Peter Hanly has so skilfully and completely shrugged off Ambrose's Garda uniform that watching him in Three Days of Rain, Rough Magic's new production at the Project, it is difficult to believe he was ever one of the main characters in Ballykissangel. In the first half of the urbane family drama, he is Walker the mad or bad or simply eccentric son of a famous New York architect. In the second act he plays Ned, the architect father complete with a stutter and a flawless American accent. It shouldn't surprise, of course. That, after all is what actors are supposed to do - to change chameleon-like from one character to the next and be utterly convincing in all. Still, it is an impressive achievement, especially given that Ballykissangel regularly attracts a weekly audience of around 10 million and a large part of its success is based on the credibility of its characters. Ambrose was hen-pecked, naive and, in Hanly's words, "totally anal". And he adds, "the guy gave parking tickets to his friends for god's sake". The Dublin-born actor who played him for four series knew early on, as early as the start of his second series, that he wasn't going to be in it for the long haul.
"One day in the middle of filming I just thought that I had done the scene I was doing before, which I hadn't of course, but it felt like that," says Hanly, "and that's when I knew I wasn't going to be able to play the same character for years and years." Then he started to get more interesting story lines and that kept him involved and interested but, by the end of the fourth series, he was ready to go. The difficulty then was trying to persuade the series producers, the BBC, that he really did want out. Apparently, it is quite common for producers not to believe that actors really want to leave, "because we all supposed to be so desperate for work", and indeed even when he had filmed what he knew to be his last series he still, much to his own confusion, hadn't been written out. Some contractual wrangling followed and he agreed to come back for one day's filming early in the fifth series during which the hapless Ambrose ended up dead at the bottom of a cliff.
The 35-year-old Hanly describes his background as typically Dublin middle-class and he is true to type in that he is friendly and polite, both thoughtful and halting in conversation and, to use a much misunderstood word, nice. He grew up in Dartry, one of south Dublin's leafier suburbs and his father was a teacher in Belvedere College, where Peter was educated. He is also naturally quiet-spoken and describes himself, quite credibly, as shy. Acting was his first choice of career. After the Leaving Certificate, he took a series of short contract office jobs and joined Dublin Youth Theatre where for two years he spent all his evenings and every weekend. The inspirational founder of the Youth Theatre, Paddy O'Dwyer, always stresses that it isn't a drama school, more a youth club that happens to do plays, but it gave Hanly the chance to go on stage and meet professional directors and generally be exposed to the theatre world. After two years of odd jobbing as a clerical worker, he decided to give professional acting a go.
Looking back, the mid-1980s was probably a good time in the theatre life of Dublin for a young actor starting off. Several new and exciting theatre companies were being formed, including Rough Magic, Co Motion and Passion Machine, and there was interesting work around. AS scheme-funded. He joined Theatre Unlimited, a Kilkenny-based company, and looks upon the two years he spent there as being his real training. This is the fifth Rough Magic production he has been in and the fifth time working with the company's director Lynne Parker.
Rough Magic built its reputation in the late 1980s and early 1990s by bringing new plays by authors such as Howard Barker, David Mamet and Steven Berkoff to Irish audiences. The sophisticated New York drama Three Days of Rain, by American playwright Richard Greenberg, feels like a return to earlier form. It stars two Rough Magic stalwarts, Anne Byrne and Darragh Kelly, but the two characters played by Peter Hanly are the key protagonists. The highly entertaining play is in two distinct parts. In the first, a brother, played by Hanly, and his sister, together with their long-time friend, meet for the reading of their father's will. In the second half the same actors play their parents in a clever theatrical device that explores such emotionally-charged family dynamics as the impossibility of children ever understanding, or even truly knowing, their parents. It is set in New York in the 1960s and the 1990s. To prepare for the role, Hanly went to voice coach Andrea Ainsworth to perfect his American accent. He also went to the Irish Stammerers' Association because the father character has a pronounced speech defect. Aside from his strong connections with Rough Magic, he has worked extensively with Gerry Stembridge, appearing in several of that writer/director's work, including his film Guiltrip, the plays The Gay Detective and Lovechild, as well as his TV drama, The Truth About Claire. Hanly will be back on RTE early in the new year in Black Day At Black Rock, Stembridge's new hour-long drama. E. He plays the local doctor in a darkly humorous drama about the effects an influx of refugees has on a small town.
His first big pay day wasn't Ballykissangel, but Braveheart. He lives with his actor partner, Jennifer O'Dea, in a house in Dublin's Stoneybatter, that was part funded by his role in the Hollywood movie. It's five years ago since the film was made but now that his hair has grown out of the Ambrose Templemore-style cut, he is been recognised in the street "as the guy from Braveheart". But in terms of being recognised, he says that big screen celluloid can't compare with the power of television. "It makes sense really. It's right there in people's homes, and they see you every week so they naturally think they know you." So, while he is not surprised by fame, he is surprised that Ballykissangel hasn't been the professional boost to his career he thought it would be. One of his longest periods of unemployment, at just over six months, followed his departure from the series and he doesn't have anything lined up for when this current production ends on December 16th. "I did think that Ballykay would lead to more work than it has, but when you think about all the TV series there are, and all the actors that are in them, it's not really surprising that it hasn't," he says with typically polite pragmatism. "There are a couple of auditions I've just heard about, but I don't really know what I'll be doing."
Three Days of Rain is at the Project Theatre, Dublin until December 16th