Clare Dunne: ‘I wanted to tell a story for my generation... I just feel like we can’t grow up. We can’t ever get ahead’
She may not be a household name just yet, but Clare Dunne’s star is in the ascendant — here, the multi-talented Dublin writer/actor talks about tackling the housing crisis and domestic violence in her debut feature, Herself, starring in a new TV gangster series with Aidan Gillen and Ciarán Hinds, and why Hollywood types who told her to remove her distinctive birthmark ‘just didn’t get me’
After moving house four times during lockdown, Clare Dunne has — fifth time lucky — found a place to call home. Via Zoom, she excitedly shows me around her new seafront apartment, including its stunning sea view.
“It’s amazing,” she enthuses. “This landlord is really sound, and me and Jack [Nolan, Red Rock actor and Dunne’s partner] can’t believe we found it on Daft. I actually feel like I’ve won the Lotto.” Dunne and Nolan were both renting places in the UK before the pandemic — the actress had a plan to move to London, where her partner was already based, for a lengthy spell — but they have now settled nicely into the south Co Dublin suburb.
As it happens, Dunne’s feature debut, Herself — which she co-wrote and starred in — touches on the vagaries of the housing market. In it, she plays Sandra, a mother-of-two who is struggling to get by in every way imaginable. Sandra escapes an abusive husband (played with compelling menace by Ian Lloyd Anderson) and, after the housing system refuses to give her a new home, attempts to build her own house on land gifted to her by Peggy, an ailing doctor that Sandra cares for (Harriet Walter).
“I suppose, even back when I started the film, my main concern was that I wanted to tell a story for my generation a bit,” Dunne says. “I just feel like we can’t grow up. We can’t ever get ahead. We can’t seem to get simple things covered, the basics. And I wanted to stay authentic to that time.”
While in conversation with a friend, a single mother who had to move out quickly from her home, Dunne began Googling in despair. She come across the story of a person who had built his own home for €25,000. “He left the plans online for free, and people were building these houses all over the place, not just in Ireland,” she says. “It was like finding a new religion or something. And then I thought, if you look at the actual cost of it, and if you empower yourself to do it yourself, and get the odd hand off friends, it’s a utopia. You still have to build it, but it’s certainly a different way of looking at it.”
If anything, Dunne’s message has become even more pertinent in the last 18 months. Unfortunately, the film’s other major theme of domestic violence has also taken on a new significance since lockdown.
As part of Herself’s script, Dunne had researched this particular story exhaustively, thanks to a number of interviews with staff from Women’s Aid. Naturally, she has watched the rise of reports of domestic violence amid the pandemic with acute horror.
“Immediately, I just feel so sad,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Why is it always highlighted when it’s at the point [when someone dies]?’ It’s like we’re finally much more aware of people going through it. There’s a slightly positive way of looking at that, which is that lockdown meant nothing else to focus on, and people realising the hell they were living in, and they were finally reaching out [to authorities]. It’s horrific that it’s happening but a relief that people are reaching out to helplines and refuges, and reaching out to friends and family.
“As filmmakers and storytellers, you’re hoping there’s not just an entertainment value to your story and maybe there’s a level of opening people’s consciousness to other things,” she adds.
“I doubt my film will save anybody, so to speak. But it can certainly open people’s minds.”
The film has already touched a nerve with audiences. In July of this year, Dunne and her co-writer, Malcolm Campbell, won an IFTA for Best Film Script.
Herself, which is finally set for release across Ireland and the UK on September 10, has had a strange and circuitous journey to the cinemas so far.
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Dunne applied for Irish Film Board funding in 2015, and Herself was initially passed over. Undeterred, she applied in 2016 and secured development funding. She then decided to send her fledgling screenplay to Sharon Horgan.
“I sent an email saying, ‘Hey, I’d love to submit this to you and see if you think there’s anything to it.’ I woke up to two emails from her: the first said, ‘I’m really sorry, I won’t get to read this for months,’ and then the second said, ‘I started reading the script. Can you take a phone call?’”
