North Sea Connection is a new RTÉ One drama about a run-of-the-mill rural Irish family that get caught up in the dangerous world of drug-smuggling. John Byrne talks to one of its stars, Kerr Logan.
Kerr Logan's life couldn’t really be busier than it is now. And yet he comes across as the most relaxed, unstressed person in a hectic and crowded large room at the RTE Autumn Launch at Dublin’s RDS.
It’s a warm and sunny day, the room is booming with the babble of many voices, and his smile as we meet tells me this guy is going to be a joy to deal with. We agree to move out to a small hallway, where things are quiet and - as if it were planned - two empty chairs are filling out a corner.
You may remember Kerr from playing Mathos Seaworth in the utterly massive Game of Thrones. Or perhaps it’s for being James McDermott in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace? Then again, it might be Conor Lynch in Lisa McGee's London Irish on Channel 4. He’s still playing Mathew Cunliffe in JK Rowling's Strike for BBC and HBO, so there's that too.
For me, it’s his role as Conall Molloy in Dead Still, the quirky period dramedy that was on RTÉ One a couple of years ago, starring Michael Smiley as Brock Blennerhasset, a photographer in 1880s’ Dublin who specialises in photographing the recently deceased.
34-year-old Logan may have left his native Northern Ireland when he was just 12 for a new life in Lancashire, but he still has a soft Ulster lilt that a RADA graduation didn’t eradicate. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, he’s got a lovely natural voice that’s like a cross between fellow Ulster actor Jamie Dornan and sports broadcaster Con Murphy. Aural velvet, really.
We’re having this chinwag as Kerr’s latest venture is coming to RTÉ One on Sunday September 4 in a brand-new drama called North Sea Connection.
The series is set within an isolated and traditional rural Irish fishing community in Connemara, where the Kenny family have fished for generations. Ciara, the youngest member of the clan, might very well be the last to do so.
When her brother Aidan puts the family’s lives in danger by secretly facilitating a drug route for a Swedish cartel to help fund a new business venture, it is Ciara who must appease them and find a way for the Kennys to stay alive.
Ciara is played by Lydia McGuinness, while it will come as no surprise for you to hear that Kerr Logan’s role is as the aforementioned Aidan, a bloke whose ambition isn’t matched by his ability.
John Byrne (JB): So, Kerr, can you set the scene for North Sea Connection?
Kerr Logan (KL): It’s pretty much a family drama. You find out early in the series that it’s about a family that’s really, really struggling to make ends meet. I think a lot of these rural communities around Ireland, and around the UK, are being forgotten about, because industries are moving towards the cities.
As a result, small towns are being forgotten about. And it’s about the people who have been there for generations trying to do the right thing and just trying to get by.
JB: And you play Aidan, an enterprising member of the Kelly family.
KL: My character’s been off in Dublin and he fancies himself as being a big businessman. The family was used to doing the odd bit of cigarette-smuggling, and the odd bit of illegal, but not necessarily dangerous, things.
My character then takes it up one step, and basically starts to cipher some class-A drugs through the family business.
And of course, then something goes wrong, an accident happens on one of our first dodgy dealings, and then we get caught up in the wrong crowd. The series follows a rake of bad people, and we get caught up in this underground world.
It’s kind of about how this underground world is brought into a very small town in the west of Ireland, and how it affects all the individuals, and how it affects the community in general and the family in particular.
It’s also about how blood is thicker than water and all that sort of stuff, and what all the family do just to stick by each other through adversity. And how far you’d got to protect family members, even though they’re making very bad decisions.
And of course, my character’s the big bad decision-maker. But as long as people learn from their mistakes, your family will stick by you. And it’s kind of like that.
It’s a classic thriller, with lots of cliff-hangers, lots of twists in the story, and hopefully audiences will want to know what happens to the characters by the end.
JB: It’s kind of understandable that people would be tempted by the kind of money that can be make from cocaine?
KL: Well, I think that as well as that, the characters here are very naive. It wouldn’t be like Kin, where the characters in those stories would be more used to dealing with more underground goings-on. These are very innocent people that sort of get out of their depth, really. I don’t think they have a clue what they’ve let themselves into.
My characters a wannabe businessman, but not particularly good at it. So, he’s trying his best but just takes a big step in the wrong direction and it really comes back to bite him in the arse.
JB: So, what else have you been up to outside of North Sea Connection? Is there anything else that we should be looking out for?
KL: I just finished off another season of Strike, which is a JK Rowling series. I play an awful character in that. That one’s just about to come on the television in the next month or so, I think. On BBC and HBO. And apart from that, the last month, my wife had our second son - just ten weeks ago.
And my wife was wanting to get back to work. She’s an actress [Sara Vickers], so she was finishing off the final series of Endeavour, so I’ve been the on-set dad, looking after our two kids while she could act.
There’s more stuff in the pipeline for towards the end of this year and early next year, we’re just juggling childcare and it’s carnage!
JB: And how is family life for the Logans? Not an easy thing to manage when both mammy and daddy are in the acting game, which can often mean long stints away from home.
KL: Two children have come along, and I live in Scotland now. My wife’s from Scotland and her parents are recently retired - so help with the childcare. So, whoever gets the work, we get to just drop the children off.
Our kids are kind of moveable, because they’re not at school yet. They can come with us to locations. Even on this job, I was filming out in Connemara for ten weeks and the kids got to come over with us.
I’m from Belfast originally, so my parents live there, and they brought the camper van down to Connemara, and we went for bike rides and saw the beautiful landscape. Not a bad way of making a living!
And actually, thank goodness they came, because even though we filmed at the end of last year there were still loads of covid restrictions. If I went home, I would’ve had to come back to the country and do loads of covid testing and isolate for a certain number of days.
So, thank goodness my family could come over and see me, because it would’ve been eleven weeks away from them.
North Sea Connection, 9.35pm Sundays, RTÉ One
