I meet Conor MacNeill at the Almeida theatre in Islington, north London. He’s at the end of a stint performing in Portia Coughlan, a play written by Marina Carr. ‘Haunting’, ‘messed up’, ‘unremittingly bleak’ and ‘disturbing’ are words some critics have used to describe it. It’s about death, obsession and self-destruction. It’s heavy stuff, but MacNeill is warm and smiley as I chat to him in his dressing room, and he has good reason to be. The Northern Irish actor has had a busy couple of years, between theatre, T.V. shows and film work, starring alongside Liam Neeson, Jamie Dornan and Timothy Spall. It’s also not his first rodeo when it comes to handling complex characters or dark subject matter.
This year alone he’s had a supporting role in The Sixth Commandment, a true-crime drama in which a young churchwarden repeatedly