With Horgan attached in a production capacity, Herself began to gather pace. Phyllida Lloyd, with whom Dunne was working on a theatre project, soon got on board as director.
“When Phyllida said that she would only do it if I could play the lead role, I was like, ‘What the f*** is going on here?’ It was magic,” she recalls.
After premiering to fanfare at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2020, the film also closed out the Dublin International Film Festival. Amazon Studios snapped up the US distribution rights to the movie (the project was initially developed under Horgan’s Merman production company, alongside Element Pictures).
Between the current housing crisis, the domestic violence strand, and the strong message about community and connection, the release of Herself looked likely to benefit from good timing at the beginning of 2020.
Yet, during the pandemic, uncertainty was soon writ large over the cinematic release of the film. While Dunne was definitely on a roll at the beginning of 2020, it appeared to be a case of a dazzling career trajectory somewhat interrupted.
“Ed Guiney [from Element Pictures] rang me up last year and I was like, ‘What’s going to happen with the film?’ and he said, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen but I know in my gut that people are going to want to see a story like this within the next few months,’” Dunne recalls. “I figured, OK, Ed is who he is for a reason. He knows what people’s hearts and souls want.”
With industry buzz growing around Herself and its creator, things have gone decidedly “Hollywood” in Dunne’s life. Last year, she signed with a new agency, United Talent Agency — home to Harrison Ford, Mariah Carey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Johnny Depp and Wes Anderson.
The Hollywood Reporter recently described Dunne as “the latest entrant into an echelon of UK and Irish female actor-writers, which includes the likes of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Michaela Coel and Sharon Horgan”. (On which, Dunne says, “Jesus, I didn’t see that one. That’s lovely.”)
As is often the case after a successful showing at Sundance, plenty of Hollywood studio meetings followed. Sounds glamorous, but Dunne is quick to downplay it: “It’s basically loads of companies just saying, ‘If you have anything you want to send us...’ kind of thing,” she reveals. “I’ve written three major things and I’m noodling at other things now. I need to just finish things and bring these guys something.
“I met some people that have made huge films — like the producers of the last Star Wars films wanted to meet me and I was like, ‘Jesus.’ People just want to get to know you, but I suppose they’re also thinking of writers’ rooms they are setting up.”
Dunne has tasted life in Hollywood’s big leagues already. She had a minor role as Victoria in 2019’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, which also starred Tom Holland, Zendaya and Jake Gyllenhaal.
“I found out I had the job on the Friday and then was on set Monday morning,” she says. “They look after you well, the drivers pick you up, the catering is great and you’re in lovely accommodation, but the best thing is the team on it. I’m there, and it really is ‘blink and you’ll miss me’, but do you know what? I had the absolute craic.”
More recently, Dunne had a part in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel. Naturally, I’m full of questions about co-stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and SuperValu bags and the like (Damon famously lived near Sandycove’s Forty Foot during the making of the film).
“Listen, it’s been said in the news I have a role in this — I did a one-dayer [shoot]. I have one line,” she stresses. “It’s a minor, minor stint — that’s it. I have never spoken to Ben. I had one scene with Jodie [Comer] and I didn’t even get to really speak to her, it happened too fast. But a few of us actresses had a great time in the K Club for three weeks, as we had to quarantine there. We’re now all experts in tennis and golf. [While filming] we just had to watch the duel, which meant watching the stuntmen, the fake Matt Damon and the fake Adam Driver for a while. Honestly, though, those few weeks were great craic. I even got some writing done.”
She admits that she would love to work more in that studio realm in the future. “The only thing is that all the studio meetings were on Zoom,” she says, smiling. “I’d have loved just a little tour of LA and New York after Sundance. I’d love a couple of stints over in America, even if I just moved there for a year or two, once I finish my Kin contract.”
