“Say Nothing”: Anthony Boyle Brings a Haunting History to Life

If you’re not watching Say Nothing on Hulu, you’re missing out on one of the best series of the year. Based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s international bestseller “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” the series mostly takes place in West Belfast during The Troubles.

The Story of a Lost Generation

The show starts in the 1960s, with the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a single mother taken away by the IRA in front of her children. We then follow the stories of different members of the IRA in the 1970s throughout the 1990s, particularly those of Brendan Hughes, aka “The Dark” (Anthony Boyle) and Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew).

A Personal Journey for Anthony Boyle

While Boyle has proven many times he could pull off basically any American accent, with Say Nothing, the actor is able to stay close to his home and tell a story that shaped many generations in Northern Ireland. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel anxious before I took it on,” Boyle told me over Zoom. The Troubles might have ended over 26 years ago, but its shadow and the lasting impact it had on Northern Ireland is still very much there.

Conquering Anxieties and Finding Authenticity

In order to tell a story as important and defining as this one, we might think that only an Irish writer or showrunner could do it. But when Boyle got the call and learned that Disney was behind the project, the actor wasn’t so sure he wanted to be involved. He quickly changed his mind after reading the script.

“When Michael Lennox called me with the writer, Joshua Zetumer, and said, ‘We want you to play Brandon Hughes’ and I was like, ‘Who’s doing it?’ And they said, ‘Disney’, I thought ‘Jesus f— Christ, Disney and the Troubles, this isn’t the sort of story that I want to be a part of’. Then I read the script and was like ‘This is unbelievable!’ The writer had went into such details, I felt like, if you’d have told me the writer lived on the Falls Road in West Belfast, I would have believed you, because he got the minutia of the human psyche of people in Belfast,”

He added: “He got the humor, the gallows sort of humor. And then I read the book, and I really liked it. I spoke to Patrick, they wanted people from Belfast in it. They didn’t want Americans doing Belfast accents. And I was just trepidatious to jump into it, because, you know, it was an outside perspective coming in, as opposed to being like a sort of homegrown project. But my fears were soon sort of quelled, after meeting with the creative team, and knowing that their intentions were nothing but pure.”

Respect and Empathy Through Storytelling

The show is very true to Patrick Radden Keefe’s book and Boyle made it a point that it should be as respectful and nonjudgmental as possible. The main goal of Say Nothing is to ask the right questions without necessarily answering them at the risk of casting a judgment.

“One thing I said to them when I met them is, when brothers have sort of killed each other, over which splinter group of paramilitary they belong to, we’re not going to answer this. We’re not going to get this right because there’s no particular way to get it right. We can’t answer questions definitively. We need to just ask questions, it is mainly about what I want people to feel from it. And what I want is people to think, ‘What would I do if I was in that position?’

He added: “Particularly an American or an English audience, who would condemn certain things, but rather them going, ‘Jesus Christ, if that was me? If I had marched at a civil rights march and then saw the British forces murder children in the street, what would I have done? What would I do like, genuinely, if that if that was my neighbor? If that was my son? Would I pick up a gun?’ And I think that the show does that really well.”

Living History

Boyle explains that the Troubles are very much part of who he is. Indeed, the actor was born in 1994 and is part of a generation called the ceasefire babies. However, his family told him everything about what it was like to live during the conflict.

Boyle explained that an outsider’s perspective was actually very beneficial for him while filming. He said, “It sometimes takes someone from the outside looking at something afresh for you to see it neutrally, you know, because I’m attached to the story so emotionally and so personally. And it’s from an outside perspective, someone who isn’t attached to it emotionally.”

Traveling to the U.S. particularly, Boyle realized that this part of history that is so engraved in him, doesn’t resonate quite the same there. He said, ‘It’s just this sort of very strange, complex, f— up time in human history that was in a very small pocket of the world.’

He added: “This is such a history that we’re well versed in. Because going to school, you walk past murals of Brendan Hughes or you walk past murals of murdered children and murals of hunger strikers. It’s so in your psyche. It’s so in your immediate geography and in your head, that when when I first moved to America, you would bring up a names like Gerry Adams or Bobby Sands, which for us would be as famous as mentioning one of the Beatles or Michael Jackson. People would go, ‘Who are they?’ And you go, ‘How do you not know about that?’ So I’m really excited and looking forward to the conversations that it opens