This year's 'Pure Mule'? In advance of RTÉ's gritty new drama series, 'Legend', Arminta Wallace meets one of its promising stars, Allen Leech. In Manchester, Louise East meets his co-star on-screen and in real life, Ruth Bradley
RUTH BRADLEY
It's official. Irish television drama has been born again. If Bachelor's Walk was the prophet and The Clinic offered us hope; Love is the Drug and Pure Mule have finally converted us. RTÉ is giving us drama we believe in, set in places we recognise, inhabited by, well, you get the picture.
This year's Pure Mule, if the talk out Montrose way is to be believed, is a new six-part drama series from Icebox Films called Legend (that's "legend", as in "excellent", not "legend" as in tales of Finn MacCool and the lads), which is going out on RTÉ 2 from next Monday.
Set in a housing estate in west Dublin, it's written by the playwright (and proud housing estate resident) Ken Harmon and it concerns the lives and loves of a group of twentysomethings who have more to worry about than what to do with their SSIAs. "If you think about it," says Ruth Bradley, "there's very little about young families on TV, and yet there's so many of them." In Legend, Bradley plays Jacinta, a newly single mum living on a tough housing estate.
The cast list of Legend is like a complicated spider map, its legs tickling every decent Irish drama outing of recent years. Ruth Bradley, at the grand old age of 21, is a veteran of Love is the Drug, The Clinic and Stardust. Padraic Delaney, who plays Jacinta's next-door neighbour Fridge, is the hero of Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes the Barley and has also starred in The Clinic and Pure Mule. Allen Leech, who plays Bradley's ex-boyfriend in Legend and her non-ex boyfriend in real life (keep up at the back), was in Love is the Drug and Paddy Breathnach's film Man About Dog. If America had its Bratpack and London its Britpack; Dublin will soon have to come up with its own permutation. The Mickpack, perhaps.
"Being part of this boom in television at the moment is very exciting," says Bradley. "We're all so passionate about what we're doing, and it's a new experience for all of us.
These series are showing a side of Ireland which has only recently been picked up on by the media. Legend is very original and very realistic and it's also particularly Dublin and Irish."
More startlingly pretty in real life than on screen, Bradley is currently in Manchester, working flat out on the highly anticipated series The Innocence Project, produced by Paul Abbott for the BBC. In it, she plays one of five law students who take on the seemingly hopeless cases of life prisoners; House meets This Life if you will. "Law and crime has been done before in television," says Bradley. "But there has never been a series in which it's tackled by people who are so young. "Innocence projects" exist in real life, but I'd never heard of them before this and I wonder why. It's incredible that there are students who are quite literally changing people's lives."
The four months of filming have been, she admits, "very heavy, very difficult. There's so much intricate technical dialogue. We're not lawyers, we're actors. This here," she taps her head, "needs to be engaged as well as the performance side where you're concerned with the emotions."
Which is exactly how Bradley likes it. "I'm only ambitious in the sense that I want to work in as many different media as I can, and to play characters which are different to me and to each other. I want to do work that frightens me or challenges me, be it in Dublin or Zimbabwe. I just want to be working."
Bradley says she can't remember a time when she has not wanted to act. When she was eight she saw her mother, Charlotte Bradley (About Adam, Proof), on stage for the first time: "I was outraged. I thought, 'But I'm going to be an actress. You stole my plan.' " A regular at the Gaiety School of Acting since the age of nine, Bradley scored her first role in the BBC's Sinners at the age of 16 and followed that with Druid's nationwide tour of Sive during her Leaving Cert year. She scored enough points to do languages at Trinity, but after only a few weeks she found herself sitting in a lecture thinking: "What am I doing here? I'm in the wrong place."
Within weeks, she moved from the family home near Artane to London. "It wasn't a difficult decision but it was a difficult life change. London is hard and I was 18 and very naive. I had to get streetwise quite quickly." She read, she waitressed, she worked in telesales, and was just resigning herself to a year of unemployment when Love is a Drug came along. Now she contentedly describes her flat in south London as "my little life. I love working in Dublin, but when I'm in London, I'm more focused on my career. Every day, I'm aware of why I'm there."
