About A Boy
He was the cheeky chappy in Boyzone, the cheery one with the boy next door personality. Then the band broke up and he didn’t know what to do with his life. So Keith Duffy did what nobody expected: he became a well-regarded actor and soap star. As he prepares to make his debut with the acclaimed Druid Theatre company, he speaks frankly about his quest for meaning in life, the controversial break-up of Boyzone in 2000, their successful reunion and Stephen Gately’s tragic death.
Olaf Tyaransen, 16 Nov 2011
It obviously took you a while to get to that point...
Yeah, but at least I got there. There’s a lot of guys that I went to school with and I meet now, and they haven’t grown up in the last 20 years. They’re still fuckin’ 19 or 20. Their attitude, their snide remarks, their insecurity comes out. I’ve always been brought up to respect my elders, and have time for my elders, and I meet people now in their 60s and I realise, “Fuck’s sake, man, that’s the attitude of a fuckin’ 25 year-old!” A lot of people in Ireland… they call it the begrudging nation, but there’s ignorance amongst our grown-ups that they just never grew up. It’s childish, it’s silly.
Probably they had lousy childhoods...
Maybe so, and they’re rebelling against it for the rest of their life. Going into a pub and a guy in his 40s picking a row with you? “I’ll knock your block off!” I mean, what the fuck? Unless you’re a bloody gangster and I’ve robbed your drugs, why would you want a battle of the fuckin’ stags? Fuck’s sake, just have a pint and shut the fuck up, man! Why do we need to be rubbing off each other like this? Fuck that! But the realisation that a lot of men never grow up, they remain children – these tough attitude, chip on the shoulder, type guys… for that, there’s a million other guys that are fantastic and do educate themselves.
Have you ever done a stageplay before?
After I finished Corrie for the first time, in 2005, I did Dandelions, written by Fiona Looney, with Pauline McLynn, Deirdre O’Kane and Don Bradfield. It was my first theatre run, and it was brilliant. It was a lot easier than this gig because it was a brand new play so I was the first person to play that character. It was nerve-wracking, but the whole process in a play of sitting in a rehearsal room with a director and the other members of the cast and building on your person and who you need to be is very different from doing Corrie, where you literally get given a script and you’re word perfect before you go into the studio. There’s no rehearsal. There’s a line run and then you shoot it. And they shoot it backwards and forwards and up and down. They don’t shoot in sequence. Episode ten, then episode two, then episode eight then episode one, it’s all over the place. A very fast-moving job.
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Olaf Tyaransen
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