Martin Doyle

He won an Oscar.

But, you know, the boxer, just everything that he did, I just think he has such a presence and also so versatile.

Like, you don't get the sense that he's doing the same shtick every time.

The kind of method acting or whatever, like, you know, whatever it is, it delivers.

And then Saoirse Ronan?

You know, again, you know, I think the first thing I saw her in was Atonement.

Was that her first film?

I should have done my research before I came in.

But, you know, she was magnificent in it.

Because I think it is probably the best play by, you know, a living Irish playwright.

I saw it in the Royal Court upstairs in London when it first came out.

I interviewed Sebastian, but also Donald McCann.

I think it's one of his greatest roles.

It's also a really powerful play about...

know, the complications of Irish history.

So Donald McCann plays an ancestor of Sebastian Barry, the playwright, the writer, who was, I think, the last chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police around the time of the Easter Rising running up to the War of Independence.

But it's told 20 years later when he is incarcerated in an asylum, when he's kind of lost his mind.

He lost a son in the First World War.

He also kind of lost his role in life, I guess, if, you know, he had sort of

devoted his life to being part of the British Empire, upholding law and order as he saw it, and yet he was the man who sort of handed over the keys of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins, and he had to kind of reconcile himself to that.