This story about “The Banshees of Inisherin” star Kerry Condon first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
With certain movies, it feels like once the cameras go off, the story continues spontaneously and undisturbed, with the characters and the actors who play them lingering in the fictional world they’ve created. Such is the case with Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin”, a story of two lifelong friends, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic (Colin Farrell), who are suddenly no more, and the ripples it creates in the rural irish island to reside on
Which is all to say that when Kerry Condon, who plays Pádraic’s long-suffering sister Siobhán, said at the beginning of our interview that she had just returned from tending her horses, it felt like the most natural thing in the world for an actress to do. surrounded by animals in the film.
“There is a spiritual element to the animals that they brought to the film,” Condon said of the film’s menagerie of wild animals, which offer great relief to their human counterparts. “It was this pure aspect that made me go, ‘God, humans are so stupid, so complicated, arguing and fighting and thinking about our existence.’ The animals are so in the moment, so sweet and beautiful. And that contrast was really food for thought.”
Condon credits McDonagh’s skill as a writer and director for illustrating that dichotomy. She’s no stranger to those skills, having worked with him for years on both stage and screen. If something has changed between the two, it is the anticipation of the actress to show how she had grown.
“I was excited to be able to show him how much I had learned, which I was able to deliver very quickly,” she said. “Continuity is something I’m pretty good at. All those things he wouldn’t have known about me doing a play. Otherwise he totally felt like we were just doing another play.”
And yet, despite Condon’s excitement, he had reservations on first reading the part of Siobhán. “I didn’t tell him at the time, but I thought, well, he’s not as good as Mairead in ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’” she said, referencing a character she played in an earlier McDonagh play. “She’s very young and feisty and loud and self-assured. So initially, with Siobhán, she was a bit like, Oh, it’s not that great.
“But then, as we were going into rehearsals, I started thinking, ‘This is a little bit harder. It’s a little more mature and it’s a little more subtle.’ And I think it was definitely sadder parts of me that maybe Martin knows more than other people. I started thinking, ‘Wow, this is really perfect for where I am in my life right now.
Like Siobhán, Condon is a powerful force, made of equal parts empathy and exasperation, who always looks out for his brother, but eventually finds himself at a point where he must make a decision to better his own life, no matter what damage it does. can cause. cause. “She goes to the lake where her parents drowned, and it’s this moment of, ‘If I don’t leave, if I don’t get away from this waste and this tragedy, I’ll probably kill myself.'” Condom said.
And yet, Siobhán’s decision to leave her beloved brother behind was not celebrated by everyone in Condon’s life, suggesting that the best movies can make us forget where fiction ends and reality begins. “None of my family is in the business, and my sister got very, very angry with me,” she said. “She was like, ‘Why did you leave him at the worst time?’ I was like, ‘she was in the script! What do you want me to do?!'”
Learn more about the awards preview here.
