By Esther McCarthy,Irishexaminer.com

Copyright irishexaminer

Set around one of Europe’s most famous dynasties, the highly anticipated show from Peaky Blinderscreator Steven Knight arrives on Netflix next week. Set in 1868, immediately after the death of Benjamin Guinness, it centres around the future of the founder’s empire and the impact it will have on the fate of his four adult children: Arthur, Edward, Anne, and Ben.

Trouble, deceit, and intrigue are all in the mix. As one associate of the young Arthur Guinness — played by Belfast’s Anthony Boyle — tells him: “The death of your father has served to poke a stick in a hornet’s nest.”

For the busy Irish actor, signing up for Knight’s new series was a no-brainer. Like many of us, he was a big fan of Peaky Blinders — the series in which Cillian Murphy played complicated gangster Thomas Shelby amid the exploits of his criminal and personal life. As with that series, House of Guinness, says Boyle, is the type of long-form storytelling that he greatly enjoys bringing to life.

“I really liked it when I was first sent the episodes — they had really long scenes. When you see TV or film, the scenes are usually quite short. A lot of TV these days is made for people who are stuck on TikTok or YouTube,” he says, referencing the phenomenon of ‘second screening’.

“His scenes, you could sit in them.

“I’d seen the work that he had done with Peaky Blinders and all the other stuff he’s done. I just really wanted to be a part of that world; his writing is just so good, so dramatic and funny and sad, and he really taps into what it means to be a human being.”

Preparing for the show also allowed the actor to explore the life of Arthur Guinness, a complex man whose business, political, and personal life coincided with a complicated period in Irish history. Was tapping into his psyche an enriching experience for Boyle as an actor?

“Yeah, I love it. It’s great, man, particularly when you’ve got a character like Arthur, who’s so full of life and complicated and funny and strange and beautiful and angry,” he says. “There was just so much in him. I hadn’t read a character like him for years. I thought if I could meet it where it was and bring my own stuff to it, we could make something really special together.”

Boyle is speaking via Zoom from Vancouver, where the busy star is filming another forthcoming TV series, more of which later. Just a day earlier, he crossed one of the city’s most monumental bridges and discovered that the Guinness family had been involved in its construction in the 1900s: “It’s almost like the Rothschilds in America… they were just everywhere globally, particularly in Ireland and England at the time, the richest family. It was such an eye-opener to me. And then you walk past St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, and you see the big statue of him.

“There’s so much history there that I didn’t know, and it’s really interesting for me to find that out.”

House of Guinness portrays Arthur as a complicated man who has very mixed feelings about his father’s desire for him to take a hand in the running of the brewery.

He’s been living in London so long, says Boyle, that he has concerns about how the inheritance will change his life.

“He’s enjoying his freedom in London and can be freer. He’s sort of pulled back to Dublin, where he doesn’t want to be. It brings him back to negative feelings about himself and about his family. He gets this golden handcuff with Robert, and they have to run the brewery together. It’s not just black and white,” he says, interrupting his train of thought to excuse the Guinness pun, “it’s complex and it’s layered.”

When Boyle was a child, he had a bone condition that meant he was a wheelchair user for several years. It was around this time he found himself drawn to the idea of acting.

“A lot of [acting] is watching people,” the 31-year-old says, “studying human behaviour.

“I spoke to some people recently who had experiences where they were sick as a kid, or had something which removed them a little bit when they were young… it made them view the world a little bit differently, or spend a lot of time watching without being able to participate.”

Sometimes, he admits, he wonders if his love for storytelling was fostered by those experiences on the sidelines, making up dialogue for his friends as they played on the streets around Belfast: “You look back at the butterfly effect, you know. If a butterfly flaps its wings in Jamaica, would I have been a plumber and not an actor?”

There were no actors in his family, but he recalls as a teenager feeling that’s what he hoped to do for a living. He remembers saying to his teachers that he didn’t need to get a maths GCSE as he was going to be an actor.

“They were like: ‘You need to know your times tables, lad!’”.

It was an interest that was fired by the stories of Belfast people who would perform plays and shows in local bars that he attended: “The bars in West Belfast would always have local people writing plays, mostly about The Troubles. You would have ex-prisoners doing talks or speaking about being in The Maze or the H Blocks.

“They would have been my first experiences of theatre, which is probably what theatre would have been like when it was made thousands of years ago. Greeks and Romans, it would have been more talking about what is actually happening in the world. Those would have been my first experiences with storytelling in that format.”

He recalls a big turning point as the first time he got paid for acting work. Boyle was 16, and was paid £50 to host a ghost tour in his native city. He graduated from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and started working on the London stage, going on to win an Olivier Award for his work on the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

Since then, the roles have been high quality and high profile. He played a real-life US airman in the successful Apple series Masters of the Air. He portrayed Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, in Manhunt. More recently, he starred in the Disney+ television adaptation of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing, set in his native Northern Ireland.

His next project features another stellar cast that includes Ozark’s Julia Garner. The Altruists is a series about the collapse of cryptocurrency company FTX.

“It’s myself and Julia Garner who’s phenomenal, an unbelievable talent, and we’re having a great time,” he says. “I think it’s going to be something special.”

Boyle is part of a wave of Irish acting and filmmaking talent that continues to reverberate internationally. House of Guinness only serves to reinforce the sheer scale of breakthrough, as well as established actors that are building their careers. Boyle is glad to be a part of it.

“There’s particularly such a great young cast, including Niamh McCormack, Jessica Reynolds, Danielle Galligan,” he says.

“It’s great to see so many Irish people do so well. There is such as a tradition of storytelling in the culture. It seems like Irish music and Irish literature — Ireland’s having a really great moment internationally, culturally. I don’t know why. I’m really not sure why, but I’m just happy that it’s happening.”

House of Guinness premieres on Netflix on September 25