![\"Francesca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/5070339_8_articleinline_147.jpg\" "\\"Francesca")
Francesca Kingdon and Peter M Smith in Code Red: Spain. <\/p>\nWhen Peter M Smith was a youngster, his family home backed onto that of two Irish acting legends. His closest neighbours in the Dublin suburb of Drimnagh were Emmet Bergin, best known for playing Dick Moran in the iconic Irish soap Glenroe, and his brother Patrick, who would go on to enjoy a lifelong career after starring in early career hits including Sleeping With the Enemy and Patriot Games.\n <\/p>\n
By the time Smith had started to fall in love with community musical theatre, Patrick was starting to make waves in Hollywood. Seeing the Bergins\u2019 successes encouraged the young Smith, who delivered newspapers in his neighbourhood, to consider an acting career \u2014 something that was also noticed by the Bergin stars\u2019 mother.<\/p>\n
\u201cI used to deliver the Herald to his mother, and she used to buy my Crumlin United lottery tickets from me every week, a pound each \u2014 she\u2019d buy two,\u201d remembers Smith. \u201cShe never won anything, but she was an absolute sweetheart, Mrs Bergin. I used to see Patrick and Emmet coming and going all the time. The reason I wanted to be an actor was because of Patrick and Emmet Bergin.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mammy Bergin, he recalls, used to look out for him as he first took part in local theatre shows as a boy. \u201cWhen Patrick was flying back and forth from Hollywood, she’d be telling him: \u2018Listen, that 12-year-old kid that lives behind is a talented kid\u2019. I\u2019d be doing talent shows, and little baby theatre productions. You’d get a name for yourself in a small town. So he always had an eye on me.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just down the road in Crumlin, another artistic legend would inspire one of Smith\u2019s future acting successes. The actor has spent much of the last year playing Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott in Moonlight: The Philip Lynott Enigma. The musical theatre show, which explores the formative years of the iconic musician, has been a massive hit with audiences in Ireland and beyond.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just sold out the Hammersmith Apollo in London, and we’re coming back now to do Vicar Street again in June, after a UK tour at the end of May,\u201d says Smith of the show\u2019s enduring popularity.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the latest role Irish performer Smith is enjoying in his own run of success. Following his role in the widely viewed Netflix series Who Is Erin Carter, Smith will soon be seen in Guy Ritchie\u2019s forthcoming crime thriller In The Grey. Co-starring Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rosemund Pike, it centres on the aftermath of a despot who steals a billion-dollar fortune, and a team sent to steal it back on what would be for anyone else a suicide mission.<\/p>\n
Francesca Kingdon and Peter M Smith in Code Red: Spain. <\/p>\n
\u201cMy scenes are with Carlos Bardem. I’m the FBI chief who’s been chasing him. The lesson I learned from working with Guy Richie was that the bigger the fish, the more comfortable they are in the ocean. He was just so relaxed and so cool. You can hear the experience \u2014 he thinks of things that you would never consider.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0In the meantime, Smith and his colleagues have been driving some work of their own. Having brought Moonlight to the stage through production company Zero3 Productions \u2014 founded by Smith and his friend and fellow actor Francesca Kingdon \u2014 they make their movie debut with Code Red: Spain.\n <\/p>\n
The English and Spanish action thriller launches viewers into the world of Spanish crime lord Eduardo Sanchez and his wife Estelle \u2014 all under the watch of veteran soldier Solomon Pearce. Irish filmmaker Jason Figgis directs. \u201cJason is so collaborative, because he’s a classical writer, he would have grown up watching the likes of High Noon \u2014 when Hollywood made character-driven heroes that were human and flawed and feared, but acted despite those fears,\u201d says Smith.<\/p>\n
He says he and Kingdon formed Zero3 out of a desire to create their own acting projects.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy hero in terms of an actor-producer would be Ben Affleck. I love what he and Matt Damon do. They were struggling to get parts in the beginning, and they went and wrote Good Will Hunting and the rest is history. I firmly believe that the strength of a piece is the writing. Everything else is about bringing it there, making sure your performance is sharp, your research is done.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
For Kingdon, who worked on Footballers Wives and with Madonna on Filth and Wisdom early in her career, moving into film production feels timely. \u201cIt\u2019s about making your own path,\u201d she says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Francesca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/5070342_7_articleinline_232.jpg\" "\\"Francesca")
Francesca Kingdon in Code Red: Spain. <\/p>\n
\u201cAlthough things are very tough in the industry at the minute, I think it’s actually a time where there are more opportunities than ever, because we can go directly to people who want to see this. That was why we started Zero3, because we see independent filmmaking as something that’s actually very exciting, and that can be when the most creative stuff comes about. Code Red is a low-budget action film, which is quite a rarity, really. It’s a film with more heart than most action films you’ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kingdon and Smith are buzzing at the prospect of bringing a number of future projects to our screens, and are in talks with several bodies, including Screen Ireland, at the moment. Do they wonder if they should have set up the production company sooner?<\/p>\n
\u201cLightning strikes when it’s supposed to,\u201d says Smith. \u201cDo I wish I’d done this 10 years ago? Of course. But then a lot of the technology that exists that has enabled us to take certain shortcuts didn’t exist even 10, 15 years ago, and the lessons that we’ve learned throughout both our careers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Fran, having worked with Madonna, worked as a lead in Footballers Wives, and myself, having worked in all the things that I’ve worked on. Any quality output that you produce is the subtotal of the work that you’ve put in and your experiences in the past. So it was the perfect storm at the right time, and now it’s up to us.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve got six or seven scripts active now. It looks like in the next few years, we’re going to continue this roll that we’re on. And that’s because we’ve earned the right to say, how do we approach this? What’s important? What do we strip away? What do we not need? And it’s a very rewarding thing, definitely.\u201d<\/p>\n
They have several projects in development, including another movie directed by Jason Figgis, called Looker, and Twelve, a crime drama starring a number of Irish actors including his friend and former neighbour, Patrick Bergin.<\/p>\n
Code Red: Spain is now on streaming platforms<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Peter M Smith was a youngster, his family home backed onto that of two Irish acting legends.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":437641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[79765,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-437640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-screen-scene","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/437641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}