‘We don’t apologize anymore’: Ayanna Hardwick on Ireland’s cultural trust and what it’s like to play Roy Keane | film

EAnna Hardwicke can’t really remember Saipan. Saipan is not the place, a small Pacific island located 200 kilometers northeast of Guam. Neither, fortunately, is the film Saipan, in which he plays the lead, and which I hope to discuss with him at length this afternoon. No, he means the Saipan incident, the Saipan event, the Saipan crisis that has baffled and angered the people of Ireland for a quarter of a century.

We’re sitting in a cheery, boxy conference room deep in the National Theatre, a space so concrete that the current King of England once described it as a clever way to build a nuclear power station in central London without anyone objecting. Hardwicke himself has the calm, thoughtful presence of a literature student, at times speaking like a particularly articulate MA student who has turned up to do a thesis on some drama he happens to be starring in. He’s here rehearsing a play that marks another controversial milestone in Irish cultural history, but we’ll get to that once we get past the summer he turned five.

“I remember the colors and shapes, the sticky books and the T-shirts, Roberto Carlos taking a free kick,” he says of June 2002. That, and another memory. “I have a vivid memory of a guy from Cork who was persuading me to say a certain thing about Roy Keane,” he says. She said: He is a disgrace to his country! And it’s only come back to me now, since I did the film. “I didn’t understand what she was talking about, just that people were angry.”

The reason for this rift was that the Irish national football team, having qualified for the World Cup for only the third time in its history, embarked on a pre-tournament trip to a sunny island that no one had heard of. Within days, massive disagreements between Captain Keane and manager Mick McCarthy (played with weary verve by Steve Coogan in the film) caused the former to walk out of the team with infamous remarks culminating in the phrase “You can stick it to your waist”. To say this led to grief and terror back home would be understating things a bit. The Saipan story instantly became the top story in every Irish news bulletin, uniting the front and back pages of every newspaper, and prompting Bertie Ahern, the football fan, to hold a somber prime-time press conference, which announced the presence of a jet, full of fuel, ready and waiting, to bring Keane back into the fold should the fracture heal. No such recovery occurred, leaving Saipan the only island in the Northern Mariana Archipelago that every Irish person still knows by name to this day.

Since I was seventeen when the events of Saipan happened, I told him that I felt vaguely re-traumatized by the film, not least the strong longing it gave me that everything had happened differently. “Well, when we showed it in Cork and Belfast, our biggest reaction was that feeling: wanting the ending not to happen,” he says amused.

Hardwicke doesn’t know whether Keane or McCarthy saw the film — “I think they both had a chance to see it, but I have no idea whether they did or not” — but he is aware of the relevance of the case 23 years later. It must be said that he bears little resemblance to Keane, the man Alan Bennett once described as having a mercenary face. (“Meet him before the walls of 15th-century Florence, and one’s heart sinks,” Bennett wrote in his 2005 memoir.) Aside from his Irish side’s uniform, and the precise widow’s haircut in his hairline, all that makes Hardwicke’s performance searing and infuriating is…an inner Keane.

“If there’s one thing I need to achieve,” he says, by playing such a strong character, “it’s the feeling that you never change or adapt to the environment or its energy. You’re always Roy. I think that’s a wonderful quality in anyone to have. I certainly don’t. I’ll blow with any wind, depending on who I’m with.”

Even now, Keane’s supporters will maintain that he was right to object to world-class athletes training in sweltering temperatures on laughably hard courts, during sessions that were not provided with sunscreen, or even footballs. McCarthyists might reply that none of that justifies reporting against the team in the press, or questioning the patriotic loyalty of McCarthy who – like Coogan, and more than half of Keane’s teammates – is an English-born man of Irish descent.

“I definitely come from a family where Ken looms large,” Hardwick says, when I ask him where he stands in this national divide. “In Cork, he’s a huge figure, from a town small enough for these people to be able to shape its identity. I was a huge fan of his, so I probably agreed with him, that it’s all about striving for better and self-actualization. In some ways, the film’s performance just made that sense stronger.”

Saipan — whose star goes out of his way to tell me that it’s “not a biopic” — nonetheless handles that line with a tact I didn’t expect. Ken Hardwicke is persuasive and persuasive in his pursuit of excellence, but also cold and contemptuous towards his colleagues. Coogan’s McCarthy, on the other hand, has the deceit and menace that Keane’s camp has long accused him of, but he also has a deep well of warmth and decency that his supporters have always emphasized.

