The Irish ‘Banshee’ Giving One of the Best Performances of the Year

The last time Kerry Condon worked with Colin Farrell, he punched her in the face. Or, rather, his character did: an Irish criminal in the 2003 dark comedy Intermission, who charms Condon’s store cashier before suddenly jabbing her in the nose and running off with the till.

“That’s all the part I had,” Condon tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. While a key player in the film’s memorable opening sequence, it's the last you see of her in the film. “I was kind of bitter about it at the time, I remember.” Yet she also takes pride in the role. “I was glad, because it was a cool scene,” she says. “You didn't really see the ending coming. But I felt even then that I deserved more, because I’m definitely capable of a bigger part.”

Nearly 20 years later, the actors have reunited—and the characters they play are on much friendlier terms. Condon is speaking to us about the experience in the library at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she’s in town to receive the Distinguished Performance Award at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival for her work in her new film, The Banshees of Inisherin. In it she proves that point about deserving the bigger part. And then some.

If you listed the things about Banshees that are worth gushing about, you’d run out of fingers. (And if you’ve seen the film, we apologize for mentioning that triggering body part.)

First off, it marks a reunion between Condon and Farrell, this time as characters on much better terms. They play siblings in Martin McDonagh’s ecstatically reviewed film, about the complicated dynamics between friends and family on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, set during the Irish Civil War.

Farrell stars as Pádraic, a simple man whose entire world is rocked when his best friend and drinking buddy, Colm (Brendan Gleeson), tells Pádraic that he doesn’t want to see or associate with him anymore. Sweetly—if irritatingly—the well-intentioned Pádraic can’t accept that, refusing to give up trying to solve the rift in their friendship.

Farrell gives the best performance of his underappreciated career as the endearing, but never dim, Pádraic. Gleeson is his perfect foil, wearing Colm’s exasperation like a heavy cloak weighing down his whole, hulking body. (It’s a reunion for that pair, too, who previously worked with McDonagh on 2008’s In Bruges.) McDonagh’s script does a clever jig between poetic and colloquial: “Some of the lines are so beautiful, you think ‘Oh, I wish they could be printed at the bottom of the screen,” she says.

Ireland has rarely looked so mystical and stunning as it does here. The film isn’t so much a tourism ad for visiting the country’s rolling green hills and craggy shoreline as it is a spiritual invocation. Farrell’s sweater wardrobe, in particular, may supplant Chris Evans’ Knives Out pullover in the annals of cinema’s most enviable fall knitwear. All of that, plus there is a scene-stealing miniature donkey to swoon over.

Yet, amidst those superlatives, emerges Condon’s performance.

Her character, Siobhán, is the emotional backbone of a film that is swirling with outsized feelings: a steady lightning rod in a storm cloud of petulant men, absorbing and grounding all their charged behavior. She’s dynamic in her own right, enlightened and well-read on an isolated island populated by gossips and drunks—above the pettiness of it all without any condescension toward the people who make up her home, her family.

Each time she’s forced to bolt from her cottage to broker peace in some skirmish or another, she pierces through the dense island fog, like a blaring beam from a lighthouse. The men are the mess. Siobhán is the steady hand. Look at any awards pundit’s predictions, and you’ll see Condon’s name on the list of frontrunners for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination.

“To be honest,” she says, “it feels kind of bananas.”

As we talk at the festival ahead of receiving her award, Condon is practically fizzing with energy—the excited kind, when heaping praise on repeat collaborators McDonagh and Farrell; the nervous kind, when thinking about the speech she’s about to give while accepting the honor. Her musical accent reverberates off the walls, like she is providing a rousing soundtrack for the room as much as she is having a conversation. Her piercing, greenish-blue eyes dance along to the song.

‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ Is Colin Farrell at His Very Best

While McDonagh is known in Hollywood for films like In Bruges and Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri—the latter of which Condon had a role in—he’s a prolific playwright as well. In 2001, when Condon was 18, she was cast as Maraid in his The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which The Telegraph ranked among the “best plays of all time.” (Condon is somewhat of a theater-world prodigy in the U.K.; at 19, she became the youngest actress to play Ophelia in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet.) She also starred in McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, making it all the more meaningful that this career milestone accompanies a movie that her frequent collaborator and friend wrote.

As for what it is about what Condon brings to the roles that McDonagh writes that has made this decades-long partnership so fruitful, Condon smirks sheepishly before answering. “I suppose that might be a question for him, because I feel like I’d be bigging myself up to say that.” Or, given the nature of the women she’s cast as, “I’ll be saying that I’m actually kind of wild and damaged.”

While Condon could never have predicted the response Banshees has gotten from critics—it currently sits at 99-percent “fresh” on Rotten Tomatoes—or the attention that she’s received for her performance, there was a giddiness she felt when she first read the McDonagh’s script. “I did go, ‘Oh, yes, this is like one of your brilliant plays, but a movie, so everyone will have access to it. Because not everyone has seen the plays or read the plays. Just knowing that it would be in a film form for more people to see, I was like, ‘Oh, everyone’s gonna realize how great you are at the Irish stuff.’”

