By Irishexaminer.com

Copyright irishexaminer

It was Kirwan’s work with Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country which put the Irish actress on the radar of the producers of new Netflix series House of Guinness. A call from Tom Shankland, a producer and director she’d previously worked with, came through – and Kirwan’s goal of working with Knight was set in motion.

“We started out together on a BBC production called Hearts and Bones, and he saw me in Night Country with Jodie Foster. They were wondering how they were going to cast Aunt Agnes, because she’s a fictional character, so she can look like anything you want, and he offered me the part. It really was as simple and honest as that, that this impossible, improbable idea that one day I would ever be on a set in a Stephen Knight production has come true.”

Kirwan joins a high calibre cast in the show, which focuses on the powerful Irish brewing and business family in the aftermath of the death of Sir Benjamin Guinness in 1868. Having driven the brewery to enormous success, Benjamin must decide how to bequeath his empire to his children Arthur, Edward, Anne and Ben – and the implications that has for his family and workers.

Like he did with Peaky Blinders, Knight brings a modern perspective to the period storytelling, and Kirwan feels it’s an approach that works well.

“It’s quite subversive. I think it’s quite rebellious,” she says of Knight’s filmmaking style. “His use of history with modern music – all of this makes history relevant. There’s always a very strong soul going through it, real people, difficult choices. They’re interesting.”

Kirwan says she was always interested in history as a student, and feels that Knight’s approach helps bring life to the experiences of people who lived.

“It’s not just the circumstances, it’s the connections, the loyalties, the betrayals. It’s very human. It’s very real. I loved history as a subject, but it was very dry. It was very hard to make that history leap off the page. This way, the characters become like avatars. We go on a journey with them, and they’re complex and nuanced and difficult. He seems to encapsulate a really wild ride for the viewer. And when you have wonderful costumes and great sets and great actors, it’s very seductive.”

Unlike many of the characters in House of Guinness, Kirwan’s character, Aunt Agnes, is a fictional one. Agnes aims to place herself into the probate process in support of some members of her family. Playing a fictional character, Kirwan says, brings some freedoms – but there is also a bigger picture in how she represents societal conventions and the constraints that women faced in 19th-century Ireland.

“I needed to ground it and base it in a Victorian woman’s very restrained environment,” she says. “Agnes is a very powerful woman, a very bright woman. All those powerful, bright women like Anne [Benjamin’s daughter] are desperately kicking against the social conventions of what it means to be an upstanding, moral woman. Their reputation is everything, the family is everything.

“That’s the only area that they can operate in. They’re not allowed to be educated. They’re not allowed to ever really enter into any office. They can’t own property. We see that with Anne.

“How angry and frustrated would you be? And how have you learned to operate in that very tight sort of space? How have you bent the rules a little? So I think Agnes is quite subversive, and she’s very humorous.”

From Churchtown in Dublin, Dervla Kirwan first came to screen prominence in the BBC series Goodnight Sweetheart, as well as on the London stage, before playing the feisty and straight-talking bar woman and landlady Assumpta Fitzgerald in Ballykissangel. The show was a ratings smash for the BBC and internationally.

In the decades since, she has starred in dozens of screen and stage roles, including opposite Colin Farrell in Neil Jordan’s Ondine. Her many TV credits include 55 Degrees North and The Silence, while she guest starred in the Doctor Who 2008 Christmas special.

In recent years, she has returned to Ireland to film the hit RTÉ series Smother in which she plays the matriarch Val Ahern, a woman determined to protect her family at any cost. She was “forever grateful”, she says, to work on the production over a number of years, filming on location in Lahinch in Co Clare.

She feels that it was one of a number of significant shows that she was cast in in recent years, along with a part in Harlan Coben’s well-received mystery The Stranger, and Night Country. Still, she doesn’t feel that she has a plan of attack when it comes to her career. “I feel all I can do when I get the jobs is to do the best I can, but I don’t feel I have any power in the direction that it takes me.”

When Kirwan moved to London as a young actor, she recalls that, “Ireland, economically, was on its knees.”. In the years since, there has been a growth in Irish actors and filmmakers making a name for themselves at home and internationally.

With stars including Danielle Galligan and Niamh McCormack, House of Guinness highlights the ongoing depth of emerging talent. “Our culture is music, art and storytelling – that’s what we do,” says Kirwan. “So it seems a natural projection onwards, that that’s what we sell, and we’re very proud of.

“It does need an awful lot of unpicking, and I am actually fascinated by it. But I think maybe it is that sense of identity and pride and massive social change and just a desire to express ourselves creatively. Maybe it’s a wealth that has come in, and more people are going to university, and the arts are so supported, they’re not frowned upon.”

House of Guinness comes to Netflix from Thursday, September 25.