“I have managed to survive 30 years on this planet without ever having thrown or received a punch!” declares actor Killian Scott. “I’ve always managed to flee. I was always quick and I would do the very diplomatic, ambassadorial ‘let’s discuss this and see what conclusion we come to... and then if it comes to arms, it comes to arms’. And if it ever came to arms, I would just run away at quite a rapid pace.”
The 29-year-old Dubliner might never have been in a physical fight in real life, but he’s thrown many a punch on-screen. As the doomed Tommy
in Love/Hate, he always proved fairly handy with his fists. And in his new movie, Traders, he’s absolutely lethal with them.
Like a deadlier version of Fight Club, with a peculiarly Irish twist, Traders tells the story of Harry Fox (Scott), an executive who seems to have it all – the luxury apartment on the Dublin quays and fancy motor – but, when the financial company he works for goes bust, seems set to lose everything. A solution is offered by his odious former co-worker Vernon Stynes (played by Game of Thrones star John Bradley), who has masterminded a diabolical all-or- nothing scheme based on the Deep Web, called 'Trading'.
Essentially, two strangers empty their bank accounts and sell their assets, and put their entire worth in cash into a green sports bag. They write suicide notes, travel to a remote location, dig one grave, and then fight to the death. The winner buries the loser and walks away twice as rich. It’s a pretty stark metaphor for cut-throat capitalism.
Far more relaxed and amiable than their Traders characters, the two stars are sitting in a room in the Merrion Hotel the morning after the film’s screening at the Audi Dublin Film Festival. It transpires that John Bradley hasn’t ever thrown a punch, either.
“Thing about punching is that it hurts you!” the somewhat portly, 27-year-old Mancunian laughs. “Because of my fat fucking hands, I’ve got very sunken knuckles and if I was to punch, it always manages to connect with these two knuckles here (shows fist). The knuckles on the outside of the hand so quite often, it’s not going to have much impact and it hurts me more than it does them.”
Their debut feature after 20 years of making shorts, Traders – which also stars Nika McGuigan, Peter O’Meara, Barry Keoghan and David McSavage - was written and directed by Rachel Moriarty and Peter Murphy. Although its premise initially seems quite implausible, the acting is strong enough, and the script tight enough, to allow viewers to willingly suspend disbelief. And as the Vernon character points out, we live in a world where a cannibal can advertise online for a willing victim and get a real response (this actually happened in the German town of Rotenburg in 2003 – OT).   
“I think people will go with it,” says Bradley, “but in the same way that Vernon has to convince everybody it’s worth doing, I think the film has to convince the audience it’s plausible.”
Scott nods his head in agreement. “What I think is very much to its advantage is that Rachel and Peter have very fully realised this idea of Vernon’s. I’m sure you can find holes in these things, but loads of the details are covered and actually by the time he’s finished explaining it, you can certainly see how it could work.”
“The Harry character doesn’t buy into it initially, anyway,” Bradley points out. “Instantly Harry is like, ‘Shut up! Are you mad?!’ And that’s what the audience is expected to do as well because they know he’s never going to buy it - but as the narrative develops, he absolutely buys it.”
Both actors maintain that they fell in love with the script immediately. “It was mainly just how how good it was off the page,” Bradley enthuses. “It was such a joy to read because the dialogue was so entertaining. You know when you read that dialogue and put that dialogue into the mouths of actors who are sensitive to language and sensitive to timing and humour and character, then you know you don’t really need anything else.”
“It’s that fundamental quality that comes with good writing: that’s what Peter and Rachel have done with the script,” adds Scott. “It does almost all the work for you when the script is tight, solid and natural. When lines are written in a realistic fashion, and you can believe them and see how people would say them, it really does a lot of the work for you.”
Traders also explores the murky world of the Deep Web. “Apparently when they were writing the script, they let the Guards know that they were going to do some Deep Web research because it’s extremely dangerous and it’s hard to access,” Scott explains. “I never realised how hard to it is to access. I thought, click on a couple of links and you’re there. But you’re going into the world where people are ordering hitmen and buying weapons and all this stuff. It’s actually hard to access and it’s extremely dodgy.
“But it is something that has been coming up, people are now talking about the concept behind the film. I didn’t find it in any way implausible. Like a couple of people have come in this morning going, ‘My god, I was so shocked’, and the last thing I was, was shocked. The existence of the internet just illuminates the shadows of the minds that people have and what people are interested in. I’m not necessarily speaking of always in a malicious level, but also sexual interests and relationship interests, hobbies, whatever.”
Not to mention fighting complete strangers to the death for bags of cash. The outdoor ‘trade’ scenes are viscerally raw and brutal.  
“They isolated the trades so all the fight sequences would have happened in three days,” Scott recalls. “Our editing guys did such a great job of how they tied it all together because it’s hard to really get that quality of these scenes, they’re meant to get chaotic. It’s two ordinary people who aren’t fighters, who maybe like me have never been in a fight in real life, and with dodgy weapons and in weird environments with uneven lands, there’s water here and broken glass there.
“I just thought that, even though they were under so much pressure, the guys just managed to capture these fights scenes in a way that was really compelling.”