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EXCLUSIVE: There’s fire and anger in Maxine Peake’s portrayal of Dolours Price in new FX drama Say Nothing.
Price, in her younger years, was one of the Irish Republican Army’s most feared paramilitary operatives, responsible, along with her younger sister Marian, for atrocities in London and Northern Ireland during the so-called Troubles.
Peake abhors that phrase. “It’s such a flimsy word, isn’t it?” she argues. “The country was occupied, the English came, and it was a war.”
The Troubles, she continues, is a feeble way of describing “something so horrific and something that the legacy continues on and on.”
Peake is one of the best actors of her generation. She’s an expert comedienne — watch her in Inside No. 9 or Shameless — and a breathtaking dramatic thespian. Witness her in dramas such as Little Dorrit, Silk and The Village and movies that include Peterloo and new film Words of War, directed by James Strong. She portrays journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was executed in the elevator of her Moscow apartment because of her fearless investigative reporting in Putin’s Russia. The unmissable film with Peake’s outstanding performance is due for release next year.
Peake was born and raised in the Greater Manchester district of Bolton in England, but it’s the blood of a militant republican from the Old Smoke that is Belfast that courses through her veins in her searing portrait of Dolours as she picks over, years after the fact, what she was willing to do to end the British rule in Northern Ireland and achieve reunification.
Whether that involved robbing banks, ambushing British soldiers, setting off car bombs in London — including one parked outside the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, that left 200 people injured — it was her duty for the cause.
Price and her sister were sent to jail in London from the mainland bombing campaign and were brutally force-fed. To listen to Peake talk in Say Nothing about what Dolours endured in prison is extraordinary.
Her performance seamlessly merges with that of Belfast-born Lola Petticrew, who fiercely captures the younger Dolours Price’s unwavering dedication to the IRA’s mission.
Peake says she had to “slide in” so that the audience “would believe it was the same person.”
But it’s a broken Price that we see, full of recriminations for what she put herself through for what she believed in. And sorrow too, for those who were maimed and killed.
The anguish is almost unbearable. Not just for Price but for the innocents who perished during the conflicts, some by her actions.
That’s the power of Say Nothing, now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. It was written by showrunner Joshua Zetumer based on a book — Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland — and further exhaustive research on the ground by its author Patrick Radden Keefe.
The gripping, and at times deeply poignant, nine-part series focuses on the Price sisters — the younger and older Marian’s are vividly depicted by Hazel Doupe and Helen Behan, respectively — and the abduction and disappearance of Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a 37-year-old widowed mother of 10, wrongly accused by the IRA of being a British Army informant, and the arduous campaign by her children to find her remains.
Also prominent in Say Nothing are senior IRA combatants Brendan Hughes (played by Anthony Boyle and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) and Gerry Adams (played by Josh Finan and Michael Colgan), the latter a former president of Sinn Féin and one of the architects of the party’s shift in seeking a settlement to sectarian violence, part of the effort that brought about the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, designed to bring an end to 30 years of warfare on the streets of Belfast.
However, Adams has publicity declared that he was never a member of the IRA, and each show carries this disclaimer: Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.
Peake says that such denials by Adams were seen as “a betrayal” by Price, who died in 2013.
“That denies you your history as well, doesn’t it?” Peake protests.
“So everything she’s done under what she says are the orders of this guy who then says, ‘I was never involved,’ I felt really played with her reality, with her history and her memory, and just the fury of ‘what was it for?’” she asserts.
There must have been a sense of “rage,” Peake notes, in “being denied your actual memory and life trajectory to this point by somebody.”
By now, Dolours is remorseful but finds a sort of solace in alcohol while blaming Adams for being the “architect of her trauma.”
Peake’s role, in a way, is that of a brilliant immersive narrator. For several episodes we see Dolours, by now long divorced from her marriage to actor Stephen Rea, recounting her story — her life in the IRA — to Anthony McIntyre, known as Mackers (Seamus O’Hara), a former IRA prisoner and one of several researchers who conducted interviews with former combatants from the Northern Ireland conflict on behalf of Boston College. To encourage participants to speak freely, they were told that relevant tapes would be released upon the death of each contributor.
