“I HAD to get some lessons on social media for this,” admits Co Armagh-born actor Colin Morgan of how his real life aversion to online interaction presented a challenge while tackling his latest role as a victim of cyberstalking/catfishing in the new four-part BBC revenge thriller Dead & Buried.
“I was constantly asking, like, ‘So wait, you can just like post things?’. I was really getting an education, it felt like I was twice the age that I actually am.”
Set on the Derry/Donegal border and filmed in Dublin and Derry, this Colin Bateman-written series centres on Michael McAllister (Morgan), a family man with a promising career who has successfully put the tragic mistake he made in his teenage years behind him - or so he thinks.
However, young mum Cathy McDaid (Annabel Scholey) remembers Michael’s chequered past all too painfully well: he went to prison for killing her older brother, Terry. When the pair literally bump into each other for the first time in 20 years by chance, Cathy is shocked to realise that Michael is now a free man.
Looking him up online, she takes umbrage at his seemingly perfect life - and hatches a plan to destroy it by highly devious means.
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While Cathy has struggled with her mental health as a result of Michael’s actions, Michael is also still paying a toll: his dubious past is constantly held over him by his wealthy, highly religious wife and father-in-law.
The strain of meeting their holier than thou expectations is driving Michael to drink - and distraction. When an attractive stranger, Molly Bloom, begins instant messaging him, a flirtatious rapport quickly develops.
Of course, ‘Molly’ is just Cathy using a fake online profile. As things escalate, and despite the repeated warnings of her ‘voice of reason’ best friend, Sally (Kerri Quinn), Cathy becomes increasingly obsessed with now having power and control over Michael as the overtly sexy Molly, to the point where virtual interactions and provocations no longer satisfy her increasingly confused needs.
“For both of the characters, this past trauma is part of their fabric,” comments Wakefield-born Scholey (40), whom viewers will recognise from her previous TV hits including The Split, The Serial Killer’s Wife and The Sixth Commandment - although she sounds convincingly ‘local’ in her latest role.
“I think that’s why they connect. They have a magnetism between them and it’s because of this past trauma they’ve shared, albeit from different sides. I do think there is an attraction in having shared what is the biggest experience of both their lives.”
“The idea of control for Cathy is a fascinating thing, particularly when it comes to trauma and the overwhelming emotions that can make you feel entirely out of control,” comments Morgan (38), a former pupil at Integrated College Dungannon who made his name with London stage hit Vernon God Little and the BBC series Merlin before going on to star in the likes of The Fall, Humans and Belfast.
“But when you can put a face and a social media account and an address and a man to the trauma, that you can control in some way, [Michael] becomes the manifestation of all the [bad] things she has going on.
“But he’s actually not that ‘bad’, and she begins to learn that. But it doesn’t matter how nice someone is, it doesn’t suddenly make your trauma nice, you know? All that’s still awful, and that’s the complicated knotty issue that goes on within this piece.”
Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of Dead & Buried, adapted by Bateman from his acclaimed one woman show, Bag For Life, is that viewers are likely to empathise with Michael more than the increasingly vindictive and erratic Cathy, despite him ostensibly being the ‘villain’ of the piece.
“Nobody ever casts themselves as the villain in their life, do they?” offers Morgan, who graduated in Performing Arts from Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education and trained with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.
“You know, people always want to be happy, to live good lives. Even more so if they have trauma from the past that is hard to be forgiven for, whether that’s self-forgiveness or forgiveness in the hands of others.
“Michael just so happens to live in a household in which forgiveness has actually been the key to him being in that situation. He needed to be around this quite staunch evangelical family that really sustains itself and finds power in the fact that it has been his saviour and he is the sinner who, seemingly, must eternally be in repentance.
“It brings up that question of any legacy, of any past trauma: when do you get the point of being forgiven? When do you ever get to the point of being able to live your full life? That’s what he’s trying to do, but I think we get the feeling that he’s not actually that happy.”
It brings up that question of any legacy, of any past trauma: when do you get the point of being forgiven? When do you ever get to the point of being able to live your full life?
— Colin Morgan
As mentioned, Annabel Scholey mastered an excellent Northern Irish accent for her role as Cathy, and it seems she had plenty of lived experience to draw upon to ensure her ‘nordie’ voice was spot on.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Ireland,” says the actor, who tells me that she loved filming here and found herself maintaining her northern accent even when off camera.
“My ex-husband [Co Fermanagh-born actor Ciaran McMenamin] is Northern Irish and my little girl is half-Irish. But I did a lot of work with my brilliant accent coach, Brendan Gunn, because there’s nothing worse than a bad accent.
“I just really didn’t want to be the lead in a show where everybody else is Irish and you watch it going, ‘She’s a bit rubbish’, you know? So I felt very passionately that I had to work hard on it. And I told Colin and Kerri if they heard anything off, I wanted them to pull me up.
“The problem is, I found it quite addictive - and every other accent I try now turns into a Northern Ireland accent.”
Given Scholey’s previous starring role in acclaimed true crime drama The Salisbury Poisonings, written by Blue Lights creators Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, she might well find another role to show off her ‘norn Iron’ skills in the near future.
“I would absolutely love to work with Declan and Adam again,” she enthuses.
”I’m very much hoping that [the accent] opens up another place for me to work, because I’ve got a lot of friends in Northern Ireland.”
