Clare Dunne: ‘Let’s stop being obsessed with getting everything by the time you are f**king 30’

One day recently, Clare Dunne was lost in her own world, riding the Luas when she noticed another passenger looking at her with a glimmer of recognition. She has reached that peculiar place now where her role as Amanda Kinsella in the atmospheric Dublin crime drama Kin means that people sometimes do a double-take whenever she is out and about in the city.

Dunne’s portrayal in the first series was vivid: it was clear she was an accomplished actress; rangy and intense and capable of unexpected bursts of joy and lightness in a half-lit world. If people couldn’t figure why they hadn’t seen her before, it was because she was, in a sense, a newcomer. In the tram car, the woman grabbed her arm and, told her she was a fantastic actress and confided, as though it was their secret: “I love that character.”

Dunne has spent idle hours mulling over the number of women who have shared with her their empathy for Amanda, a woman negotiating the coded and treacherous world of organised crime, responding to a primal grief for her son.

“She is part of every man and woman; basically, the shadow side of things,” Dunne says. “Her cleverness and insight and instinct: that is what so intriguing about her. Because we all have that inside of us.

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Even though it seems like she is a bit crazy, she is actually just listening to her instinct and getting ahead of everyone because of it. She’s got that f**king weird savvy. She just gets that bit ahead because she has that instinct.”

“Weird savvy” is a perfect term for how Dunne herself has moved through an acting life which remains wonderfully beyond the reach of stereotypical categorisation. In 2021, she seemed to burst on to the public consciousness when her presence in Kin coincided with the delayed release of Herself, the strikingly original film of lone defiance which Dunne wrote and in which she played the lead role. The television show and her film were the only screen credits she had to her name: in a pleasing quirk of timing, both were released in the very same week.

If there is common trait between her depiction of Amanda in Kin and in Sandra, the dispossessed woman she plays in Herself, it’s that both bring a blazing integrity to how they interpret their respective worlds. It’s a quality that Dunne herself has in spades. From the outside, her arrival seemed to happen overnight, but its origins can be traced to a decade or more ago, when she was making her way as a young stage actress in England.

She sometimes thought of acting on screen as someone on land might observe a passing cruise ship: visible, but beyond reach. Her talent was clear: she was a regular in the all-female Shakespearean plays staged at the Donmar Warehouse by Phyllida Lloyd, the versatile director who balanced accomplished stage work with big-screen successes such as Mamma Mia and The Iron Lady.

When I was in those prisons, I met people who were really taken advantage of and were betrayed, and their lives are marked forever afterwards

The concept of an all-female Shakespeare caused a stir a decade ago. If Susanna Clapp, the Observer critic, gave the 2014 production of Henry IV a five-star review – praising Dunne’s depiction of Hal as “beautifully judged – reckless, suddenly earnest, Irish”, then other notices were less pleased, revealing a thinly concealed resentment at the feminisation of the holy scrolls of English drama.

“Some awful, awful stuff,” Dunne laughs now, chugging from a fizzy water bottle as she sits down to chat by screen link.

“In some reviews, it was just like: ‘Oh, girls trying to do something . . . like dogs walking on their hind legs’ kind of thing. But it was because we were breaking the mould. We were just so different. And it doesn’t mean that it was right, or that like suddenly we should only have all-female stuff all the time. It was just an exploration. But it was just so funny, looking back. It was ahead of its time.”

In addition to regular theatre acting, Dunne also toured the north of England with a group staging workshops in women’s prisons during those years. It was an experience that had a primal impact on her. She is chatty by nature, and the storyteller in her was interested in how the prisoners she worked with had landed in their predicament. The precariousness of their fortune stayed with her, and it helped to answer for her a question that had nagged her even before she started drama school in Cardiff: what is acting for?

“When I was in those prisons, when you have someone who has been through something huge in life – maybe they’d been part of gangs or were caught delivering drugs when they were so innocent at the time – and I have met people who were really taken advantage of and were betrayed, and their lives are marked forever afterwards. Well, to have them act out from Shakespeare what it feels like to be betrayed, ah, f**k . . . the hair on the back of your neck will stand up. Unreal. And that is when you realise that storytelling and us, what it can do in a room for people, that transformed my outlook on acting and storytelling for ever.”

This, to her, was the true point of Shakespeare: the centuries-old words and plotlines and famous lines transmitting an energy at an authentic level, rather than just for pure performance in the rarefied surrounds of London’s famous theatres.

“The thing about working in a prison; the first thing you realise is the equality of everyone on the planet,” Dunne says.

“Shakespeare was writing for all the guys down on the ground that were in the shit and piss, and the middle classes on the next level, and then the Queen watching them from her little sanctuary. He wrote for everyone. Which is something you have to remember. And that is something that I certainly try to do when I am writing stuff.”

I would never try to hide my accent. I’m just worried sometimes that people won’t understand me

Dunne speaks in a broad Dublin accent and is an ace imitator of all accents: when she’s explaining how the Irish accent can facilitate the Bard, she moves without pause from a cut-glass Received Pronunciation of the standard thespian to a lost agrarian Cornwallian dialect.

