Éanna Hardwicke cannot really remember Saipan. Not Saipan the place, a small Pacific Island 200km north-east of Guam. Nor, thankfully, Saipan the film, in which he stars, and which I’m hoping to discuss with him at length this afternoon. No, he means Saipan the incident, Saipan the event, Saipan the crisis that has baffled and incensed Ireland’s population for a quarter of a century.
We are sitting in a pleasantly boxy meeting room deep within the lungs of the National Theatre, a space so starkly concrete that the current king of England once described it as a clever way of building a nuclear power plant in the middle of London without anyone objecting. Hardwicke himself sports the quiet, thoughtful presence of a literature student, at times speaking like a particularly articulate MA who’s popped round to deliver a treatise on some dramatic works he just happens to be starring in. He’s here rehearsing a play that forms another contentious landmark in Ireland’s cultural history, but we’ll get to that once we move past the summer he turned five.
“I remember colours and shapes,” he says of June 2002, “sticker books and jerseys, Roberto Carlos taking a free kick.” That, and one other recollection. “I have a vivid memory of someone from Cork coaxing me to say a certain thing about Roy Keane,” he says. “She said: ‘He’s a disgrace to his country!’ and it’s only come back to me now, since I’ve done the film. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, only that people were incensed.”
The cause of this fissure was that Ireland’s football squad, having qualified for just the third World Cup in their history, took off for a pre-tournament trip to a sunny island none of them had heard of. Within days, a massive fallout between captain Keane and manager Mick McCarthy (played in the film, with weary brio, by Steve Coogan) caused the former to exit the squad with a notorious rant that culminated in the line “you can stick it up your bollocks”. To say this prompted grief and horror back home would undersell things a tad. Saipan immediately became the number one story on every Irish news bulletin, uniting the front and back pages of every newspaper and prompting an anguished primetime press conference from football-loving taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, who made it known there was a jet, fuelled, ready and waiting, to ferry Keane back to the fold should the fracture be healed. No such healing came to pass, for ever rendering Saipan the one island in the Northern Marianas archipelago that every Irish person still knows by name to this day.
Having been 17 when Saipan occurred, I tell him I felt vaguely retraumatised by the film, not least the strong yearning it gave me for everything to have happened differently. “Well,” he says, amused, “when we screened it in Cork and Belfast, the biggest reaction we had was that feeling: of willing the end not to happen.”
Hardwicke doesn’t know if either Keane or McCarthy has seen the film – “I believe both have been offered a chance to watch it, but no idea if they have” – but is aware of how live an issue it remains, 23 years later. He doesn’t, it must be said, look much like Keane, a man Alan Bennett once described as having the face of a mercenary. (“Meet him before the walls of 15th-century Florence” Bennett wrote in a 2005 diary entry, “and one’s heart would sink”.) Beyond his Ireland team garb, and a subtle widow’s peak shaved into his hairline, everything that makes Hardwicke’s scorching, seething performance so … Keane is internal.
“If there’s one thing I needed to carry in,” he says, of playing such an intense figure, “it’s this feeling that you never change or adapt yourself to the environment or its energy. You’re always Roy. I think that’s a brilliant quality in anyone who has it. I certainly don’t. I’ll blow with any wind, depending on who I’m with.”
Even now, Keane’s supporters will stress he had a point in objecting to world-class athletes training in blazing heat on laughably hard pitches, during sessions where no sunscreen, or even footballs, were provided. McCarthyites might reply that none of that justifies briefing against the team to the press, or calling into question the national allegiance of McCarthy who – in common with Coogan, and more than half of Keane’s own squadmates – is an English-born man of Irish heritage.
“I definitely come from a family where Keane looms large,” Hardwicke says, when I ask where he fell within this national schism. “In Cork, he’s a massive figure, from a city just small enough that those people can shape its identity. I was a huge fan of his, so I probably agreed with him, that it’s all about striving for the best and self-actualising that. In some ways, doing the film only made that sense stronger.”
Saipan – which its star is at pains to tell me is “not a biopic” – nevertheless treads this line with a tact I hadn’t expected. Hardwicke’s Keane is compelling and persuasive in pursuit of excellence, but also cold and contemptuous around his colleagues. Coogan’s McCarthy, on the other hand, has the bluff and bluster Keane’s camp has long accused him of, but also a deep well of warmth and decency which his own supporters have always emphasised.
