Laura Donnelly: "What feels like a nailed-on success can die a death and something you think is a bit ‘meh’ gives you your big break"

I’m just going through my start-of-interview Hot Press explainer for people who mightn’t be familiar with us – most fantastic magazine on the planet, strikingly handsome English Deputy Editor, impossibly sexy readers etc. etc. – when Laura Donnelly stops me and says: “I was at your 1998 awards in Belfast, which took place the night before the Good Friday Agreement was signed. It’s pretty hazy but I remember Ash being up on stage with Bono and everybody raising their hands, and the 16-year-old me thinking, ‘What a great rock ‘n’ roll night!’ My sister who was with me was going out with Rick, the Ash drummer, at the time. I think I might have met you that night with Steve Strange the promoter who was such a darling.”

I think she did and, yes, Steve who’s sadly no longer with us was a top man.

“I was big into the Belfast music scene and was permanently in Katy Daly’s, which was such a great venue. I went out with the Snow Patrol guitarist, Nathan Connolly. We were together for a long, long time; he’s a diamond.”

Quick pop quiz; first album bought and gig attended?

“I’m pretty sure that album was a cassette of Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite For Destruction,” the actor shoots back, “and gig Robert Palmer who my mum took me to see when I was eight. Knowing that they’ll be asked the same question one day, I’ve just taken my eight-year-old daughter and her elder sister to their first gig, which was Metallica in London Stadium.”

Now, that’s what I call quality parenting!

“R.E.M. were the first band I loved, then I really, really got into Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Guns N’ Roses and Metallica,” Laura resumes. “From there it widened to Zeppelin, the Stones, Tom Waits and Tom Petty and got even more eclectic with Nick Drake.”

Having established her musical credentials, let us now delve into the 44-year-old’s acting career which started at the Irish Ballet School.

“My teacher was a woman called Patricia Mulholland,” Laura recalls. “She invented a form of dance that was the precursor to Riverdance; it was telling Irish myths and legends on stage. I got to play children’s roles in what she called her ‘Irish ballets’ – things like Children Of Lir and Deirdre Of The Sorrows – and found the experience beyond magical.

“The costumes, makeup and being backstage before a performance; all of that stuff lit something inside of me. I was like, ‘I don’t want this to be a world I visit, I want it to be a world I live in.’ I wanted to be on stage and film and TV followed on from there.”

Laura Donnelly as Elsa Bloodstone in Marvels Werewolf By Night.

Irish Identity

Little did Donnelly know then that she’d end up on Broadway. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let us rewind to the 1990s and her school days at Rathmore Grammar in Dunmurry, whose famous past pupils also include Def Leppard guitarist Vivian Campbell, SDLP MP Claire Hanna and Mairéad Farrell who was one of the IRA members shot dead in 1998 in Gibraltar.

“I was only in Rathmore for two years,” Laura resumes. “I moved there because they had a really good drama department and I wanted to do A-Level Drama and I also wanted an escape from the previous twelve years of being in an all girls’ school!

It was technically a convent but I don’t think I was taught by any nuns. Before that I went to Dominican College in Fortwilliam where there were nuns in the classroom.

“I was really good at exams, so most the time did bugger all in school. I was frequently told I’d do a whole lot better if I applied myself, but then I got good grades and they couldn’t say anything to me!”

After subsequently earning a B.A. in Acting from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Laura bit-parted in the likes of Casualty, Hex, Merlin and Best: His Mother’s Son before getting her big break in 2013 when she appeared in three episodes of Norn Iron serial killer drama, The Fall.

“I don’t think I was aware of how big it was going to be,” she admits. “I don’t really focus on the outer aspects of the production. I’m just focused on what I need to do with my character. ‘How do I do the best job here?’ But I do remember at the reading sitting opposite Gillian Anderson. It sounded like she was just chatting to someone but, no, she’d begun saying her lines. I was in my mid-20s and thought, ‘Oh my god, there’s no difference between Gillian acting and her normal behaviour.’ It was at that point I realised how extraordinary she is.”

