A Belfast Lad Goes Home

After playing some iconic Americans, Anthony Boyle is a beloved IRA commander in a riveting new series about the Troubles.

- JACKSON MCHENRY

IN THE EARLY YEARS of his life as an actor, Anthony Boyle made the strategic decision not to play what he called the "Belfast lad❞— the kind of rough-and-tumble Northern Irish guy, fond of a pint and a good yarn and not to be crossed, familiar in a lot of media from the British Isles and perhaps not too dissimilar from Boyle himself. He grew up in West Belfast, dropped out of school at 16, and worked a series of odd jobs-including bartending and performing on ghost tours-before going to drama school in Wales. He had a breakout moment playing the very posh, very blond son of Draco Malfoy in the play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, first in London (where he won an Olivier Award), then on Broadway. He pursued a slate of American roles on American television: as one of the troupe of young fighter pilots in this year's Masters of the Air and as John Wilkes Booth in Manhunt (both on AppleTV+, the preferred streaming service of people who have probably done walking tours of Gettysburg). But as Boyle approached 30-his birthday was in June-he tells me, "I was like, I want to go home. I want to do Irish roles."

Boyle has come home in one of the more dramatic ways possible: In the FX series Say Nothing, he plays Brendan Hughes, an officer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army nicknamed "the Dark" and something of a folk hero in Northern Ireland. A mural of Hughes, Boyle tells me, graced a wall along the Falls Road near where he went to school and where his father still works security.

The series, like the book by Patrick Radden Keefe on which it's based, focuses in part on the life of Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew), who became active in the IRA as a teenager.