![]() Many films have documented and dramatized the Troubles, but most have tended to focus on the violence, on the ideologies. “The idea of them checking under their cars for bombs in their driveways… That was normal. ![]() It is clear the scene he is playing out in his mind. “Now, I have kids,” Dornan says, then pauses. (You wouldn’t know: her flawless skin and glossy chestnut bob give away no signs of sleep deprivation.) Balfe has recently become a mother for the first time, her 10-week-old baby son the reason she had to spend 30 minutes with a breast pump in the back of a van between photos for this shoot. Dornan and his wife, Amelia Warner, have three girls-they are the screensaver on his phone, which he showed me, unprompted, earlier in the day, absolutely besotted. I wonder if playing Ma and Pa allowed for a new perspective, for them to see afresh, through the eyes of their adult characters, their own childhoods and that period in Ireland’s history-particularly since both are now parents. We didn’t even really think about it until our cousins came up from the south and they would be terrified going through, because you’d have British soldiers with machine guns pointed at the car asking for your papers.” ![]() “I remember we used to go weekly shopping in the north,” adds Balfe, “and you would go through checkpoints at least once a week. “Like trying to meet your mates on Saturday afternoons in town and there’d been a bomb scare.” “I always think back to stuff that became normal, that was not normal,” says Dornan. At least, they weren’t aware of it, as children often aren’t. ![]() But my dad was a police sergeant-that’s why we were there-so we were brought up very apolitical.”įor both of them, the idea of “sides,” of division, did not much figure in their day-to-day. It was, she says, “a very IRA-leaning area. Balfe, meanwhile, lived in the Republic of Ireland, one of seven, right on the border in Monaghan. ![]()
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