Donnelly got to use her own accent again when she played the older Helen McConville in Say Nothing, Disney’s historical IRA drama which somehow managed to find humour in the darkest of places – e.g. Dolours and Marian Price donning nun’s habits to rob a post office.

“It’s something we’re very good at, especially in the North,” she says of achieving that light and shade. “I’d read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book when it came out and was blown away by it. I was a bit cynical when I heard they were making a series of it because I didn’t how they could do this very complicated story justice.

“Then they sent me the scripts and I thought, ‘Wow, they’ve captured this brilliantly!’ Whilst not shying away from anything, there’s real empathy towards the different sides of the community. So few people understand even the basics of our history and culture, never mind the intricacies of it. And they’re usually pretty okay with not understanding it, as was made very clear by Brexit!”

Anthony Boyle said to me that, being a West Belfast boy himself, his Say Nothing portrayal of Brendan Hughs had to be spot on.

“Certainly,” Laura nods. “All of his mates would have had a lot to say about it if it hadn’t been done in a fair way.”

If asked to recommend other films and series which capture the essence of the North, what would Laura pick?

“Derry Girls, which is like a documentary to me,” she smiles. “I was that age at that time and it’s so hilariously accurate. The Terri Hooley film, Good Vibrations, is another really good shout. I’m also tempted to say In The Name Of The Father because I remember watching it and thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is a genuine representation of the stuff I witnessed growing up.’ There was a familiarity I hadn’t felt before.

Not so much the political side of things – y’know, that awful story – but the way that people behaved and dressed and spoke. I’d never seen that represented on screen before; it was extraordinary.”

Did Laura have any inkling back then that the North would turn into a TV and film production hotspot with actors like herself, Lola Petticrew, Roisin Gallagher and the aforementioned Anto Boyle getting to work in their own backyards?

“No, I just assumed that being from Belfast was going to be a disadvantage for me,” she admits. “When I was coming out of there, Bronagh Gallagher being from Derry was a big thing. She was one of the few people who’d been in anything international and held on to her identity. I’d heard rumours that Kenneth Branagh was from the North but it was like, ‘Is he?!’ Nobody really knew. There was Liam Neeson and

Ciaran Hinds but that was about it. When I got into acting, I don’t think I’d lead with my Irish identity for quite some time. Now it’s an advantage being from Belfast!”

Scottish Highlands

The proof of the casting pudding being the number of TV shows that came her way post-The Fall.

“I was in Outlander with Caitríona Balfe who’s a fantastic actress and such a powerful woman,” Laura notes. “She’s so intelligent and consciousness. I did Marvel, albeit one of their smaller TV shows, Werewolf By Night. I didn’t take any selfies or even FaceTime people if I was on set. I spoke about it as little as possible because in that world they’re terrified of things getting out before they want them to.”

This year finds Laura featuring in not one but two major shows. First to hit the smallish screen in June was season 2 of Sugar, the neo-noir detective drama helmed by Colin Farrell whose praises she loudly sings.

“He’s very free and playful,” she observes. “Colin has a deep, deep psychological and emotional understanding of his character. Like all the best actors, he knows John Sugar inside out and on set knows exactly what needs to be done. He makes hard work look very easy. That, in turn, makes it very easy to play alongside him.”

Rather than having to audition, it was Sugar showrunner Sam Catlin who came to Laura wanting her to play Charllotte Fisher, the femme fatale who steamrollers her way into the enigmatic detective’s affections.

“We met for a coffee, he told me what the arc of the character would be and I was in,” she recalls. “It’s too much fun of a role to say ‘No!’ to.”

Talking about Charlotte’s relationship with John Sugar, Donnelly has said: “They absolutely mirror each other’s loneliness. That’s definitely the biggest magnetism between them. His self-deprecation is probably what’s really appealing to her. I suspect she’s not spending a lot of time around very humble men and he speaks to that quite strongly.

