Nenagh actor McCormack to star in BBC thriller series

Nenagh actor Daryl McCormack's meteoric rise as a star of the screen will yet again be in evidence later this year when he appears in a BBC thriller series that puts a spotlight on the life of the so-called “fallen women” of the Magdalene Laundries.

Part of Ireland's dark past, the laundries were institutions where more than 10,000 women who became pregnant out of wedlock or were “morally wayward” were incarcerated against their will, some serving “life sentences” of enslavement for the “sins” they committed.

McCormack has landed what The Guardian in the UK is calling his most challenging role so far, as a police officer investigating a traumatised laundry abuse survivor in the forthcoming BBC thriller, The Woman in the Wall.

The Nenagh actor, who will star alongside the BAFTA award winning actress Ruth Wilson, has revealed to the newspaper that he had heard about the laundries, whose residents were disparagingly known as “The Maggies”.

“It's still very sensitive,” says McCormack. “I remember hearing about it growing up. The last laundry only closed in the late 80s, so it's not exactly ancient history. To know that survivors are still alive adds a great sense of responsibility. We want to honour those people.”

The Woman in the Wall is set to have its premiere screening on BBC One in November and comes after McCormack's starring role alongside Emma Thompson in the British sex comedy, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.

The Nenagh actor, who cut his teeth on stage performing in productions while in school at Nenagh CBS and with the local choral society, has also been lauded for his role in Sharon Horgan's screen comedy, Bad Sisters, and as gangster Isaiah Jesus in seasons five and six of Peaky Blinders.

He was just finishing acting school in Dublin when he was called for an audition for Star Wars. Even though he ultimately didn't make the cast, he was far from crestfallen. “It was a thrilling, chaotic week or two, and the fact they were even considering me was great,” he said.

But the screen career of the 29-year-old from Nenagh has come a long way since his acting college days and The Guardian in a profile calls him a “a rising star” who will soon again be “lighting up our screens” as part of what it describes as the current golden era of British TV shows.

THE WOMAN IN THE WALL

The Woman In The Wall is created and written by Joe Murtagh and produced by Motive Pictures. Described as a sensitively crafted new drama, the series will air on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and on Showtime in the US, and “will examine the legacy of one of Ireland’s most shocking scandals – the inhumane institutions known as The Magdalene Laundries.”

Ruth Wilson will play Lorna Brady, a woman from the small, fictional town of Kilkinure, and a former resident of one of the laundries, who wakes one morning to find a corpse in her house. Chillingly, Lorna has no idea who the dead woman is or if she herself might be responsible for the apparent murder.

Unluckily for Lorna, the extremely ambitious, albeit elusive Detective Colman Akande, played by McCormack, is on her tail for a crime which is seemingly unrelated to the dead woman she’s discovered in her house.

The BBC says McCormack's character as the detective garda is portrayed as someone who quickly rose through the ranks of the force “thanks to his natural aptitude for the job”.

“He possesses a dark and sometimes scathing wit but there is a quiet sadness to him that even he doesn’t understand, and he's hiding his own secrets from the world…” The BBC describes the series as “distinct, stirring and revelatory”. “The Woman in The Wall is a gothic detective story shot through with dark humour and elements of psychological horror, which follows a pair of forgotten and unlikely protagonists searching for the answers they so desperately need in a place where they have been long buried.”