In RAW, he plays moody lawyer turned restaurant worker Shane Harte but this week we’ll see a different side to Keith McErlean in a new comedy drama set in the world of pub quizzes. The RTÉ Guide’s Alan Corr talks to the Donegal actor about juggling roles and why RAW is less raw than it was.
Keith McErlean is reliving the moment when he realised that maybe, just maybe, he could cut it as an actor. It was spring 1994 and he was standing on the windswept plains of the Curragh, dressed as a Scottish soldier preparing to do battle with the perfidious English. In the distance some bloke called Mel Gibson was barking instructions through a megaphone at McErlean and 2,000 other young men in similar battle dress.
“I was an extra in Braveheart when I was 17”, McErlean says. “I was in the FCA and they hired 2,000 of us to go down to the Curragh to play Scottish and English soldiers. One day this amazing horseman had to ride down and deliver a few lines so he galloped down beautifully but he could not say his lines. He did it about ten times and eventually Mel Gibson got up onto a stepladder and did the line himself. I was standing there watching all this as a 17-year-old thinking, ‘go on, let me say the lines! I could say that! I can’t ride a horse like that but I can say those lines.’ That was the fist time I thought I could do this acting thing…”
Sixteen years after that brush with Gibson and the sharp end of a British pike and McErlean is doing very well indeed at this acting thing. He first gained recognition as the dim but likeable Barry in Bachelors Walk ten years ago and now, not only is he centre-stage as brooding lawyer turned kitchen porter in foodie drama RAW but this week he also takes the lead role in Trivia, a new comedy drama set in the world of pub quizzes.
In Trivia, McErlean plays Adam Lynch, a local charmer who owns the village pub and gets out from behind the bar every Tuesday night to do his bit as a slightly bemused team member in the weekly pub quiz. The quiz is always, always won by his team captain, a fat, bald and obnoxious know-it-all called Lawrence who happens to be Adam’s best mate.
Funnily enough, McErlean has just joined a pub quiz team in his adoptive home town of London but we doubt he’ll be taking matters of current affairs, Oscar winners and world capitals too seriously. However, Trivia does provide a welcome change for the 35-year-old actor. “Adam is very different from Shane Harte in RAW. Shane has a bit of a short fuse. He’s probably not the kind of guy you’d want to go for a pint with. I’d rather go for a pint with Adam Lynch.”
Are you trying to say that you don’t like Shane? McErlean clears his throat theatrically and laughs. “Let’s just say that there are more fun people in RAW than Shane. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy playing him, that dark and brooding thing.”
McErlean, who is a native of Carndonagh in Donegal, has built up an impressive resumé. After he graduated from the Gaiety School of Acting in 1998, he appeared at the Abbey Theatre and Peacock Theatres and in 2004, he played a man with AIDS Declan Breen in the film The Blackwater Lightship for CBS. Two years later, he appeared opposite James Franco and Jean Reno in the movie Flyboys.
But it’s Bachelors Walk that’s been his calling card. It was a landmark show that married strong drama about a bunch of 20- and 30-something drifters and dreamers in Celtic Tiger Dublin with plenty of laughs but McErlean did worry that he was being painted into a comic corner. “Absolutely. Nobody was familiar with me before Bachelors Walk”, he says. “When you have that much exposure in one go, you can very easily be pigeonholed. There was a few years of being offered the idiot in things and it did slow work down so it’s nice to get back on the telly and play something straight.”
RAW has been very ably filling that Clinic-shaped hole on Sunday nights on RTÉ One. The show has a very tightly knit cast who actually hang out with each other outside of working hours. “I’ve been quite happy on a Friday night to say ‘seeya on Monday!’” says McErlean. “You work with people very intensely all week and then not see them ’til Monday. It’s very different with RAW. We go away for weekends. This year we went down the Shannon on a boat but the producers didn’t like it very much. They don’t like the entire main cast together on a boat. They can’t be sure they’ll all come back.”
In Trivia, McErlean is back doing gentle comedy with soapy storylines but it’s on RAW that he gets to show off his more serious acting chops. In the next few weeks, we get the full spectrum of the Harte family when Shane and his sister Jojo’s father Des arrives, something that’s sure to thicken the plot considerably.
Now in its third season, RAW has changed dramatically from its earlier incarnation as a more youth-oriented show, especially now that it’s jumped from RTÉ Two to RTÉ One. “It had to be retooled”, says McErlean. “We’re going for a different audience now. The first series was very racy. I’m not a prude but I though it was a little bit too much. They threw a lot at the wall to see what would stick and then decided to discard that idea. I think they realised they had a good backdrop. The kitchen of a restaurant is quite pressurised and intense and people’s personal lives tend to get in the way of that and that’s quite interesting.”
It’s a far cry from playing a Scottish warrior out on the Curragh all those years ago.
Alan Corr
