Kerry Condon: ‘Sometimes people look at me but they can’t place me. And that’s what I want to be – an actor’

At a moment when other Irish stars have signed up to represent the likes of Gucci (Paul Mescal), Louis Vuitton (Saoirse Ronan) and Versace (Cillian Murphy), Kerry Condon makes for strikingly unaffected company. “I just want to be a character actor,” she says with a shrug.

Condon has long eschewed the limelight in favour of simply “doing the work”, as she put it the last time the two of us spoke. She has no interest in the private lives of the actors she admires, she says today, and in turn expects no interest in her domestic sphere. Her romantic entanglements, if any, are Hollywood’s best-kept secrets. Her brother accompanied her to the Oscars last year, after she was nominated as best supporting actress for her role in The Banshees of Inisherin, and she dedicated the Bafta she won for the part to her horses. “I really like being alone,” she says.

Condon has plenty of opportunity for that on her farm near Seattle, in Washington state, where she keeps nine rescue horses, including one she adopted after filming the HBO series Luck with Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte. A far-flung horse farm is on brand for Condon, as her father bred horses when she was growing up, in Co Tipperary, and her cousin Richard is a jockey.

A life away from her professional base, in Los Angeles, is also a necessity for the fiercely private star. “I don’t get recognised on the street,” she says. “Look at me today: I’m blond. I look different from role to role. Sometimes people look at me but they can’t place me. And that’s what I want to be: an actor. That’s what the job is.”

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Condon has been shooting a Star Wars series, Skeleton Crew, with Jude Law for Disney+, as well as a Formula 1 drama in which she appears alongside Brad Pitt and Javier Bardem. As of this weekend she’s appearing in the equally starry In the Land of Saints & Sinners, a 1970s-set action film, shot in Co Donegal and Dublin, that opens with an ill-timed IRA car-bombing in Belfast that kills three children. The terrorists, led by Condon’s fearsome, sweary Doireann, take to the hills – or, rather, cliffs – to lie low in Glencolumbkille. It’s a plan that puts Doireann at loggerheads with a crumpled war veteran and occasional hitman played with the familiar gruff charm of Liam Neeson.

“I just had a lot of fun trying to figure out ways to be menacing to my costars,” says Condon. “Poor Conor [MacNeill] and Seamus [O’Hara]. I gave them an awful time. And then I was opposite Liam, who’s very tall and imposing. So that came with challenges. I had to figure out ways I could be intimidating to Liam Neeson, who is maybe twice the size of me.”

[ In the Land of Saints and Sinners: Liam Neeson is a gruff, gunslinging hero in this Donegal western ]

In the Land of Saints & Sinners is the third feature from the director and Clint Eastwood collaborator Robert Lorenz. Its script, by the Irish writers Mark Michael McNally and Terry Loane, accordingly takes cues from the western. There’s something of the well-worn friendship between Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in Unforgiven in the relationship between Neeson’s Finbar and Ciarán Hinds’s local garda. Colm Meaney’s crime boss could easily be parachuted into an empire-building western. There’s even an extended bar-brawl shootout before the final credits roll.

Condon’s character shares more DNA with Miranda Richardson’s dogged assassin in The Crying Game or Rose McGowan’s IRA intelligence officer in Fifty Dead Men Walking. Although Doreann claims she is “fighting for a free Ireland”, Condon says that she never viewed the film through a political prism. “I tried to steer away from that,” says the 41-year-old. “I don’t think that that’s what this character or this movie is about for me. I think that’s a ‘by the way’. She is really going after Liam Neeson’s character, because her brother goes missing and she suspects that Liam is the culprit. So she has a personal vendetta. That’s what I was going on. I thought of the film as a thriller. It’s not about the Troubles.”

The making of the film was part of an especially scenic time for Condon, who shot it back to back with The Banshees of Inisherin. “It was my first time being in Donegal,” says the actor, whose Oscar nomination was one of nine for Martin McDonagh’s movie. “I’d never been there before. It was so, so beautiful, and the people were so, so kind. Banshees hadn’t come out yet. I went back to make this film three months after spending time on Achill and the Aran Islands. This was another part of Ireland that was just as beautiful and just as magical.”

