The five-part An Brontannas (The Gift) begins Thursday (Oct 23) on TG4 at at 9.30pm. The crime drama series features the American-Irish actor John Finn (Cold Case) playing a garda sergeant. Paddy Kehoe spoke to the veteran actor.
Finn, who was born in New York in 1952, also played a cop in Cold Case, which ran for seven seasons. He was the lead actor in EZ Streets, and he enjoyed supporting roles in the films The Hunted, Catch Me If You Can,True Crime, Turbulence, Blown Away, The Pelican Brief, and Glory. He has had recurring roles in Dawson's Creek, The Practice, The X-Files, Strange World, NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope and has acted in eight episodes of Brooklyn South.
An Bronntanas is set in a fictional village in Connemara where the main employer is the local fish factory. An announcement is made that the factory must close, and the workers will be made redundant,
One night, the lifeboat crew discovers an abandoned fishing boat with a cargo of over a million euros worth of drugs. Does the crew hand over the drugs to the authorities or sell them and save their struggling village?
Directed by Tom Collins (Kings) and set in Connemara ,An Bronntanas also stars Dara Devaney (Na Cloigne) and Owen McDonnell (Single-Handed.) The series is directed by Tom Collins (Kings).
John Finn began his acting career when he met a group of longshoremen reading aloud a Yeats play in a New York bar. They were members of the Irish Rebel Theater which later became the Irish Arts Centre. He joined the fledgling group, helped build the sets and eventually graduated to playing stage roles. So, Finn plays cops - interestingly, his father was once a New York city cop who later moved to the Fire Department.
In 2005, the actor along with his Cold Case co-stars Kathryn Morris and Jeremy Ratchford appeared on a promotional trailer for Cold Case on TG4, which incredibly featured some lines of dialogue in Irish. From this came Finn’s invitation to act in An Bronntanas. He has attended summer Irish courses in Glencolumbkille. “I am not pretending I am a Gaelgeoir, I'm not fluent at all, “ he says. “Sometimes Peadar Cox (An Brontannas script-writer) had to rewrite some of the script to make it more comfortable for my beginner’s understanding of Irish.
“I would be learning it through English, I would be looking for subject, verb, object - as you know Irish doesn't fall into that structure. With a lot of the prepositional stuff, it was difficult to comprehend what I was trying to say until we brought it around to something where the structures were more comfortable.”
The crew spoke Irish with him and around him which the actor greatly appreciated. ”When you are around people who don’t make the language exclusive, but try to bring you in to it, it’s very helpful. Irish has been here before you and I were here, it’s going to be here long after we’re gone. I think the key thing is to use it, not to make it mandatory, I don’t think that’s the solution, but rather to encourage people to use it.”
He remembers his maternal grandparents speaking Irish at home in the Bronx. John Malone, his grandfather, hailed from Crusheen, County Clare, his grandmother from Moneygall , County Offaly.
“My grandparents would be speaking it in the kitchen and when I would come in they would stop, not because they were embarrassed or ashamed, but because I didn't have it. It was an everyday language, it was comfortable for them.”
John first visited Ireland on shore leave from the Navy in 1975, coming in on a ferry from Swansea, with a shipmate named O’Shaughnessy. “When I came to Ireland I was expecting to see the Ireland of my grandfather, “ the actor says. “The idealised Ireland of 1912 was gone, of course, which was a bit of a shock for me. “
He recalls O’Shaughnessy’s reaction on arrival in Cobh harbour. “He kissed the ground and put a pocketful of soil in his pocket to take back to Boston. He was completly gone . . and that was the American expectation. But we quickly got it knocked out of us after we walked around Cork for a while.”
The actor returned for a much longer visit in the 1970s. “I bought a car in Dublin for I think fifty quid, I just drove out West, without any expectation beyond finding a remnant of my family.” He has fond memories of meeting his maternal uncle Mick Malone, the closest in the bloodline, during that second visit.
“He was in a nursing home in Ennis and he had Irish. The story they told me was that he got the bed in a nursing home because he got tired of riding his bike down from Crusheen to visit his friends.” John took him for a drive to the Cliffs of Moher where Mick played the fiddle for him.
As a frequent visitor, the actor is surely fit to judge with some useful perspective.“There are certain qualities that have not gone away, “ he remarks. “Family, loyalty, education, music, the laughter, the craic.” He has an Irish passport, loves traditional music .
Finn has been consistently busy as an actor, as his CV readily testifies. A modest man, he recognises that he didn't have the acting school background. “I didn't know how to put artifice on what we do, I didn't approach the work from artifice - without sounding pretentious, I'm looking for something truthful, something honest. I have about 30 years of experience, there is a certain integrity that comes with what I do, but I’m not the only one who can do that.”
Being hired to act in An Brontannas he regards as a major coup, working, as he has been, with the culture and language that is dear to him. “ It’s to everyone’s credit, director Tom Collins, Cian de Buitléar (Director of Production) and (producer) Ciaran Ó Cófaigh and TG4 to take a risk with it, and to take a risk with someone like me. It could have backfired easily. Maybe it has and nobody is telling me, ” he laughs.
