Bring Them Down, Mammal, Calm with Horses

Christopher Eccleston has said it would be impossible for him to become an actor in today’s world, in an impassioned interview after the closure of Oldham’s Coliseum theatre. The British actor spoke about how the closure of the historic theatre would affect the acting community and people from working-class backgrounds. Eccleston reflected on his start in the industry and why he felt it would be “impossible” for people from a working-class background to enter acting today: “If you grow up in the north-west, you don’t feel culture and the arts belong to you. You don’t believe if you come from a council estate you can be an actor, a poet or a painter. I had no qualifications… Acting is not an academic pursuit. It’s a pursuit of the heart and the gut. You don’t need to have gone to Oxbridge... What you need is imagination and emotion and passion.” Eccleston said he would “keep banging on” about the promise of a new theatre in Oldham. Source: www.theguardian.com

I'm guessing I am one of many Americans who can't discern between rich and working-class British accents most of the time, but I understand it must be obvious to their fellow Brits. I've been watching Star Trek: TNG a lot lately and since Patrick Stewart has the air of a mannered Shakespearean actor—something like a real-life Frasier Crane type, except less off putting—I assumed he may have grown up wealthy. But it turns out he grew up quite poor, it turns out. Next, my mind went to Ian McKellen. I'd have guessed he was less 'posh' than Stewart but that he must have grown up well to do, since I know he went to St. Catharine's College of the University of Cambridge. I can't find much explicitly about his economic class during his upbringing, but it seems like he didn't grow up rich either. 

I guessed incorrectly about the class backgrounds of many. I suppose, because the American super-rich class historically has been limited to a few families like the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Kennedys, more recently the Hiltons and similar corporate-brand families. People who are very impoverished likewise used to be a very small share of the US population overall, and the vast majority fell within a broad-ranging middle class. But that is changing and I suppose we are bound for a more UK-like system in which socioeconomic class really defines a person's limitations and economic mobility. British actors who are really posh: Cara Delevigne descends from the Barons of Redesdale (aka the Mitfords), Helena Bonham Carter's family background has connections with the Bank of London, Benedict Cumberbatch is related to aristocracy. Damian Lewis (Homeland), Tom Hiddleston, Dominic West, and Eddie Redmayne went to Eton, the famous elite prep school. Barry Keoghan is salt of the earth Irish 'from the wrong side of the tracks' working class.

On the other hand, Julie Walters (Billy Elliot), Anthony Hopkins and Helen Mirren have working-class roots; Ian McKellen and Judi Dench came from middle class. Florence Pugh grew up upper-middle class with a successful restauranteur father but her family claims working-class roots. James Norton's (Star Trek: Picard) parents were teachers and then he went to Cambridge. Carey Mulligan is solid middle class. Kate Beckinsale went to a private independent girls' school. Does that mean she's posh? In the US, it would mean upper middle class. Ralph Fiennes: by his accent, I would have guessed working class, but he grew up connected to generations of family who have been knighted. I was struck when Fiona Hill—who has a lovely manner of speaking to my ear—testified that her working-class regional accent would have prohibited her from any important advancement in the UK and it's why she moved here to the US. But although I do hear what defines northern accents, which sound to me like they're nearly Scottish at times, I guess I can't always discern them because Ian McKellen is from Lancashire in NW England and Patrick Stewart is from Yorkshire in NE England and both sound refined and upper class to me. Michael Caine is totally non-posh, in fact he’s Cockney. The Eton actors, such as Benedict Cumberbatch and Eddie Redmayne, actually are upper middle class and are only posh-adjacent. Source: medium.com