“What I love about the story,” Hardwicke says, “is it never feels like it’s asking which ideology do you subscribe to? Mick clearly has such a love of the game and a sense that, when you play sport, you’re sharing that with your country. What comes across in the film, and from Steve’s performance, is the great pathos of that. Personally, I feel closer to that at this stage of my life; that it isn’t about winning, that it’s about something harder to put your finger on than winning.”
Hardwicke’s own life saw him catch the acting bug young, encouraged by his mum to actively pursue drama as a career – “She told me to throw the kitchen sink at it” – an inducement that may have carried more weight than your typical supportive parent, given her lifelong job as a career-guidance counsellor. Not that he didn’t harbour any doubts. “For the first two months of drama school I felt like it wasn’t right,” he says. “I think I had this idea that acting was a bit bullshitty or something, like not a real job, and not a very noble job.
“For some reason, my antidote to that was I should have gone to university and studied classics,” he tells me, becoming perhaps the first person in history to consider that a stable and secure career path. Thankfully, Plan A appears to be delivering the goods. Prior to Saipan, most may recognise Hardwicke as Connell’s troubled pal Rob in Normal People, or his terrifying turn as murderer Ben Fields in true-crime drama The Sixth Commandment, for which he won a Royal Television Society Award in 2024.
Now, he’s at the National Theatre in Catriona McLaughlin’s new run of John Millington Synge’s 1907 masterwork, The Playboy of the Western World. Hardwicke plays Christy Mahon, the charismatic stranger who enters a rural Mayo tavern and tells its patrons he’s just killed his father. For this, he is initially celebrated, impressing the men with his storytelling and earning amorous attention from the womenfolk, before his story unravels and all must contend with his deceptions, and the messiness of real-life violence intruding on fanciful tales of the same.
“It’s hard to know what it would take now to get people jumping out of their seats and shouting, storming the stage,” Hardwicke says. “What would do that these days?” He’s referring to the notorious rioting that accompanied Playboys’s original run in the Abbey theatre in Dublin, where it was brigaded from within by angry audience members, and from without by hundreds more who’d never seen the production. Some considered its depiction of drinking and lasciviousness an insult to moral decency. Others decreed it nothing less than a crime against Ireland herself; an English-language account – by a Protestant, no less – showcasing Irish peasants as simplistic, violent fools. Even now, with its reputation much rehabilitated, Hardwicke feels some misconceptions persist.
“I think some people have a sense of the play’s language as hokey,” says Hardwicke, a notion he rejects. “This play takes place in the west of Ireland,” he says. “There was so much music and wildness and laughter, and one of the things I love about Catriona’s perspective on it is that in the darkest reaches of the country, going into public spaces around a fire and having a really good time is essential to life. The pub gets a bad press sometimes, but these were places where you could tell stories as a way of lifting yourselves out of the doldrums and transport yourself to a different place. I think that’s what the characters in the story are doing for each other.”
Never scared of tying a clumsy ribbon around things, I ask him whether he sees any connection between public rejection of Synge’s most famous work, and the rending of garments over Keane’s departure 95 years later.
“I do think there’s something there,” he says. “Something about people riding high that we begrudge. But there is a funny thing right now, where it does feel like Irish artists have a sense of themselves on that global stage.” He points to the festival-conquering Fontaines DC and CMAT, the wave of “phenomenal novelists working today”, or his Playboy co-star Nicola Coughlan: “People doing incredible work at huge moments in their careers, and choosing to use that platform for things they passionately believe.”
Hardwicke wonders if this flowering has something to do with Ireland having a “more unified voice” than in other parts of the world. “You see that politically with Gaza over the past two years, and the way that people of Ireland are united across lots of different divides by our solidarity there,” he says. “I don’t want to try any clumsy parallels but there’s something I’m very inspired by in terms of the art that comes out of the country now. Its outward looking, it’s not apologising.”
Has Ireland, then, moved past tearing down its greatest exports for saying the unsayable, or hectoring them for doing the country down?
“I think now,” Hardwicke says, “there’s a sense of Irish people taking stage in the world and not playing down their culture. Maybe that has something to do with the fact we come from an island that’s been colonised and denied its own language and culture for many centuries, so now there’s a sense of: fuck it. We’re emboldened now. We’re empowered.”
Saipan is in Irish cinemas from New Year’s Day and UK cinemas 23 January; The Playboy of the Western World is at the National Theatre: Lyttelton, London, to 28 February.