Hardwick says: “What I love about the story is that it never seems to ask what ideology do you subscribe to? Mick obviously has a great love for the game and a sense that when you play sport, you share that with your country. What comes through in the film, and from Steve’s performance, is the great pathos of that. Personally, I feel closer to that at this point in my life; that it’s not about winning, it’s about something that’s hard to put your finger on. Who’s winning.”

Hardwicke’s private life saw him develop a passion for acting at an early age, with his mother encouraging him to pursue drama as a career – “she asked me to throw the kitchen sink at her” – an incentive that perhaps carried more weight than your typical supportive parent, given her lifelong career as a career guidance counsellor. Not that he didn’t have any doubts. “For the first two months of drama school, I felt like it wasn’t right,” he says. “I guess I had this idea that acting was a bit bullshit or something, like it wasn’t a real job, and it wasn’t a very noble job.

“For some reason, the cure for that was that I should have gone to university and studied the classics,” he told me, becoming perhaps the first person in history to consider this a stable and secure career path. Fortunately, Plan A seems to deliver the goods. Before Saipan, most people might recognize Hardwicke as Connell’s troubled friend Rob in Normal People, or his terrifying role as assassin Ben Fields in true crime drama The Sixth Commandment, for which he won a Royal Television Society Award in 2024.

It is now at the National Theater in Catriona McLaughlin’s new staging of John Millington Synge’s 1907 masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World. Hardwicke plays Christy Mahon, a charismatic stranger who enters a country pub in May and tells its patrons that he has just killed his father. For this reason, he is celebrated at first, impressing men with his storytelling and earning amorous attention from women, before his story is exposed and everyone must deal with his deception, and the chaos of real-life violence that intrudes on similar fairy tales.

“It’s hard to know right now what it would take to get people jumping out of their seats and screaming and storming the stage,” Hardwick says. “What would that do these days?” It refers to the notorious riot that accompanied the original Playboys show at Dublin’s Abbey Theater, organized from the inside by angry audience members, and from the outside by hundreds of others who had never seen the production. Some considered its depiction of drinking and prostitution an affront to moral decency. Others considered it nothing less than a crime against Ireland itself; An English-language account—by a Protestant, no less—shows the Irish peasantry as violent, simplistic fools. Even now, with its reputation so much rehabilitated, Hardwick feels some misconceptions persist.

“I think some people have a feeling that the language of the play is farcical, an idea he rejects,” Hardwicke says. “This play is set in the west of Ireland,” he says. “There was a lot of music and brutality and laughter, and one of the things I love about Catriona’s take on it is that in the darkest parts of the country, going into public places around a fire and having a really good time is essential to life. The pub gets bad press sometimes, but these are places where you can tell stories as a way of pulling yourselves out of the doldrums and moving to a different place. I think that’s what the characters in the story do to each other.”

Never afraid to tie a goofy ribbon around things, I asked him if he saw any connection between the public rejection of Synge’s most famous works, and the ripping off of clothes after Keane’s passing 95 years later.

“I think there’s something there,” he says. “There’s something enviable about people riding high. But there’s something funny at the moment, that Irish artists seem to have a sense of themselves on this world stage.” He points to Fontaines DC and CMAT, which have invaded festivals, the wave of “extraordinary novelists working today,” or his Playboy co-star, Nicholas Coughlan: “People are doing amazing work at huge moments in their careers, and they are choosing to use that platform for things they believe in passionately.”

Hardwick wonders whether this boom has something to do with Ireland having a “more unified voice” compared to other parts of the world. “You see it politically with Gaza over the last couple of years, and the way the people of Ireland are united across a lot of different divides by our solidarity there,” he says. “I don’t want to try to make any clumsy comparisons, but there’s something that’s very inspired me about the art coming out of the country now. It’s a facade, it’s not an apology.”

So has Ireland gone beyond ripping up its greatest export for saying the unsayable, or overlooked it for hurting the country?

“I think now there’s a feeling that Irish people have a prominent place in the world and don’t belittle their culture,” says Hardwick. “Maybe that has something to do with the fact that we come from an island that was colonized and deprived of its language and culture for centuries, so there is now a feeling: Screw it. We’re bolder now. We’re empowered.”

Saipan exists Irish cinemas from New Year’s Day and Cinemas in the United Kingdom January 23; The Playboy of the Western World is at the National Theatre: Lyttelton, London, until 28 February.