Mubi shared a first-look image of Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott in the upcoming drama Bring Them Down, the debut feature from writer-director Chris Andrews. The film is in the final stages of principal photography in Ireland. Keoghan and Abbott have replaced Tom Burke and Paul Mescal who were previously attached to the film. The plot follows Michael (Abbott), the last son of a shepherding family, who lives with his ailing father, Ray (Meaney). Burdened by a terrible secret, Michael has isolated himself from the world. When a conflict with rival farmer Gary (Ready) and his son Jack (Keoghan) escalates, Michael is drawn into a devastating chain of events, forcing him to confront the horrors of his past, leaving both families permanently altered. Keoghan changed the game in The Killing of a Sacred Deer (his range as an actor is on full display) and Abbot has been around for years, most notably in Possessor, and Black Bear. The film is a European co-production produced by UK-based Wild Swim, Ruth Treacy and Julianne Forde from Ireland’s Tailored Films, Jacob Swan Hyam (UK), and Jean-Yves Roubin and Cassandre Warnauts from Frakas Productions (Belgium). Mubi financed Bring Them Down with Screen Ireland and the UK Global Screen Fund. Source: deadline.com

Barry Keoghan started his career as a critically acclaimed young Irish actor working on indie movies in his home country. These movies picked up notice thanks to festival appearances and he soon branched out into the United States, where he was able to slowly start to show his worth by working alongside some acclaimed directors before eventually picking up roles in both the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and DC Universe (DCU). Since coming into Hollywood, he has worked alongside directors like Christopher Nolan, David Lowery, and Martin McDonagh. He also gained a lot of mainstream attention when he picked up a role in the MCU movie Eternals. While the movie was one of the MCU's lower-rated releases and didn't set the box office on fire, he could possibly return down the line as the Eternal Druig. He also had a minor role in the DCU movie The Batman, where he took on the role of Joker, the most infamous villain in that film's world. However, the best Barry Keoghan movies don't always deal with superheroes.

The landscape of grief encompasses both universal and very personal territory, realms that Dublin-set drama Mammal (2016) explores with curiosity and compassion, although not always with narrative precision. Margaret (Rachel Griffiths) lives a solitary life and seems to like it that way. She works in a second-hand store in a nondescript corner of the city, but barely has a word to say to her shop assistant and rarely socializes. Her routine is unexpectedly disrupted by the reappearance of her ex-husband Matt (Michael McElhatton), who’s come to tell her that their 18-year-old son Patrick has gone missing. Margaret takes the news without much apparent emotion, since hasn’t seen Patrick since leaving the boy with Matt years before. 

At about the same time, she befriends Joe (Barry Keoghan), a homeless young man about the same age as her missing son, whom she assists after finding him injured and unconscious in the alley behind her shop one night. A bit like the feral cats that Margaret adopts from the streets, he’s wary and standoffish at first, but decides to move in with his few possessions after checking out her small two-bedroom home. Margaret begins molding the young man into a stand-in for her deceased child. Is she merely trying to be a mother again? Or are her intentions more driven by passion? As they spend more time together, sharing jokes, beers and smokes, their relationship begins to take on new dimensions that neither has anticipated. 

Margaret attempts to manifest a parental relationship with Joe as a substitute for the son she never knew and attain some measure of redemption in the process. For his part, Joe keeps trying to reconcile his painful decision to leave home with his inability to survive on the streets, even as his frequent late-night forays with the loose-knit gang that he used to run with threaten to destabilize his situation at Margaret’s. Keoghan here gives an intense performance as a tortured young man on the verge of utterly destroying his life before it’s even quite begun, never really settling on a predictable path to stability.

A tense crime film, Calm with Horses (2019), also known as The Shadow of Violence, is about a former boxer turned organized crime enforcer named Arm who is asked by the head of the family to kill someone. Joseph Murtagh creates a believable atmosphere of toxic masculinity and its hold on those that indulge in it. The box that they lock themselves in, intentionally or not. Barry Keoghan plays the role of Dymphna, a member of the crime family and friend of Arm. The character is complex but violent, and Keoghan's often subtle portrayal of the figure grounds him in reality. He is intimidating and brash, but has deeper layers to him, which the actor communicates ambiguously in this bleak thriller. Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com