absolutely kill me!’

I fear your rather racy secret is out now, Lacy...