“I knew about Sam right from before the first professional meeting I had with him,” says Jack Reynor in his irrepressibly matey fashion. “So, then, when we met each other, I was like: ‘Oh, Sam Keeley’. And he was like: ‘Yeah. Who the f**k are you?’ Ha, ha, ha!”
In the decade that followed they have been everywhere. Reynor, who lives near his childhood home in Blessington, Co Wicklow, shot Transformers: Age of Extinction and Midsommar in the US. Keeley, raised in Tullamore, Co Offaly, travelled the world for films such as In The Heart of the Sea, The Siege of Jadotville and Monsters: Dark Continent. He has just wrapped up a seven-month shoot on a crime saga from Brad Ingelsby, the man behind Mayor of Easttown. The series, provisionally titled Task, co-stars Mark Ruffalo and unstoppable Cork actor Alison Oliver.
“That was in Philadelphia,” he says. “I made that my base for the seven months. But, yes, it’s a certain allotment of time. I just wrote it off and thought: yeah, just get stuck in.”
“He made sure he preserved the sanctity of the week of my wedding so he could come home to be my best man,” Reynor interjects.
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Ah yes. I was getting to that. The word had, indeed, got to me that Keeley performed speechifying and ring-handling duties at Reynor’s recent marriage to long-term partner Madeline Mulqueen. What sort of questions am I supposed to ask? Something about the cake? The dress?
“We had been engaged for so long, 11 years, waiting to do it,” says Reynor. “We were very much in two minds about whether we were going to do it like an elopement – a really small thing – or whether we would just go the full hog. In the end we did it down in Wicklow, where we live. It was beautiful. We had about 220 people there over three or four days. It was just class. We just got back the wedding album.”
It sounds as though Reynor and Mulqueen, a former model from Limerick, were at home to the traditions. But there was some innovation. He tells me they had a tattoo artist. What now?
“Eighty-eight people ended up getting tattooed,” says Reynor. “There were a few done after hours as well. Probably a little misjudged. But it was actually gas, because the majority of people who got the tattoos were the older relatives in the family who never would have got tattoos before.”
How was the speech?
“Madeline was like: ‘Don’t, be reading off your phones. I want everybody to print it out on paper,’” says Keeley. “I said: ‘I haven’t written anything. I’m just going to freeball and see how I get on.’ She was like: ‘Write the speech!’ Ha, ha! It was good in the end.”
The Irish acting pool is bigger than it used to be. Keeley and Reynor, the former brooding, the latter friskier, are roughly in the same generation as Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan, Jessie Buckley and a dozen other risen Irish stars. But we are still talking about a tight community. The two chums have managed to stay in touch over the decades. Keeley, who lives much of the year in Iceland, may be growling as Eric “Viking” Kinsella in the hit TV series Kin. Reynor may be playing against Tom Holland in the Russo Brothers’ Cherry. But they still find time for each other.
“We absolutely make the effort,” says Reynor. “I never wanted to live outside of Ireland. I just bought a house a mile away from the house I grew up in. That part of the world is so important to me. Sam lives in Iceland. He’ll speak more to his relationship with Ireland. But we’re both at home for the important things and we make sure we get together.”
“I chose exile,” says Keeley with a laugh.
“Like James Joyce?”
“Yeah! My partner’s from there,” he says. “We’ve been together for nearly 10 years now. I have family there now. I have a life there. Iceland was always a place that I would go to when I wasn’t working as a home away from home.”
Both men are doing all right for themselves. Reynor has just shot his third film for John Carney, master of the low-key Dublin musical. Power Ballad, co-starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, follows on from the same partnership’s Sing Street and Flora and Son. The Perfect Couple, a big glossy drama in which Reynor co-starred with Nicole Kidman and Eve Hewson, landed on Netflix a few months ago.
“She’s very intense, but in a great way,” he says of Kidman. “She walks on the set and you really feel her presence when she comes into the room. We had all been shooting for about six weeks before she arrived, and there was a lot of improv. I don’t think she was aware that there was so much improv. She had come very prepared. She was on the script.”
Susanne Bier, the director, had been using Reynor to agitate the scene – to throw lines in randomly. “Nicole would be in the middle of something, and I would just say really obscene things right across her lines,” he says. “She would turn around and look at me and just stare me out of it. And I was like: I have to keep doing this. It’s my job. That’s why I’m here. But she has such an intense glare.”
He chortles as he clarifies that she quickly got it. “She has a great sense of humour. She’s got a real Aussie sense of humour.”
Meanwhile, Keeley is looking forward to the release of a big, flashy retelling of the William Tell story, featuring Claes Bang from Bad Sisters as the titular Swiss apple sniper.
“We just premiered that in Zurich,” he says. “And there is a lot of pressure. Here we are premiering a film a bunch of foreigners have made about a Swiss folk hero. But they seem to be really pleased with it.”
Before that reaches us we have the small business of another Christmas to get out of the way.
“The stuff I get excited about at Christmas is meeting up and having a few pints,” says Reynor.
“Unless you’re on a production that carries over from one year to the next, that’s the time everybody gets to go home and be with their families,” says Keeley. “Particularly that week before Christmas. That run-up is usually a time where we get to see each other and get to meet and catch up. I still love Christmas. Though I know that can vary for people.”
“I love the stuff we eat at Christmas,” says Reynor. “In Blessington, there’s a chipper called Macari’s. They have a donor kebab. And I swear to God it’s the best. We call it the no-put-downer. Because if you take one bite out of it then it’s done.”
Ah, the turkey, the plum pudding, the mince pies ... the doner kebab.
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