The talented Mr Hardwicke: Is actor set to follow fellow Cork man Murphy into the big time?
Role as murderer in creepy drama might help Éanna scoop Bafta award
Ireland may yet look back on 2024 as the year when two dapper gents from Cork dominated the Baftas. In February, Cillian Murphy collected a well-deserved Best Actor trophy at the 77th British Academy Film Awards in London for his triumphant central turn in Christopher Nolan’s
Oppenheimer.
Nobody else came close, and you’d have been a fool to think otherwise.
The TV Baftas, which will be presented tomorrow night at London’s Royal Festival Hall, are trickier to call.
For whatever reason, the small-screen competition is considerably tighter.
All Irish eyes, however, are again on the acting categories. In the Best Actress field, the inimitable Sharon Horgan is nominated for her terrific lead turn in Jack Thorne’s acclaimed BBC drama,
Best Interests.
Two Irish stars appear in the Best Female Comedy Performance category: Belfast’s Róisín Gallagher (for The Lovers) and Cork’s Máiréad Tyers for her performance in Extraordinary.
Meanwhile, the Best Supporting Actor race is wide open. Will the award go to Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen? Maybe.
What about Jack Lowden for Slow Horses? It’s a possibility. Happy Valley’s Amit Shah could very well beat them to it. But wouldn’t it be something if Éanna Hardwicke, a tremendous talent from Rathcooney, Co Cork, emerged victorious?
Hardwicke is nominated for his deeply unsettling turn as notorious British murderer Ben Field in Sarah Phelps’s disturbing true-crime mini-series, The Sixth Commandment, a story so disquieting that Hitchcock could not have come up with it.
A win would be nice, but the nomination alone tells us Hardwicke (27) is already on his way to the top. He has worked hard to get there.
Born in St Luke’s and raised in Glanmire, Hardwicke was just 10 when he decided he wanted to become an actor.
He followed, like so many, the traditional youth theatre path. In 2009, he had his first screen role in Conor McPherson’s eerie supernatural drama The Eclipse, opposite Ciarán Hinds and Aidan Quinn.
As a teenager, he served his time at the Cork School of Music and, in 2018, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in acting from Trinity’s Lir Academy.
He was performing in the end-of-year play when he received a call from Lorcan Finnegan.
The acclaimed Irish filmmaker was shooting his next horror feature, a sci-fi satire called Vivarium, and he wanted Hardwicke to play the grownup son of a pair of frazzled suburban millennials.
The film had already acquired Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots – you don’t say “no” to these things – and a nervous Hardwicke went to Belgium the following week to start production.
“I remember my first scene on the shoot was with Jesse,” Hardwicke told the Irish Examiner in 2020. “He said, ‘Ninety per cent of our job is to forget the camera is there. You’ve done all your work about character and story and then, on the day, you’re just trying to get into a place where we forget that it’s there’.”
Finnegan’s film deserved to be huge, and it deserved a cinema release. Alas, the pandemic played havoc with the rollout, and Vivarium debuted on digital platforms in March 2020.
Regardless, Hardwicke’s face soon dominated Ireland’s television lockdown schedule, and it was for his compelling turn as a lonely teenager in Lenny Abrahamson’s remarkable adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People that he received rave notices.
Hardwicke played Rob Hegarty, a forgotten friend of Paul Mescal’s Connell, who struggles to adapt to the real world following the boys’ secondary school graduation.
In the end, it’s Rob’s suicide that encourages Connell to take positive steps towards mending his own mental health. A delicate subject, and an inherently tricky role, but Hardwicke played it brilliantly.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get to play something where I know the role so intimately,” he told the Irish Independent in 2022.
“Rob was the same generation as me, had the same problems and desires and thoughts and feelings as I had. I could even hear his voice.”
Television has been good to Hardwicke. He played a thoughtful garda in Kate O’Riordan’s Smother and a troubled taxidermist in the Paramount+ mini-series The Doll Factory, based on the international bestseller by Elizabeth Macneal.
Next, he will lend support to Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson in Prime Video’s three-part drama A Very Royal Scandal, which dramatises the events leading up to Emily Maitlis’s BBC Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew.
In July 2023, BBC One aired The Sixth Commandment, a four-part miniseries about the 2015 murder of retired Buckinghamshire schoolteacher Peter Farquhar.
Hardwicke played his killer, Ben Field, a nasty, sociopathic creep who seduced, gaslighted and poisoned his old teacher before moving on to Farquhar’s neighbour, Ann Moore-Martin.
Written by Sarah Phelps, The Sixth Commandment handles such extraordinarily grim subject matter with care and professionalism, and two of its central players, Timothy Spall and Anne Reid, are also nominated for Bafta TV awards this weekend.
For Hardwicke, the series marked his British television breakthrough.
His performance is electrifying, a career-making turn that, though occasionally difficult to watch, is impossible to turn away from.
Hardwicke has already won a Royal Television Society Programme Award and an Ifta for his efforts, and his Bafta nomination confirms what many have believed for quite some time: a star has arrived.
We saw it, too, in his best film to date, 2023’s Lakelands. Written and directed by Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney, this clever, soulful drama tells the story of a Longford footballer (Hardwicke’s Cian Reilly) destined for GAA superstardom.
The boy has something special, but his behaviour off the pitch is a constant worry to his nearest and dearest, including his father Diarmuid (Lorcan Cranitch) and his old pal Grace (Danielle Galligan).
One night, Cian is attacked outside a nightclub and suffers a nasty blow to the head. The injury won’t go away, and a straight-talking doctor delivers the bad news: his GAA career is over. Hardwicke is sensational as a young man struggling to find his way.
Earlier this year, he was one of 10 upand-coming actors to receive a European Shooting Stars Award at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale).
The European Film Promotion jury was most impressed with him, saying: “For his role as a Gaelic footballer in the nominated film Lakelands... the jury recognises Éanna’s ‘star quality’ and lauds his performance, as ‘nothing short of gripping, skilfully revealing layers of sensitivity beneath a seemingly tough exterior’.”
High praise, indeed, and it’s worth remembering that Domhnall Gleeson, Ruth Negga and Andrew Scott are all previous Shooting Stars recipients. I strongly suspect Hardwicke is about to join their ranks.
‘His performance is electrifying, a career-making turn, it’s impossible to turn away from’
The 2024 Bafta TV Awards ceremony is on BBC One tomorrow at 7pm