This story about “The Banshees of Inisherin” star Kerry Condon first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.
With certain films, it feels as though once the cameras turn off, the story continues unbidden and unbothered, with the characters and the actors who portray them persisting in the fictional world they’ve created. Such is the case with Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a tale of two lifelong friends, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Pádraic (Colin Farrell), who suddenly aren’t, and the ripples it creates on the rural Irish island they reside on.
Which is all to say that when Kerry Condon, who plays Pádraic’s long-suffering sister, Siobhán, said at the beginning of our interview that she had just come in from minding her horses, it felt like the most natural thing in the world for an actress surrounded by animals in the movie.
“There’s a spiritual element to animals that they brought to the movie,” Condon said of the film’s menagerie, which offers a stark relief to their human counterparts. “They were this pure aspect that made me go, ‘Gosh, humans are so silly, so complicated — bickering and fighting and thinking about our existence.’ Animals are so in the moment, so sweet and beautiful. And that contrast was really food for thought.”
Condon credits the illustration of that dichotomy to McDonagh’s skill as a writer and director. She’s no stranger to those skills, having worked with him for years on both stage and screen. If anything has changed between the two, it’s the actress’s anticipation at showing off how she’d grown.
“I did feel excited to be able to show him how much I had learned, that I was able to deliver very quickly,” she said. “Continuity is something I’m pretty good at. All those things that he wouldn’t have known about me doing a play. Otherwise, it totally felt like we were just doing another play.”
And yet, despite Condon’s excitement, she had reservations upon first reading the role of Siobhán. “I didn’t say it to him at the time, but I was like, Well, it’s not as good as Mairead in the ‘The Lieutenant of Inishmore,’” she said, referencing a character she played in a previous McDonagh play. “She’s very young and feisty and mouthy and sure of herself. So initially, with Siobhán, I was a little bit like, Oh, it’s not as good.
“But then when we would get into rehearsals, I started to think, ‘This is a little harder. It’s a little more mature and it’s a little more subtle.’ And I think it was definitely sadder parts of me that perhaps Martin knows more than other people. I started to think, ‘Wow, this is actually perfect for where I’m at in my life right now.’”
As Siobhán, Condon is a powerful force, made of equal parts empathy and exasperation, who looks out for her brother always, but eventually finds herself at a point where she must make a choice to better her own life, no matter the hurt it might cause. “She goes to the lake where her parents drowned, and it’s this moment of, ‘If I don’t leave, if I don’t get away from this waste and this tragedy, I’m probably going to kill myself,’” Condon said.
And yet, Siobhán’s choice to leave her beloved brother behind wasn’t celebrated by everyone in Condon’s life, further suggesting that the best films can make us forget where fiction ends and reality begins. “None of my family is in the business, and my sister got really, really angry with me,” she said. “She was like, ‘Why did you leave him at the worst time?’ I was like, ‘It was in the script! What do you want me to do?!’”
Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
