The Young Offenders As season three of the hit comedy kicks off this week, Donal O’Donoghue meets Chris, Alex and Hilary
Conor and Jock are back and the young offenders fortunately don’t seem to have learned too much. Donal O’Donoghue talks with cast members Chris Walley, Alex Murphy and Hilary Rose
“I’d say ‘a heart-warming comedy set in Cork following the lives of two teenage boys and their mum!’”. Hilary Rose, star of e Young O enders, is giving her pitch for the hit comedy series. But as soon as she’s said her bit about the quirky coming-of-age drama she’s having second thoughts. “Oh god that sounds so boring. I wouldn’t watch that! Quick boys, can ye suggest something?” So Chris Walley (aka Jock) o ers his tuppence worth. “How about ‘two lovable young rogues that get up to mad stu and keep getting away with it and, um, they have a lovely family?” Over to you Alex Murphy (aka Conor). “Adam and Paul meets e Inbetweeners?” Hilary claps her hands. “Oh yes, I’d watch that!”
Last year, a lot of people watched e Young O enders on RTE and BBC ree, where it racked up record audiences. Now we’re back in the saddle again for season three as Conor and Jock continue to boldly cycle where you really shouldn’t: through a crowded English Market, down endless steps and into a neverending series of scrapes. As ever, they are pursued by their nemesis, Sergeant Healy (Dominic MacHale) while Conor’s long-su ering mother, Mairead (Rose), who has to repeatedly bail them out. e series, a spin-o from the hit indie 2016 lm of the same name, created and written by Rose’s husband, Peter Foott, is an endearing series of postcards celebrating growing up against the backdrop of Ireland’s second city.
Chris, Alex and Hilary are on video in their respective homes in Cork, emerging out of the hibernation of lockdown, when we speak. Even separated by Zoom the conversation crackles with craic and connectedness. “Chris had a huge beard last week,” says Alex (you’re not sure if he’s being serious, although Chris is sporting some facial hair). “Alex has become a musical wizard during lockdown,” counters Chris. You laugh. Is he joking? “No seriously,” says Chris. It seems that Alex did indeed take up the guitar during lming last year and is now pretty pro cient. “I did lots of writing and didn’t watch any television,” says Hilary Rose of her lockdown. “Oh yes I did watch Chris’s new lm.”
All three were largely lucky with the lockdown timing. Chris Walley had just wrapped the BBC crime drama, Bloodlands, in Belfast and Alex Murphy completed 58 of the planned 62 performances of e Lieutenant of Inishmore at the Gaiety eatre, before it went dark. “I packed enough clothes for a week in Cork but got trapped down here for ten weeks,” he says. “I had to do some online shopping.” Meanwhile Hilary Rose wrapped season two of Amy Huberman’, Finding Joy, last November before starting on a new TV drama, Smother, in Lahinch, Co Clare, before lming was halted in March. She kept busy writing, as did Chris (he has co-written a feature lm) and Alex played guitar. Season ree ( lmed back-to-back with season two last summer) opens with Jock’s ongoing struggles with fatherhood. Baby Star is proving a bit of a handful and Conor, who practices with a doll, is no help. Under the beady eye of Principal Barry Walsh, things could very quickly fall apart. So, when Billy Murphy comes up with a plan involving a van and some fancy televisions, what could possibly go right? And with that we’re back in a world of pudding bowl haircuts, shiny medallions and mad bike chases through the hilly streets of Cork where the stories get taller (watch out for a bizarre Terminator homage) and the young o enders continue to get away with murder, sort of.
“We were told at the start of each day ‘no swearing and no loud noises’ so everyone had to be on their best behaviour,” says Alex of working with the baby co-star (in fact it was two babies, as twins were used). “So, Chris and I became in a way the surrogate fathers to the
twins and became pretty good at it. We discovered that they liked The Beatles.” How? “We tried to distract them with music and Alex just happened to put on The Beatles which made them stop crying,” says Chris. The shoot was, as ever, a collaborative process with the actors occasionally improvising. “I rely a lot on the lads, especially when I’m a bit tired,” says Hilary Rose. “I just say to them ‘watch me and tell me if you think this is any good.’”
Season Three also sees Rose’s beleaguered single mother coming into her own. “Up to this point Mairead has been trying to corral the boys but now she cuts loose,” says Rose. “That was fun.” I bet. In one scene Mairead gets stuck into Sgt. Healy and not in a romantic way. Their fight scene (Mairead does the punching and the hapless Healy is the bag) looks mad. “Obviously you are trained to pull your punches but after doing it for nearly two hours from so many different angles, sometimes you might connect and I did,” says Rose. “I was like, “Dom I’m so sorry, I think I hit you there!’ And he was like ‘it’s fine Hilary, no problem.’ But I really like the physical stuff and would love to be in an action movie.”
Have they seen much of season three? “I haven’t finished watching season two,” says Hilary. “Ooops! Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.” Chris has seen most of the new series whereas Alex says, somewhat cryptically, that he is especially looking forward to a few montage sequences. So, do the lads hassle Hilary for advance information on the storylines? “Chris and Alex have a much better idea than me about what’s going to happen next,” she says. “They just call up Peter, whereas we try to avoid talking about The Young Offenders at home. Sometimes the lads tell me things like ‘this is happening’ and I’m like ‘what?’” Alex laughs. “Yeah that’s right Hilary, you’re going to get killed off!”
But how much longer can Walley (25) and Murphy (22) convincingly squeeze themselves into grey school sweaters as they come of age again and again and again? Well if the cast of The Inbetweeners managed to stave off the ravages of time into their thirties, why not these boys? “Sometimes the script might have Jock saying something like: ‘We can’t do that boy, we’re only 16’”, says Alex. “In that instance we’d have to tell the director that we can’t say that. The minute we say we’re 16, I can imagine the viewers thinking, ‘hmmm’. So, Conor and Jock are this ambiguous young age and no questions are asked. As for us, we’ll keep going as long as people like the show.”
We were told at the start of each day ‘no swearing and no loud noises’ so everyone had to be on their best behaviour