“The really rounded words sound brilliant in Shakespeare – we get right around the Rs and rounded words like they do in Cornwall so it can sometimes sound great with Irish. But I am obsessed with accents. I love them. When I did a tour of America with Druid, I used to get local people to read to me just to record their accents.”

Dunne’s everyday vernacular is urban and street-casual. Every so often, on interview duty, she scolds herself if she feels she has moved away from it – and her sisters and friends let her know it.

“I remember I did a radio thing with Ryan Tubridy and afterwards, I thought: ‘Oh, I really poshed up there.’ But it’s like a tic,” she sighs. “I would never try to hide my accent. I’m just worried sometimes that people won’t understand me.”

Like all true Dubs, she is unabashedly crazy about the city and, like many, is frustrated by the sense of the civic mechanisms grinding to a halt. On the day we speak, the news bulletins and headlines are filled with the governmental end to the eviction ban. It’s a subject which contains strong echoes of the storyline in Herself and is also relevant to Dunne as a citizen.

She remains engaged in society. When she returned to Dublin, she learned that she hadn’t been the first in her family to perform in prisons: curiously, an aunt of her mother’s had taught theatre in Mountjoy for years. Dunne has maintained the tradition, writing to Mountjoy to volunteer for classes, then inveigling a sister and a cousin to come along with her to give hip-hop classes in the Dóchas Centre.

She is due to return in the near future for other planned workshops. For Dunne, linking dramatic performance to what is happening in the world is the only way to make sense of it. The eldest of six girls, she attended drama school and heard plenty of encouraging world about her dramatic potential but was wary of the artifice and point of that world.

“It was there from the beginning because I never really understood what acting could do. Genuinely, I was very suspicious of acting. I was unsure of it, but people kept telling me I should look at it.”

If there was any sense of fate about the path she took, it was in reading, as a teenager, Other People’s Shoes: Thoughts on Acting, the 2004 memoir by the vastly accomplished English stage and screen actress Harriet Walter. It was the uncertain moments of Walter’s early career that intrigued Dunne – and the accompanying fearlessness.

There’s a short, vivid interview with Walter on YouTube in which she shares what proved to be the turning point in her theatrical life. It was the 1970s; an unproven Walter broke free from fringe and political theatre, only to find herself agentless and without work for months. She’d happened to read Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist when she saw a notice advertising casting for a dramatisation of the very same book. It was serendipitous. And she was cast. “And it was after four months of thinking I was never going to be an actress,” Walter remembers. “It is when you are absolutely rock bottom and you think it is the end of it all, you just never know with this job.”

Of course, Walter was speaking from hindsight, after decades of being lavished with accolades and a stunning run of roles. But her point stands: in the moment, she had to persevere with blind faith.

Flash forward to Dunne in the precise same place two decades later. After graduating from drama school in Cardiff, she found herself on stage with Walter; up close to someone she revered. By late 2014, she was trying to pass through that glass wall between stage and screen, subjecting herself to the ‘pilot season’ auditions in New York. “Basically, traipsing around to any audition your agent can put you up for,” she says with a shrug.

It’s as gruelling and lonely as it sounds. But it was in New York that the origins of Herself came into being. Dunne was on the phone with one of her dearest friends in Dublin, whose personal circumstances threatened her with homelessness. The conversation wouldn’t leave Dunne: in the evenings, she found herself plotting and fantasising ways to circumvent the problem. Couldn’t she just get a house built herself?

She took it further, contacting local councils and architects when the dramatic and social intersections of the story compelled her to turn it into a film drama. She had read enough formulaic scripts to know that this was a powerful story; she knew the woman, the voice, the narrative arc. And so she began to write.

That rage in me, that little kid in me, saying: ‘I just know we can do this better’

It is easy to see the next part as fated. Her script was still in first draft stage when she got an email from Sharon Horgan apologising for being unable to attend a play in which Dunne was involved. It was a slight crack in that pane of glass that she had the savvy to recognise: Dunne replied and also enclosed a draft of Herself with attendant apologies, saying that while she knew Horgan would be too busy to read it herself, perhaps she could place it with the manuscripts in her production company. Horgan responded to the effect that yes, she was up the walls but that she would pass it on or look at it at some stage.

Shortly afterwards, Dunne received a second email from Horgan. Ignore the first message! She had opened the screen play and was hooked. She wanted to help get it produced. Not long after that, Phyllida Lloyd said she wanted to direct it. Element Pictures came on board to produce.

It sounds like one of those stories of aligning of stars. But nothing was inevitable. Horgan might not have had the curiosity – or time – to click open on the screenplay. And there were many years during which Dunne was working and refining the script, learning as she went, in that blind faith that it would somehow make a way into the world. “Or you could call it something else,” she laughs.

And even if it didn’t happen, working on it gave her a daily purpose. The fuel – the sense of anger at her friends’ predicament – kept her going. “That rage in me, that little kid in me, saying I just know we can do this better,” is how she describes the adrenalin behind the project.