As of this autumn, Bradley will have a whole new challenge to face. Since everything that Paul Abbott touches turns to television gold (Cracker, Shameless, Clocking Off), The Innocence Project will doubtless bring Bradley one of acting's more ambiguous side effects - fame.
She pulls a face.
"I've never thought about the aftermath, to be honest. It's all a bit surreal. I consider myself lucky to be going about my business doing something I love. Being recognised - I can't relate to that at all." Louise East
ALLEN LEECH
When in Rome, the saying goes, do as the Romans do. For the young Irish actor Allen Leech this is all in a day's work. He's currently playing the role of Marcus Agrippa, general to Octavian - aka Augustus Caesar - in the second series of the HBO/BBC historical blockbuster Rome.
"It's amazing, a fantastic experience," he says. "The studio is just outside Rome and has a back lot of five acres. That's where Rome was built. You walk into the Forum, and it's two-thirds the size of the actual Forum. There are so many small streets that you get lost. Once I was heading for the set and I was told to go through the 'old' part of Rome, so I did - and I got lost. They sent someone to find me - and he got lost."
The budget for this series amounts to a whopping $111 million - a far cry, no doubt, from the figure Icebox Films spent on Legend. The series delves into the lives of a group of young Dubliners on a housing estate, and Willy, the character Leech plays, is a far cry from a Roman general. Which is fine by him.
"I suppose one of the things that all actors want to do is pick roles that are different from the last thing they did," he says. "I thought it was very interesting to play a guy who has everything - partner, child, house - and then it all falls apart. It was also lovely to play something that I hadn't played in the past, you know? In Love is the Drug it was the loved-up guy, or the hard man in Man About Dog. This guy is slightly broken, but yet he maintains a facade of 'I'm still all right'."
Given the setting - a pretty tough council estate in the western suburbs of Dublin - it's interesting to hear Leech describe his character, Willy, as "a guy who has everything". The measure used is clearly emotional rather than financial: and that, in truth, is very much where the heart of the series lies. It uses snappy dialogue and witty visual gags to take a hard but blackly humorous look at where young working-class families are at right now, and the kinds of problems young men - in particular - are having to wrestle with. It opens with a funeral.
The wife of the main character, Fridge (played by Padraic "Wind That Shakes The Barley" Delaney), has been killed by a joyrider, leaving him with two small children and a debt he didn't even know he had. Which, in turn, gets him rather too close to the local gangster, known as The Mammy, for comfort.
While Fridge struggles to come to terms with the loss of his wife, Willy is constantly reminded that his ex is living across the road with the new man in her life, which is bad enough, and their daughter, which is worse. With everyone stretched to breaking point, civilised behaviour goes out the window.
Was it tough for Leech to get under Willy's skin? After all, things are going pretty well in his own life. Barely two years out of drama college, he has already clocked up a more-than-respectable CV; and he lives in London with Ruth Bradley - who, in Legend, plays the role of the baleful ex.
"Well, I was sent the script and what I felt was, it was very truthful," he says. "I think RTÉ is really hitting the right note with what people would want to see. And also there's a certain realism, a grittiness about Ken Harmon's writing that comes from his own working-class background, and that I'm really interested in. But we had a great laugh doing this series. The kids were terrific. Sinead, who plays my daughter, is hilarious, and the little kid who plays [Fridge's son] Skittles, Sebastian Crotty Elder, is incredible. He'd sit in the car and be really quiet; and then Mary, who was his minder and his aunt, would say, 'Okay we're going to work now,' and he'd sigh and say, 'Right', and just get on with it. He was very focused for a two-year-old, I have to say."
Having been "stung" in the past when one or two projects didn't work out as planned, Leech is reluctant to divulge what's next on his acting agenda. So it's back to Rome, then? He grins.
"It really is the exception in this business when you get on to a set like that. They have a leather workshop on site with two experts who make the leather gear, and a place in Bulgaria which makes the sandals. They ship in a load of cloth from India and make all the costumes by hand." He pauses for a beat, then grins again. "I'm definitely going to try to steal mine at the end."
Arminta Wallace
Legend starts at 9.30pm on RTÉ 2 on Monday, September 4th. The Innocence Project airs on BBC in October. Rome will air in 2007.