There’s a certain soul-searching required of you when you’re on a press tour like the one for Banshees. The film premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival, and its cast has hop-scotched across the globe for other festivals on the way to its theatrical release last weekend. It’s given Condon, whose career has spanned a variety of roles (she’s also appeared in the TV series Rome and Better Call Saul, and is the voice of F.R.I.D.A.Y. in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), occasion to reflect on what the McDonagh roles she’s played, in particular, have meant to her.

“All of the parts seem to come at various stages in my career where I've needed them or needed that reminder—it always makes me feel like I'm starting again, and that I’m good at this,” she says.

When she was in Cripple of Inishmaan in 2008, it had been a long stretch since she’d done theater. “After theater, you always feel like ‘I can do anything,’” she says. The experience reignited her confidence as an actress. Yet prior to filming Banshees, Condon says she experienced grief “for the first time in my life.” Siobhán came to her at the perfect time, as she was able to process her feelings through the character. But she also thinks she wouldn’t have been able to bring what the character needed without that experience.

We ask if it was the pandemic and the general darkness of the last few years that brought on the grief. “I hate to say it, but the pandemic was actually kind of nice for me,” she says, “because it was the first time in my life where I took a year and a half off work.” She has two horses, and she now had time to ride them every day. “I’m just working-class, so I feel I’ve always had a work ethic where I would never take a year and a half off. It would just seem very indulgent or something.” The grief she felt was because she had “lost something very close to me.”

There’s a lovely thought Condon had when she considered the despondence Siobhán seems to feel about her situation in life, like she’s wasting away her potential on this remote island, yearning for something more. An amusing running joke in the film is Pádraic’s close bond with his miniature donkey, Jenny, whom he treats as if she were a golden retriever: Jenny keeps following him around, he keeps inviting her into the house, and Siobhán keeps shooing her away. Maybe, Condon thought, Siobhán would have been happier if she had a closer bond with the animals.

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“Animals can keep you company, especially if you’re a single person or an old person who’s lost your husband,” she says. “They’re just such a gorgeous company, and they have unconditional love. I do feel that if Siobhán had bonded or been closer to the animals, maybe she mightn’t have been so lonely.”

Condon cherished the fact that there were so many animals on set. Pádraic and Siobhán also have two cows and a little calf, whose name is Charlie. Condon’s beaming smile practically explodes out of the room: “He was so cute, Charlie, and he's probably a big cow now.”

But the breakout star is Jenny, who has become somewhat of a media darling ever since the film began screening. As adorably diminutive as Jenny is on-screen, she was also temperamental and shy, because she hadn’t been used to being on a film set before. A “body double” was brought in to provide scene coverage when Jenny couldn’t perform, but to also give her comfort and company. That donkey’s name was Rosie.

If she’s being honest, Condon bonded more with Rosie than she did with Jenny. “I just felt like Jenny was the star, but I wanted Rosie to know that she was just as special and important as Jenny was. I don’t like people feeling left out and I hate favoritism. So I was very aware of Rosie’s feelings.”

There’s so much to talk about when it comes to Condon’s animal co-stars that it could be easy to neglect her relationships with her human ones.

Condon and Farrell’s performances have gotten much-deserved attention for how they create a sibling bond that feels revolutionary, which is to say that it is incredibly familiar. There’s an ease and an obviousness to their intimacy. The love Siobhán and Pádraic have for each other goes unspoken, yet it still blares so loudly that a handful of their quiet scenes together end up being among the year’s most shattering.

Condon is close to her real-life brother. “I talk to him more than anyone. He's the only person in my whole life I have never ever argued with.” She thought about how, when she’s with her brother, they revert back to the dynamic they had when they were preteens. There’s a childlike aspect to that, but also an intensity. Farrell has a comparable connection to his actual sister, so both actors understood the nuances of this sibling relationship.

In Banshees, there are times when Siobhán has to act as mother to Pádraic. But, from the twin beds in the room they share to the nature of their comfort and bickering, there’s also that frozen-in-time, youthful bond.

“When you’re with your sibling, you can be kind of ugly in your mannerisms, because you feel so comfortable around them,” Condon says. “It’s really relaxing, and you don’t really feel that way with a lot of people. When I was giving it out to him, I would have sort of a scowl.” Her face contorts similarly to how Siobhán’s does in the film as she says this. She’s right. It is instantly recognizable and singular: a familial grimace.

“Martin isn’t afraid to show uncomfortable aspects of humanity that we all understand, but maybe we don’t see represented so often,” Condon says. “It makes us uncomfortable, but he does it in a humorous way. You can digest this with a laugh, but, at the same time, it hits home.”

If it’s tempting to therapize in this way while talking about Banshees, well, that’s the Irish for you. A bleak matter-of-factness twists around an outpouring of feelings like a claddagh knot. “Being on the island [during the shoot] was very spiritual and moving,” Condon says. “You feel like there’s this invisible, spiritual feeling of something looking after you. Or people who’ve died are around you or something.”

Her eyes widen, somehow conveying both serenity and mischievousness. “You have the spirituality and the beauty of it. Then there’s also a remote, cut-off loneliness to it. Then the waves: You’re thinking the waves came all the way from America, and they’re banging on the shore with this rage. You’re thinking, ‘Oh dear God, what sorts of souls are they carrying into the shore?’

She punctuates it all with a grin: “Anyway, that’s what I was thinking.”

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