“I don’t think that she’s felt seen in a long time, possibly ever. I don’t she lives a life that facilitates many close relationships of friendships. She has a huge amount of empathy herself. She really does care and sees that reflected back.”

And that’s all the spoilers we’re going to give!

Laura Donnelly in the Dark

After soaking up the Californian sunshine with Castleknock’s favourite son, Laura headed to the somewhat gloomier Scottish Highlands to shoot The Dark, a serial killer drama which premieres here on August 28 following a ratings-grabbing UK run.

She plays Monica Cassidy, a Serious Crimes detective and single parent who’s investigating multiple murders whilst grappling with her own troubled past.

“As somebody who went to college in Glasgow and has all my family there, I love the fact that the Scottish landscape and the atmosphere of the place is so woven into the script,” she enthuses. “So often with a lead character you know who they are straight up. There’s an obvious role they’re going to play within the story, but I couldn’t get a clear idea at first of Monica, other than that there’s a lot going on under the surface. I knew I was going to have to drill down and really investigate the character, which is always appealing to me. I don’t want to read a script and immediately know who that person is.”

There’s fabulous chemistry between Donnelly and Stella Gonet, the veteran character actor of Professor T, 28 Days Later, Breeders, The Sailsbury Poisonings renown, who plays Monica’s mother, Angela.

“Aw, thanks,” Laura beams. “I absolutely adore her. She brings her own warmth to the screen and provides the story with so much humanity. We understand Monica so much better through her.”

Next up for Donnelly is Kennedy, Netflix’s blockbuster telling of “the lives, loves, rivalries and tragedies that shaped the most iconic dynasty in modern history.”

She plays matriarch Rose Kennedy and can’t wait for you to see it.

“That’ll be one of the biggest productions I’ve been involved with, definitely,” she smiles. “It’s so beautifully written; I’ve never read a set of eight scripts like them. The excitement when you got a new one – oh my goodness! You’d finish it and be like, ‘You’ve told me what to do, I’ll just go do it.’ It's so fully formed. Mix that with extraordinary directors, led in the first episode by Thomas Vinterberg who’s a genius, and a cast headed up by Michael Fassbender who’s also a genius, and you have something truly special.”

I felt a bit sorry for Móglaí Bap that his first ever acting gig was opposite Michael Fassbender in the Kneecap movie. I mean, no pressure!

“If you can get past the intimidation of ‘Oh my god, it’s Michael Fassbender!’ it actually makes your debut the easiest it could be ‘cause it’s not hard to act with amazing actors. It’s so much harder to act with people who don’t know what they’re doing.

“The success of the Kneecap film is so thrilling,” Laura adds. “I wish there’d been something like that around when I was in school and learning Irish!”

Talking recently to Hot Press, Jessica Reynolds told us how her five-minute “I’m going to blow you like a Brighton bomb!” sex scene with Mo Chara has completely turned her career around.

“No matter what it is, you have to give every single job your all because you don’t know what’s going to catch fire,” Laura notes. “You’ve no say over that. What feels like a nailed-on success can die a death and something you think is a bit ‘meh’ gives you your big break. It’s always thrilling when, like in Jessica’s case, it’s the latter.”

An example of the former is the sci-fi period drama Donnelly did a few years back for HBO, The Nevers.

“This speaks to exactly what I said about the universe deciding how things are going to work out,” she nods. “I got to do everything that I’d wanted to do on screen. My character, Amalia, had this crazy back story which at one point meant I was playing three different characters; I was wearing these incredible long Victorian dresses with mad tight corsets; I did loads of my own stunts; and learned how to dive and fight underwater in the famous Pinewood water tank. A huge, huge budget and a cast of amazing actors – I was having the absolute time of my life – and then Covid, cancel culture and all sorts of other thinks kicked in and it went nowhere. Even though the outcome was thoroughly unsuccessful, it was one of the greatest times I’ve ever had at work. If I’ve a motto in life, it’s cherish the moment.”

• Season 2 of Sugar is out now on Apple TV+. The Dark premieres on Virgin Media One on August 28.