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By his own admission, the 27-year-old Irish actor has benefited from a series of very fortuitous breaks — just don’t ask him to sing.
By Scott Roxborough
Europe Bureau Chief
Éanna Hardwicke will be the first to admit, he’s had a lot of lucky breaks.
Several fortuitous moments led to the 27-year-old Irish native being named among the 2024 European Shooting Stars, the select group of 10 up-and-coming actors to be feted at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival and who will benefit from a four-day program (from Feb. 16 to 19) of networking and professional schmoozing events with international agents and producers.
Hardwicke was just 13 and doing youth theater in Cork when he was cast alongside Ciarán Hinds and Aidan Quinn in Conor McPherson’s Irish-set horror film The Eclipse.
“I thought I’d made it,” he says, chuckling. “Age 13, and I thought I could go professional. Then … nothing. So I ended up going to drama school.”
Then, a week before he finished at Dublin’s Lir Academy of the dramatic arts, Hardwicke got cast in Lorcan Finnegan’s art house sci-fi feature Vivarium as the sort-of-son of Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots, who play a young couple caught in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighborhood of identical suburban homes.
“Again, I got very lucky,” says Hardwicke. “It never crossed my mind that my first job out of drama school would be this amazing sci-fi thriller/Twilight Zone-esque thing we’d shoot in Belgium and Ireland for a summer. It was a really great entry point into cinema because while I loved watching films, I didn’t have any particular awareness of how they were made. Then, first job, I got to work with a brilliant director with a very strong vision. It was like a whole new education all summer long.”
Coming off of Vivarium, Hardwicke got cast in the BBC miniseries Normal People that featured two then-unknown actors: a pre-Aftersun, pre-All of Us Strangers Paul Mescal and a pre-Where the Crawdads Sing Daisy Edgar-Jones. Released on Hulu in the U.S., it picked up four Emmy nominations.
Just over a year later, Hardwicke was up for his first lead — as Cian in Robert Higgins and Patrick McGivney’s Irish drama Lakelands, a pro athlete who is attacked on a night out and suffers a potentially career-ending injury. Hardwicke got the part.
“It was just potluck,” he says. “I felt a huge affinity with Cian because there’s lots that we share. It’s my generation in Ireland, and Ireland’s a small enough country that I felt I knew Cian, I knew his voice and could access it.”
Lakelands falls in the niche of last year’s Oscar contender The Quiet Girl or with 2024 Berlinale opener, the Cillian Murphy-led drama Small Things Like These: All are deceptively small but precisely observed stories of rural Ireland, past and present. In Lakelands, as Hardwicke struggles to come to terms with his injury, he is forced to question traditional concepts of masculinity. Cian becomes a stand-in for Ireland itself, for a country reaching for a new identity as the world around it changes.
“These are all brilliant examples of the way Irish film is going,” says Hardwicke. “There seems to be a lot of interest in these stories. Just look at An Cailín Ciúin [The Quiet Girl], which had great success at the Berlinale two years ago and went all the way to the Oscars.”
But Hardwicke has also been willing to leave his comfort zone in the Irish provinces to embody characters far from his personal experience. In the BBC true-crime drama The Sixth Commandment, he plays Ben Field, a young student who gaslights an older teacher, Peter Farquhar (Timothy Spall), into thinking he was in love with him before murdering him. In Paramount+s’ The Doll Factory, he plays Silas Reed, a shop owner with a sideline in vivisection and taxidermy.
“Both of those roles required a gigantic leap,” says Hardwicke. “I think acting can be a more dynamic thing than merely expressing your personality, your biography, who you are onscreen. … But maybe that’s just me rationalizing why casting directors have picked me to play some really horrible people.”
Next up, Hardwicke will take a crack at playing normal — or as normal as a BBC TV producer can be — as Stewart Maclean, in A Very Royal Scandal. The Amazon miniseries revolves around the events surrounding Prince Andrew’s infamous 2019 interview about his links to Jeffrey Epstein that was such a public relation disaster it marked the royal’s final fall from grace. Michael Sheen plays Prince Andrew and Ruth Wilson his interviewee, Emily Maitlis.
“It’s something completely different again,” says Hardwicke. “Basically, I just want to work, with good scripts and good people, wherever the story takes me.”
With one major exception. With all the luck in the world, Hardwicke says he’ll never land a role in a musical.
“It’s a common misconception that all Irish are in tune, but I’m definitely not,” he says. “I know we’re in a great era of musicals, and I love musicals. But sadly it’s not part of my skill set.”
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