When Peake was preparing for the role, she spoke to a lot of people who joined the IRA, and “the future wasn’t something that people thought about. You knew that these actions came with a cost; just how do you settle into the rest of your life when you’ve done something so extreme? That fascinates me,” she states.
“How does the rest of your life measure up in many ways when you’ve been through such extreme emotions, when you’ve been that close to death, when you’ve taken life? I don’t know then — how you process that and move forward?”
When I view all nine episodes again, I focus on Peake, and I see what she’s just told me etched on her face in her portrayal of Dolours, especially when she’s sat opposite McIntyre telling him the “ancient history” of “the whole sordid story.”
Anthony Hopkins once observed that it’s harder to act sitting ramrod still than it is racing around being active.
“It was sort of a gift in many ways because for me, acting is reacting. That’s it, really,” she says. “I mean, simplify it. It’s about how you react to a situation. It’s about trying to be truthful within the situation.”
To achieve that meant “absolutely knowing and imbuing yourself with the history of Dolours that I knew, and then obviously the script. And then you have to put yourself in that situation,” she tells me.
Being able to sit still and listen and speak to somebody was special, she adds, because ”you don’t have a lot of dramas where you can just sit, listen and tell your story.”
And such scenes are not often done as rivetingly as when performed by Peake and O’Hara.
Sometimes summoning a memory playing Price “really” got to Peake, “but again, it’s about being present.”
She felt the same way when she did scenes with Behan’s older Marian. “Lola was saying the other day that she and Hazel, playing the younger sisters, felt this real connection. Similarly with myself and Helen, we felt we just bonded, we felt like sisters. We could get that nippiness and edge and love that’s created in love that sisters have.”
Quite a few times, Peake says, she would do something “that I would find something amusing or something that would just choke me up and I wouldn’t expect them to.”
She noted that often when she watches documentaries and real people are being interviewed “I never think they cry,” so she was “very conscious not to make it too sentimental, too emotional, because I think you’ve got to give the audience something. And when you watch documentaries, you can see a real-life person struggling to keep the lid on their emotion. But you wouldn’t try and stop it, but sometimes you hold it back.”
After immersing oneself into Say Nothing, there’s anger at the killings and the maiming but there’s also sort of admiration for Dolours Price standing up for what she believed in.
Peake nods agreement but says, “In absolutely no uncertain terms do I agree with violent means to an end. But personally, I feel you cannot. Yeah, in many ways I do admire her drive, her courage, her commitments, but obviously not in the way they manifested.”
The “Irish question” is a matter that she’s always had an interest in. “And I thought I knew stuff, but I suppose once you start going into the real personal stuff, I think, on both sides there is the romanticism, isn’t there, of the struggle. There’s definitely romanticism across the water about it.”
I mention that I saw Dolours Price a couple of times at film and stage premieres in London, usually accompanied by Rea, and she appeared on the face of it to be charming and attentive.
Peake recalls seeing filmmaker Mike Leigh at a screening of a Ken Loach film.
“’Oh, hello, Maxie,’ he went, ‘What are you doing at the moment?’ I said, ‘Oh, I’m just filming this series called Say Nothing. I’m playing Dolours Price.’ And Mike went, ‘Oh I met her, quite a few times. Lovely woman.’
“So there were lots of these people who met her. I was trying to find a balance and then I met the real Anthony McIntyre and his wife, and they had a different viewpoint,” says Peake.
She also did a couple of Zoom meetings with Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, an Irish civil rights leader and former politician. “Bernadette said Dolours was a really generous person, and this was apart from whatever they felt about what she’d done.”
I ask Peake if she felt in any personal and legal peril because of Gerry Adams denial that he was involved in any actions by the IRA.
“Well, I haven’t written it and I haven’t produced it, so no,“ she says firmly.
“And I feel I’m playing a part in a TV drama that I was asked to play, and for me the attraction was playing Dolours. The attraction of taking this woman when we’ve been through this extraordinary journey. But no, I maybe naively thought that if there is any comeback, it could all go to the powers that be.
“I am only an actor, a vessel, one cog in the wheel of this big storytelling machine.”
Her concern was to “realize you’re talking about people’s lives and people’s trauma. And so you’ve got to be very sensitive about it. … We talked about the legacy of the trauma that continues on, and you’ve got to be very respectful and mindful of people’s lives who were destroyed by it and continue to suffer from what happened.”
