Late Late Show<\/a>, the Father Ted star said he learned the hard way that a flippant remark can travel a long way once it loses its original tone and context.<\/p>\nO\u2019Hanlon said he was once asked in a light-hearted magazine interview whether he took drugs and, instead of simply saying no, gave a deliberately mischievous answer.<\/p>\n
“I said, ‘Yeah, I do. I love them. I think everyone should take them. And I think you should put cocaine on your cornflakes,\u2019” he recalled.<\/p>\n
“You\u2019re having a jolly conversation. It was a light-hearted interview. And you think that\u2019s as far as that will go.”<\/p>\n
O\u2019Hanlon said the remark was later picked up by an Irish tabloid, which he recalled ran a front-page story under the headline “Father Ted Star\u2019s drug shame”.<\/p>\n
“They had a huge picture of me as Dougal in my most gormless guise,” he said.<\/p>\n
The actor said he had to deal with the fallout while filming Father Ted.<\/p>\n
“We were actually shooting, I think, the second series of Father Ted at the time, and journalists were camped outside the set, waiting to get a word,” he said.<\/p>\n
“So that was pretty demoralising.”<\/p>\n
O\u2019Hanlon said the experience taught him to be careful about how jokes can travel once they are taken out of their original setting.<\/p>\n
“You have to be careful what you write. You\u2019ve got to be careful what you say,” he said.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Hanlon was on The Late Late Show to discuss his new book, A Plot to Die For, which he described as “a lovely, funny murder mystery” with themes of fame, family and the bond between a mother and son.<\/p>\n
He said he wanted to write something his own mother would enjoy, adding that the book was written during a period when he was spending a lot of time with her.<\/p>\n
“It was written at a time that I was spending a lot of time with her and getting to know her very, very well as a person rather than purely as a mother,” he said.<\/p>\n
“She\u2019s a lovely woman. She\u2019s elegant. She\u2019s stoic. She\u2019s philosophical. She\u2019s good-humoured and she has no cynicism whatsoever. And so I wanted to write a book that she would love.”<\/p>\n
You can watch the interview in full on the RT\u00c9 Player.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ardal O\u2019Hanlon has recalled how a joke he made in an interview more than 20 years ago ended…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629243,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-629242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}