Kin is Dunne’s next small-screen outing and is an Irish gangster series co-starring Aidan Gillen, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Ciarán Hinds and Charlie Cox. After its premiere on Irish TV, Kin will be shown on AMC (home to Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead) in the US, and has also been pre-sold in Scandinavia to on-demand service Viaplay. The drama focuses less on the violence within the criminal underworld and more on loyalty and unbreakable familial bonds: less Love/Hate and more The Sopranos.
Asked what it was about the project that appealed to her, in no-nonsense fashion, she explains, “I was in the middle of the pandemic and I was on the PUP going, ‘What the feck is going to happen?’ I had been waiting all of my acting career to be offered a lead role. I got to audition for it and when I read the script, I fell in love with the whole world of it.”
Irish audiences are, of course, no strangers to gangland dramas, but Dunne explains that Kin is different to the others. “It’s this ensemble of people and you really get inside the characters and follow their journeys,” she says. “I just think it’s very sure of itself. I learned loads from working with Charlie Cox and Aidan Gillen. Charlie’s amazing, and no one realises just how funny Aidan is. I just loved being around such experienced actors and realising that even the most experienced ones are willing to be vulnerable and ask questions on set.”
It’s all finally coming up roses for the actress/writer, but there were plenty of hard yards put in before her debut feature came to fruition.
She grew up in Ballyboden in Dublin, and later Ballinteer, alongside her mother and father — a family resource centre worker and an office logistics manager, respectively — and five sisters (Dunne describes herself as the “eldest but least mature”).
“When I was 12, my mum asked me what I wanted to do and I just said, ‘I love telling stories,’ so she sent me to drama group [the drama school in Churchtown owned by the late Maeve Widger].”
Every so often, someone in the acting industry or a drama school teacher would refer to Dunne’s small birthmark, under her left eye.
“Some people, in a kind way, were saying, ‘It might be a thing that some people can’t get past,’ but other people, and my mam and dad, said, ‘Look, if they don’t want to work with you because of that, they’re not the people you want to work with.’
“I remember, at one point, I had to get [the birthmark] checked out for safety when I was 12 or 13, and they said that removing it was so difficult, so I kind of just accepted that it was part of me. For years when I wasn’t getting screen work, there were moments I doubted myself. I met some managers in America who asked me about getting it removed, and I just walked out. I was like, ‘You don’t get me. See ya.’”
Dunne graduated in 2009 from the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff and made her way to work at the Druid Theatre. “What ensued after that was six months of doing nothing,” she laughs. “I had written a very loose piece for an assignment in college and I got a prize for it — £1,000 sterling. As I was moving to London, I decided to put on the show, and I rented Smock Alley and put on that play, Living With Missy. Looking back, it was one of the happiest times of my creative life.”
Dunne then spent a spell in New York for TV pilot season. “I was auditioning and waitressing and thought, ‘Well, this isn’t going great,’” she admits. “But I was reading so many scripts that I developed an eye for knowing a good one in the first couple of pages.”
She is writing up a storm now, with different projects at various stages of completion, including a television pilot for Element Pictures. She is also attending auditions for new roles.
I do wonder if the slew of effusive praise and accolades have affected the writing, or the auditions, in any way. Is she more confident in her abilities, now that she is the toast of the industry?
“I’m just like all Irish women, I’d say,” she laughs. “I’m not good at letting it in sometimes, which is probably unhealthy. To be honest, I’ve been writing recently, and the art is in the completion.
“Completing something alone is such an achievement for me that I will always chase that buzz. Whatever unlocks me, I just have to go for it. I just need to go to a coffee shop and sit outside and hear the chatter of people. Sometimes I have to be completely on my own to write; other times, I have to drive out to the sea for a walk.
“Well, at least I don’t need to drive there anymore.”
‘Herself’ will be released in Irish cinemas on September 10. ‘Kin’ will be aired on RTÉ One on September 12 at 9.35pm