[ Paul Mescal and Kerry Condon invited to join Academy ]

Condon received her first film-related paycheck when she reviewed The Lion King for a local radio station. She was 10. (“I thought it was really good,” ran the glowing notice.) By her teens she was writing to directors, looking for work. It paid off. At 16 she appeared in two episodes of Ballykissangel, the BBC drama from the late 1990s, which was shot in Co Wicklow. She made her feature-film debut in 1999, as Frank McCourt’s consumptive first girlfriend in Alan Parker’s film of McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. She was an object of affection for Cillian Murphy and Adrian Dunbar in the 2001 film How Harry Became a Tree and two years later scored hits with Intermission and Ned Kelly (starring the late Heath Ledger).

It’s not a bad haul for someone who describes herself as a shy kid. “I just was going to be an actress,” Condon says. “For my whole life. Actors talk about getting bit by the acting bug. I don’t remember any sense of this. It was like a preordained thing. I don’t even remember when I first had the notion or why. It was always on my mind. I was going to do it. I hadn’t got a plan. But I was thinking globally from the start.”

Condon’s best-known performances – whether as Octavia of the Julii, sister of the Roman emperor Augustus, in the HBO series Rome or Jonathan Banks’s widowed daughter-in-law in Better Call Saul – are defined by precision and small, subtle movements.

She is, tellingly, self-taught. She was, she recalls, the only person in the cast not to have attended drama school when, in 2006, she played Ophelia in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet. (Condon was the youngest actor to appear in the role for the company.)

“I don’t know if the group dynamic of drama school would have suited me very well,” she says. “I like being by myself and I’m also quite competitive, so I don’t know if it would have worked for me. It was also too expensive. I didn’t have the money even if it was an option. I was younger than everybody else at the RSC. But it was still really enjoyable. It was a hard time, because it was a lot of work, but it was a fun time too. It was so exciting to be getting paid for being an actress. I never thought I would be paid to do something I loved doing.”

She formed two lasting relationships during this period, with McDonagh and with the actor David Wilmot. In 2001 McDonagh cast her as Mairead in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s premiere production of his play The Lieutenant of Inishmore. As well as The Banshees of Inisherin, she has subsequently collaborated with him on The Cripple of Inishmaan and the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

“In hindsight, Jesus Christ, I got so lucky,” says Condon. “I had Martin McDonagh and David Wilmot, who are two of my best pals to this day. They were with me on that journey. I was only a teenager, and they were a bit older than me. That helped me navigate everything, and I learned so much from being with them. I learned a lot about movies from Martin. David taught me a lot about music and helped me be a better actress. I was so blessed, because Martin gave me an amazing role. And then, at that time of my life, for the play to transfer to New York was crazy. Every night amazing actors were coming to see the play. It was a big hit in New York, and it got me a lot of attention. I had to shave my hair. That taught me a lot about committing to a project.”

When he picked up his Golden Globe for best actor last year, Colin Farrell singled Condon out among his Banshees of Inisherin costars, referring to her as an overnight sensation after 20 years. It’s an odd way to think about the woman who is the most successful Irish actress at the box office. Liam Neeson is our reigning champion, having appeared in films that have taken a total of €11.35 billion at the box office, according to recent statistics. He’s closely followed by the Harry Potter stars Michael Gambon (€8.37 billion) and Domhnall Gleeson (€8.19 billion). Condon is a close fourth, with €8.09 billion. Most of this total is from her providing the voice for Friday, Tony Stark’s AI assistant, in Avengers: Age of Ultron, Captain America: Civil War, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

It is perhaps fitting that the un-Hollywood Condon remains offscreen in her most successful films. “They were great jobs because I never thought there would be so many of them,” she says. “I just thought it was supposed to be one film. But they kept asking me to do all these other movies. I had the same with Better Call Saul. That was supposed to be one episode, and I loved the episode itself – it felt like a play. I did not expect to be brought back every season after that. It was a gift that kept on giving.”

Many actors plot their Oscar campaigns with military precision. Condon heard about her nomination while gathered around a telly with a group that included Farrell (whom she has known since her youthful stint on Ballykissangel). Everything after that broadcast is a blur. “Everything kind of changed in my life,” she says. “It all happened so quickly. I didn’t really feel like anything had changed until quite recently. I was doing work at the time and I was filming another job. I was promoting Banshees and juggling quite a lot of projects and just trying to keep up. It was only afterwards, when I had a moment, that I realised what had happened.”

In the Land of Saints & Sinners is available on Netflix