Tom Vaughan-Lawlor on his new IRA heist film: ‘If it was fictitious you’d say it was too much’

I meet Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, one of Ireland’s busiest actors, a week or so before the death of Rose Dugdale. That news has brought an unexpected topicality to Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s Baltimore. The slow, thoughtful film focuses on the late IRA volunteer’s role in a notorious art heist on Russborough House, in Co Wicklow, almost exactly 50 years ago. Vaughan-Lawlor is typically focused as one of Dugdale’s comrades. That story had faded a bit from consciousness, but it was familiar enough for the Daily Mail to publish an angry headline at the time of Baltimore’s world premiere.

“Oh really? I didn’t know,” Vaughan-Lawlor, says, interested.

Yes, indeed. “Why is a new film lionising the upper class deb from Devon who hijacked a helicopter to drop IRA bombs on an Army base?” the paper asked in October.

That’s one take on the picture. I can’t say I detected much lionisation. Imogen Poots plays Dugdale, born into an enormously wealthy English family, as flinty, intense and unyielding. She isn’t represented as a monster. But nor is she represented as a hero.

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“The film isn’t a biopic, and it’s not a film that’s going: this is a hero; this is a villain,” Vaughan-Lawlor, whose character is an “imagining”, explains. “It’s a woman who has made certain choices – who has a unique singularity, and a commitment. And I think that’s mirroring the uniqueness of artists. She’s reflecting all of these things. It is using the heist and the safe house to debate identity and class.”

Born in 1977, Vaughan-Lawlor was not around when Dugdale and her team burst into the home of Sir Alfred Beit. She could hardly have been a less likely volunteer: alumna of both a finishing school and St Anne’s College, Oxford, who, after obtaining a PhD, worked as an economist for the UK government. The paintings, valued then at £8 million (Lord knows how much now), included works by Gainsborough, Rubens, Vermeer and Goya. The world gawped at each unlikely turn. What did Vaughan-Lawlor know about it all?

“I have a vague recollection of the story through my dad,” he says. “The whole thing of it being the biggest art heist in history. Her journey from British aristocracy to being a Marxist IRA renegade. If it was a fictitious film you’d say it was too much. But it’s just an astonishing journey. I think what Christine and Joe do brilliantly is take the biopic and do something interesting with it. They wrap it in a heist genre and a kind of a 1970s new-wave style and mash it all together.”

The Dubliners, who emerged decades ago as visual artists under the name Desperate Optimists, have demonstrated that singular approach in features such as Helen, Mister John and Rose Plays Julie.

“Even with a tight budget and schedule, people are given time to do their work,” Vaughan-Lawlor says. “Their notes to you are very soul based. They are nuanced. They are contradictory on purpose, because they’re trying to keep you open and keep your choices active and offbeat.”

I talk to Vaughan-Lawlor at his home in Whitstable. He and his wife, the fellow actor Claire Cox, moved to the scenic Kent town some years ago to escape the bustle and ferment of London. They are now raising two children by the Thames Estuary. Vaughan-Lawlor was brought up in Dublin, son of the actor Tom Lawlor, and, though he lived through a good portion of the Troubles, he has admitted that it all seemed a long way away. “Growing up as middle-class kid in Dublin, it was just background noise,” he told this newspaper a few years ago. That was honest of him.

“That was true,” he says. “But I will go you one further. It’s really interesting being an Irishman living in the UK. If you take a straw poll of people in the UK, their understanding of Irish history, their understanding of the conflict there is just so vague. It’s astonishingly vague. Their understanding of Irish history is astonishingly vague. Their understanding of imperialism is extraordinary. People will ask me where I’m from. I’ll say ‘Dublin’ and they’re, like, ‘Is that North? Is that South?’”

He mentions a recent documentary series on the BBC.

“I think that’s why Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland was so revelatory. People watch and go: ‘Oh!’ That was true of me. But living here has opened my eyes to English people’s lack of understanding.”

Which makes it all the more interesting that Baltimore focuses on an Englishwoman raised on a vast estate in Devon. Class runs through the film. The way this version of Dugdale takes control speaks to her origins at the top of the heap.

“The roles within the cottage are mixed up,” Vaughan-Lawlor says of the gang in their hideout. “She’s sort of the hunter-gatherer. They make the tea. And they’re kind of in love with her. They kind of fear her. They definitely respect her. They’re wary of her. She’s English as well. It’s unsettled.”

In that earlier interview in The Irish Times, Vaughan-Lawlor said that, observing how tough it was for his dad, he elected never to go anywhere near the stage. We know how that worked out. What won him over?

