He has retired the blue top he wore in ‘Love/Hate’. He’s coming home for the Iftas tonight. And he’s still in bed
About 10 minutes into this interview, Robert Sheehan reveals that he has just woken up and is lying in bed in his Camden flat. (It’s a phone interview. I like to think I would have noticed otherwise). “Sorry, mate,” says the star of Love/Hate with a yawn. “I’m in interview mode but I’m also in bed mode, and the two sides are battling each other.”
This doesn’t mean he’s not engaging. It’s early in the morning, but he is funny, thoughtful and charming. As we talk he yawns a little but laughs a lot. He’s passionate about his career while being fuzzy about how he got one. “I’ve been largely undecided about everything for most of my life,” he says. “I can barely commit to a phone bill . . . Somewhere along the line it has become my career due to continuing work.”
It all started when he responded to an open audition at the age of 12 and landed a part in Aisling Walsh’s Song for a Raggy Boy, a film set in a brutal reformatory school. “Me and about 10 other lads all went down to Cork for seven weeks and had a magical summer,” he says. “Our great time didn’t reflect the abysmal mood of the film.”
Afterwards, he wasn’t sure whether acting was a realistic ambition and went to Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology to study film and television. “While the acting stuff was incredibly fun and fulfilling, the two sides of my brain were battling, one going ‘You can’t make a living from acting’ and the other going ‘It’s great fun, carry on and see what happens.’ I was an absentee student. I spent months making a film called Summer of the Flying Saucer. Thankfully I was kicked off the course – I failed terrifically – and my parents didn’t say, ‘Don’t you think you should do a real job now and become a real person and start making money?’ They didn’t put that pressure on me. So I ended up sitting on my arse in Galway for a year.”
Sheehan spent that year playing World of Warcraft and incongruously booking gigs for stand-up comics around the country. “[At one gig] all the comedians showed up and I wasn’t there. I was doing a short film in Dublin. My brother went with a few mates, and all the comedians were going up to him saying, ‘We need to know who’s going on first. What’s the running order? What’s happening? Robert should really be here.’ . . . I did a year of nothing much and came to the end of it, felt wildly restless and wanted to do stuff. Lesson learned.”
He moved to Dublin and landed roles in quick succession in the feature film Cherry Bomb, the Channel 4 drama Red Riding and the Nicholas Cage vehicle Season of the Witch. This was followed by a two-year stint on the hilarious and hugely popular Channel 4 drama Misfits, in which he played Nathan, a smart-arsed, orange-jumpsuited young offender with superpowers.
“I connected quite quickly and intensely with that part,” he says. “I think as the series went on, the writers got our voices in their heads. They can write the cadence of your sentences a lot easier when they’ve got your whiny Irish voice in their ear. And there was that intense family feeling on set. We were shooting in Thamesmead, in southeast London, this very odd-looking estate. We’d get really dirty looks from the locals, because they saw us walking around in orange jumpsuits and thought we were shooting a documentary about young offenders and that we were sullying the area’s not-so-great name.”
About that time, he began filming the first series of the RTÉ gangland drama Love/Hate, in which he played the soulful, doomed assassin, Darren. Love/Hate was not an instant success, with some viewers questioning its credibility. “I could understand that,” he says with a laugh. “We were young, fresh-faced lads in what looked like trendy clothes. We did look a bit like a boy band. But I think the show really graduated into its full expression in the second series and probably also got given the free rein it deserved. There were 500 things happening [in every] episode, and it was incredibly gripping to watch.”
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2012 | Love/Hate
2013 | The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
2012 | Me and Mrs Jones
