Colin Morgan - New Interview (Irish Independent)
Fame was 'a bit of a shock to the system' - Colin Morgan on his rise to stardom, new movie and writing his first book
Colin Morgan went from little-known theatre actor to a major TV star in the space of three weeks. Here, he tells Chris Wasser about his love of cinema, why he still keeps a low profile and why he's excited and nervous ahead of his debut novel
Colin Morgan is a bit of a mystery. Or at least that's how it looks from the outside.
A quick google will tell you the Northern Irish actor keeps himself to himself, and you won't find anything concrete about personal relationships or favourite hobbies. You certainly won't find him anywhere on social media.
The Armagh man, best known for playing the title character in the beloved BBC fantasy adventure series Merlin and a robotic fugitive in Channel 4's Humans, is living proof that an internationally renowned performer can enjoy a successful career without sacrificing their privacy.
That being said, the initial burst of fame took some getting used to.
“I suppose I didn’t really adjust and probably still haven’t,” Morgan says. “I think I was so used to theatre, where you go in, you do your graft and you go home.
“And over the whole course of a [theatre] run, even if it’s a three-month run, say with 600 or 800 people every night, whatever that total number is, it doesn’t even amount to a one-night viewership of an episode of Merlin, which I think was close to 10 million on the first night
“Bear in mind, we were still shooting the end of the first season when it started airing in 2008, and we actually weren’t even in the country. We shot part of it in France, so we left to film this thing and we returned essentially having had 10 million people see your face for three weeks. That was a bit of a shock to the system, for sure.”
Acting, says Morgan, is a part of his DNA. It always has been, and he remains entirely uninterested in the celebrity side of things, preferring instead to keep a low profile.
“Yeah, definitely, and I’m definitely on this planet to be [an actor], and anything that gets in the way of providing those things to the world – the stories, these characters, these forms of entertainment – is a distraction to all that, I believe. Of course, people want to know more about other people’s lives, but you know, I’m not that interesting,” he says, laughing.
Morgan, I believe, is being humble. His trajectory from teenage theatre lover to award-winning actor has been full of surprises.
In 2007, he made his London theatre debut at the Young Vic, playing the title role in an adaptation of DBC Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning novel Vernon God Little. The following year, Merlin launched and the series made Morgan – then something of a screen newcomer – a household name.
In time, Morgan moved to film, and the actor finally secured a big-screen role worthy of his talents playing the part of a mouthy troublemaker named Billy Clanton in Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning 2021 drama Belfast.
In 2024, he fronted two hit television shows in Ireland: The Boy That Never Was and Dead and Buried. Does he ever rest? Maybe, but he enjoys a challenge and loves the work – it’s been that way ever since he told his mum (a nurse) and dad (a painter/decorator) that he wanted to act for a living.
“I think any parent who hears their kid say, ‘I want to be an actor,’ panics,” he says. “Because, of course, it’s not reliable. It’s flippin’ tough, it’s very competitive, it doesn’t guarantee anything, and it seems really unstable. It is all those things.
“But what I will say is that if it is part of your DNA, nothing and no one will be able to convince you otherwise because you just don’t see a plan B for yourself. I didn’t. I was quite determined on that front. Luckily, I had parents who let me do that. They were incredibly supportive, and still are.”
If you don’t try, says Morgan, you’ll never know, and he kept this in mind when he auditioned for a place at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama more than 20 years ago.
“I remember I got the boat over from Belfast with my mate, and the audition was going really well. I think it starts at about 60 or 80 people, and at each stage, fewer people are kept. So it ends up with about six people and I hadn’t anticipated being there that long – they wanted to keep me for the last round, but I had to leave early to get my boat.”
The following morning, the phone rang and Morgan was offered a place for the next term. “I remember walking downstairs and being like: ‘I just got accepted into that drama school I auditioned for yesterday.’ And so, I had all this money saved up from working in a cinema and doing various other jobs to go travelling – and that ended up going towards drama school.”
Morgan returns to the old cinema job – in a fictional capacity, at least – in David Gleeson’s charming Irish comedy-drama Once Upon a Time in a Cinema
Billed as a “love letter to the cinema experience”, the film is set in 1980s Ireland and tells of a cranky cinema owner named Earl Clancy (Morgan), who hasn’t yet figured out a way to tell his staff (Niamh Cusack, India Mullen) that he’s selling the only picture house in town to a dodgy politician.
On the eve of the big sale, Clancy experiences the Friday night from hell. Thankfully, there were fewer of those when a teenage Morgan worked part-time at an Armagh movie theatre
“It was a brilliant way to grow up,” he says. “As a teenager and as a lifelong fan of stories and movies, and immersing myself in those worlds, to land a job in the cinema, it’s kind of a no-brainer, really. The fact that you got paid for it was a bonus. But what happens in the cinema stays in the cinema,” he jokes, “and there’s stories that I probably can’t tell in an interview.”
Shooting the film in a real theatre – the old Royal Cinema in Limerick – added to the experience, I’m sure. “A hundred per cent. I think the last time it screened a movie was back in 1986,” he says. “It’s mad to think that place closed the year I was born, and there I was, 40 years later, shooting something in it.”
Indeed, but that’s not the biggest twist in the Colin Morgan story. He’s set to publish his debut novel, a promising coming-of-age tale titled The Ballad of Ronan McCoy, this June.
“I had this nugget of an idea for a story that I wanted to tell and so, yeah, I just started scribbling away, and eventually got the bravery – which, I’ll be honest, was a whole new level of bravery than I was used to – to send it to an agency to say: ‘Hey, is this something?’
“And they thought it was, and now it is. I’m excited and I’m nervous. But it’s just another form of me putting another story out into the world. It just so happens, this one is my own.”
Once Upon a Time in a Cinema is in cinemas [in Ireland] from Friday, May 1
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