“My dad exposed me to all the great actors of the 1970s,” he says. “And all the great actors of the 1950s and 1960s. I was around theatre all my life. I was around cinema. So it has always been there. I studied drama at Trinity [College Dublin]. I don’t know. Acting is a form of escape. It’s a form of understanding who you are. There is a search there. And I find that very appealing.”

The search eventually took him to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. It is always fun to look up who was at Rada with whom. If I have this right, his generation seems to have taken in the likes of Ben Whishaw, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Tom Burke. Not everyone who gets through the course makes it, but you do get the opportunity to connect with a network. Do graduates get competitive? Is it a trial?

“Drama-school training is a really, really tough place,” he says. “Or it was, anyway. It’s kind of like the marines. It’s nine to six every day, being tested and stretched. All about pushing the boundary of your comfort zone in terms of what you can do. They train you to be a thoroughbred, and I am very thankful for that.”

Let’s be honest. If we consider Vaughan-Lawlor as being part of a generation, a school, a training ground, it is not Rada that first comes into the mind but the RTÉ show Love/Hate. Running from 2010 until 2014, the crime series confirmed that domestic serial telly could compete with what the British and the Americans were doing. It also pushed forward a phalanx of talented young actors: Ruth Negga, Barry Keoghan, Charlie Murphy, Killian Scott, Robert Sheehan. Nobody did quite so well out if it as Vaughan-Lawlor. Nidge, the gang leader he invested with such salty energy, was a key symbol of Ireland in the 2010s. So what did the production team get right? How did that series end up highlighting so many smart performers?

“Well, Maureen Hughes cast it, and she was always on the lookout for new talent, for faces that hadn’t been on TV before,” he says. “Just people nobody knew. What was weird for me was that when I was in drama school there was zero screen-actor training. I hadn’t done any filming. So my training was watching Aidan Gillen and his technique on set. That was an interesting handing on of the baton. At Rada they are training you for the theatre. I had no idea.”

Nonetheless something clicked.

“Maybe that rawness lent itself to that particular show,” he says. “I think it did. There was the whole thing around us being middle-class Dubliners playing these parts. I get that. But that’s the job. And the job is to journey away from yourself and see what you can find. So it was an amazing experience.”

Vaughan-Lawlor, an amiable guy who seems merrily astonished at how well all this has gone, has certainly mastered the art of acting for the camera. He attacked the part of PJ Mara with relish opposite Aidan Gillen’s Charles Haughey in Charlie for RTÉ. He took on a deeply troubling character in Peter Mackie Burns’s gruelling film Rialto.

And there is something else. If you were to compile a list of the Irish actors whose films have generated the most revenue, he would be up at the top with Kerry Condon. Why? Because they both have credits in film from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Indeed, Vaughan-Lawlor can brag (not that he would) about being in a film that, for a while at least, held the title of highest-grossing of all time. His movements were captured and animated for the character of Ebony Maw, wiry villain and son to the mighty Thanos, in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

“It was all done on the Marvel lot in Atlanta, Georgia,” he says. “On my first day I was opposite all these movie stars. It’s a bit stick or twist. You’re going to deliver or you’re probably going to go home. That’s fair enough. That’s the job. So it’s quite enervating and quite exciting. It’s a test of your balls in a way, on loads of levels. They were all fabulous. They were all so generous, welcoming and easy-going. It was an amazing time. Surreal at times, but fun.”

So, despite being motion-captured, he was in and around the Iron Men and the Captains America? He’s not off in a grey cell with a handful of boffins.

“Oh, yeah. You’re in your mo-cap suit, with your dots all over it. But everyone else is there. Because that was the culmination of that MCU phase, everyone was there. It was extraordinary.”

That’s something they can’t train you for. Or maybe they do now.

“I think you can train people how to deal with nerves on stage. You have to husband your nerve and to hold it.”

There can be no happier feeling for an actor than to have two major projects landing at about the same time. A week after Baltimore opens, you can catch him opposite Bill Nighy in a touching film called The Beautiful Game. Directed by Thea Sharrock, whose Wicked Little Letters was released only a few weeks ago, the Netflix release concerns players in the Homeless World Cup.

“I knew very little about the Homeless World Cup,” he says. “When I came to England in the year 2000 there was a statistic that said three-quarters of the homeless in London were Irish. That has always stayed with me. I always listen out for Irish voices among the homeless in London. Who knows how things might have worked out? To play an Irish homeless person, to give them that tiny, tiny bit of recognition, felt right to me.”

Baltimore is on general release