{"id":579814,"date":"2026-08-02T04:47:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T04:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/579814\/"},"modified":"2026-08-02T04:47:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T04:47:13","slug":"culture-that-made-me-fair-city-actor-liam-carney-picks-his-touchstones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/579814\/","title":{"rendered":"Culture That Made Me: Fair City actor Liam Carney picks his touchstones\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Born in 1960, Liam Carney grew up in Ballymun, Dublin. In 1986, he joined Paul Mercier\u2019s Passion Machine Theatre Company. His first break on television came in 1989 with a role on Glenroe. His screen credits also include Braveheart, Gangs of New York and Red Rock. He joined Fair City\u2019s cast as the property developer Con Rafferty in 2022. In 2024, he was nominated for an Ifta for his performance in the drama Sunlight. Fair City is on four nights a week on RT\u00c9 One.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I love Se\u00e1n O’Casey’s plays \u2014 Juno and the Paycock, Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars. I love his language, the structure of them and the history in them. They capture the era, the political and social state that the country was in at the time. They’re particularly specific. They’re fantastic records. I’ve seen each of them a couple of times. He also gives a very balanced view [of Ireland\u2019s revolutionary years]. You get a sense of both sides.<\/p>\n

Se\u00e1n Rocks\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"TheThe late Se\u00e1n Rocks. <\/p>\n

A stage performance I remember well was the late Se\u00e1n Rocks, the Lord have mercy on him, in Frank Pig Says Hello. It was incredible. It was an adaptation of Pat McCabe\u2019s The Butcher Boy in 1992. He played a number of different characters. He was so entertaining, so off the wall. I left the theatre on a high. He was a wonderful actor before he went into radio.<\/p>\n

Catalpa<\/p>\n

Another memorable performance was Donal O\u2019Kelly’s one-man show Catalpa. I saw it in Dublin\u2019s old Andrew’s Lane Theatre. I wasn’t aware of the story of the ship, the Catalpa, the history of it, which involved a daring rescue of Fenian prisoners from a British penal colony in Western Australia in the 19th century. For one man to do what he did was extraordinary because Donal O\u2019Kelly devised it as well. He was one man on stage with a sheet; you saw the ship, you saw everything. It was mind-blowing the images he could create, the story he could convey on his own.<\/p>\n

The Highwayman\u00a0<\/p>\n

Growing up, I started listening to Kris Kristofferson. I love him. I’ve seen him live, and I saw The Highwayman \u2014 with himself, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings \u2014 in The Point in Dublin. It was an incredible gig. I’m too cool for school when I\u2019m out in the public normally, but Willie Nelson threw his cowboy hat from the stage. I was standing on my tippy toes, but I didn’t catch it, unfortunately. I was two inches away from catching Willie Nelson\u2019s battered cowboy hat!<\/p>\n

Queen at Slane Castle<\/p>\n

I saw Queen at Slane Castle in 1986. That was my first real concert. It wasn’t a great day. It was a bit rainy. It was a bus out there and a late bus to go home, but I loved it. I went with a girl. We had a good day. She was a cracker, so that helped as well. I think I got my first kiss listening to Bohemian Rhapsody \u2014 not at that concert, this was back in the \u201970s. So that might be in there as well, very deep in the brain and the memory.<\/p>\n

Passion Machine<\/p>\n

Paul Mercier is one of my favourite playwrights. I did a lot of work with him at Passion Machine \u2014 from Studs to Buddleia, so many. He had a huge catalogue of work. They were vast productions. All the plays are so different. Home in 1989 was an incredible play I was in with Brendan Gleeson and Gerry Byrne.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"LiamLiam Carney with Matthew O’Brien in a scene from Fair City.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a huge cast \u2014 15 of us. It was very successful. It was about a house of bedsits in Dublin in the \u201980s, and rows over a vacuum cleaner and whatnot. It was set in a four-story house. The main set was the attic room. The set design, by Anne Gateley, was incredible. It was very believable dialogue, very Dublinesque. It was hilarious.<\/p>\n

I remember one night a door on the stage got stuck. We\u2019d been warning the crew: \u201cThis is getting stuck.\u201d One night, Brandan Gleeson tried to go out the door and he couldn’t. So, he had to put a shoulder to it and the whole frame came out. He just picked it up and left it at the back wall and turned back to Gerry Byrne who was doing the scene with him and said, \u201cYou’d want to get that door fixed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The audience went into uproar. When everything calmed down, and Gerry Byrne got his act together, a couple of lines later he had to say, to Aisling T\u00f3ib\u00edn, \u201cAll I ever wanted was my own front door.\u201d That line, on that particular night, really wrung out.<\/p>\n

La Haine<\/p>\n

I loved La Haine, a black-and-white French film which came out in 1995. A friend of mine said, \u201cYou have to see it.\u201d So, he went again with me. I was delighted to see it in the cinema \u2014 at the old Screen cinema in College Green.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"LaLa Haine.<\/p>\n

As its main characters, one was an Arab, one was black and one Caucasian. It’s like an odyssey that takes place over 24 hours. They’re looking to buy drugs. They meet different people along the way, different head cases. I remember getting a sense that these were good guys. These weren’t bad guys. They were a product of the society they lived in, a high-rise complex in the Paris suburbs. I loved the ending of it.<\/p>\n

Centennial\u00a0<\/p>\n

There was a fantastic TV series in the late \u201970s \u2014 which goes back to my interest in Native Americans \u2014 called Centennial. There were 12 one-hour episodes. They were based on James A Michener\u2019s novel Centennial. The book is about the history of America. It begins around the formation of the Earth. It describes how the mountains and plains are created. It goes through the anthropology of the animals, from dinosaurs up to horses. The TV series is mainly set during the exploration of North America by French and British trappers. I loved it.<\/p>\n

Tom Sawyer<\/p>\n

I love Mark Twain. One of the first books I read in primary school were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I remember loving them. I re-read them recently; I fell in love with them again. A couple of years ago, an American author, Percival Everett, wrote a book called James, which tells their story from the perspective of the negro slave. I loved it.<\/p>\n

Kent Haruf\u00a0<\/p>\n

Kent Haruf is an American writer. He wrote a series of books \u2014 titles such as The Tie That Binds; Plainsong; and Benediction \u2014 set around this tiny, sleepy town called Holt in Colorado where nothing ever happens, and not an awful lot happens in the books, but I remember on more than one occasion reading them on a train or a bus and the tears streaming down my face because they get very involved. I found them very emotive, beautiful books.<\/p>\n

A Million Little Pieces\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n A Million Little Pieces is the first James Frey book I read. It’s written as a memoir. A while after reading it, I heard he’d been hauled over the coals because some characters were fictional. He got a grilling by Oprah on her show. I thought it was very unfair and irrelevant because I thoroughly enjoyed it; I didn\u2019t care if some characters were made up. I went on to read everything I could find by him and loved them all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born in 1960, Liam Carney grew up in Ballymun, Dublin. In 1986, he joined Paul Mercier\u2019s Passion Machine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60,6405],"class_list":["post-579814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music-movies-reviews-munster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579814","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=579814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}