‘We are no longer apologising’: Éanna Hardwicke on Ireland’s cultural confidence and what it’s like to play Roy Keane

Currently on stage in a play that provoked riots, the rising Irish actor is also stepping into Keane’s boots to replay a notorious footballing feud. But, he says, his country feels more empowered than ever before

Éanna Hardwicke cannot really remember Saipan. Not Saipan the place, a small Pacific Island 200km north-east of Guam. Nor, thankfully, Saipan the film, in which he stars, and which I’m hoping to discuss with him at length this afternoon. No, he means Saipan the incident, Saipan the event, Saipan the crisis that has baffled and incensed Ireland’s population for a quarter of a century.

We are sitting in a pleasantly boxy meeting room deep within the lungs of the National Theatre, a space so starkly concrete that the current king of England once described it as a clever way of building a nuclear power plant in the middle of London without anyone objecting. Hardwicke himself sports the quiet, thoughtful presence of a literature student, at times speaking like a particularly articulate MA who’s popped round to deliver a treatise on some dramatic works he just happens to be starring in. He’s here rehearsing a play that forms another contentious landmark in Ireland’s cultural history, but we’ll get to that once we move past the summer he turned five.