“When I was growing up, finding out about pollution, or how there was a First and Third World, I used to be like: it can’t be like this! I got what I wanted in the end; not only did I get to act on screen, but I also got to write a story and go on a journey that really matters. So sometimes I would say to other actors or writers or directors who are out there is let the challenges teach you.

“It’s a bit like that quote let every crisis be an opportunity. And I am not Pollyanna at all. Because I have cried a lot of tears and had those moments- like, where the finance fell through the first time, we went to shoot Herself. I moved back in with my parents for a few months in my early 30s. I have . . done. It. All,” she says, raising her hands in mock surrender.

“So I’m not standing here going: ‘Sure, everything will be grand lads. Just keep going!’ Because it is f**king hard. And that spark and that will on the journey are the spark and will within all of us. And that is why we love stories. Even if someone is telling a story at a party about a deadly thing that happened to them, you go with them.”

If I’m honest, like I was starting to go: ‘Oh, no, I’m not really getting anywhere in these auditions’

Herself is a unique film: the story of a Dublin cleaner and young mother who is serially battered by her husband, leaves and sets out to build a house of her own with the help of a wealthy employer (Harriet Walter) and a gruff kindly contractor (Conleth Hill). The praise was general: “a feminist movie with a Sisyphean dimension that is disquietingly universal’ was the closing line in the New York Times while the Evening Standard headline chimed ‘This radical fairy-tale is destined for great things.’ Dunne played the lead role of Sandra at Lloyd’s insistence: who else could feel for the character as Dunne would? She was, in essence, playing a version of the real-life friend. She’d been carrying this story with her for a decade.

“Like, she had to write on a form that she was technically homeless, on feel a failure and shame and anger at the whole thing,” Dunne says of her friend’s circumstance.

“And that just really got to me. And then I was fantasising on her behalf.”

Still, she was genuinely surprised and thrilled to learn of Lloyd’s insistence that she take the main that screen role.

“Because if I’m honest, I was starting to go: ‘Oh, no, I’m not really getting anywhere in these auditions’,” she says now.

“This was back when things were even harsher on women and looks. Everything felt a bit harsh, you know, like doors were really closed. And yet, I knew in my heart that like, there are people out there just like me who don’t base everything on looks or how many followers you have.”

[ 2021: Herself: Delayed portrayal of housing crisis loses none of its relevance ]

Herself had been filmed but not yet released when the auditions took place for Kin. Seeing the edit convinced director and co-creator Peter McKenna that he had found his Amanda Kinsella. Dunne was a revelation. The new series will draw her closer to the coalface of dealings and stand-offs with the clashing families and interests in the series.

Meanwhile, she has just finished her directorial debut, One Good Conversation, a comedy drama she wrote based on a relationship formed from what was intended as a one-night stand. She is currently filming another acting project and has reached a point where she can appreciate the off-beat path she has taken.

“I’ve been working with Hazel Doupe recently. Oh God, she is absolutely phenomenal, beautiful actress. And a wise old soul. And I’m looking at her at 20 going, when I was 20, I was not as old as her. I don’t know that if I would have been as able personally. And maybe she had a different way in and was acting from when she was younger whereas I didn’t have any access to that world.

“So, I do also think that everybody gets their moment when they get their moment. It doesn’t matter when. And for God’s sake, especially the girls, let’s stop being obsessed with getting everything by the time you are f**king 30. Like you have to look young and beautiful forever. Helen Mirren has been saying forever, there is too much obsession over that as well.”

I’m just about able to afford the rent. There is that thing of: ‘I’m not going to be able to afford to live in Dublin’

There’s a sense now that Dunne’s creative life could flare in any direction. Since Kin and Herself, other appearances have followed, including a small role in the Matt Damon period drama, The Last Duel, which was filmed in Ireland.

She has the normal concerns of many Dubliners in their 30s, trying to find security in their city.

“I’m just about able to afford the rent,” she says. “I think I’m going to get my mortgage people in a week or two but there is that thing of: I’m not going to be able to afford to live in Dublin. I am full of those questions. And I’m a working actor and writer who people probably view as: ‘She’s doing very well for herself.’

But Dunne can’t help having a soft spot for the old place. The city forms a familiar backdrop in Kin, sometimes magisterial in the night shots, sometimes murky and ominous in the daylight. And whether she is in character or simply getting about the city, Dunne is at home: a Dubliner and creative force with the spirit to try and change things.

“I love Dublin. I really do. I get so frustrated. The more I go away, the more I appreciate the richness of here, and see what we have here. And it’s time to cop on to that! Look at what is possible. I saw that brilliant exhibition in the Science Gallery a few months ago,” she says, her voice quickening at the memory.

“Where all these deadly architects came up with all these amazing solutions to the housing crisis. Occupying old buildings. Old churches that are run-down. And it was like: ‘This is the new world. Let’s get on with it!’”

Series two of Kin starts on RTÉ One on Sunday, March 19th, at 9.30pm