The Sixth Commandment<\/a>, was just five when the Saipan incident became a media frenzy in Ireland \u2014 and scythed the nation in two between those in Keane\u2019s camp and those backing McCarthy. \u201cI\u2019d be lying if I said I remembered the details,\u201d Hardwicke admits. \u201cBut I remember the headlines and those really iconic photos of Roy in the airport or Roy walking out of the training session. The iconography was really strong.\u201d<\/p>\nFor those wondering what all the fuss was about, Keane, at the time, was not just Ireland\u2019s captain but the axis around which the team revolved. He was \u2013 literally in some cases \u2013 leagues above his teammates, with seven premiership titles under his belt. At the height of his powers, he was a brick wall in defence \u2013 all crunching tackles and snarling authority. Just Google \u201cRoy Keane Alf-Inge Haaland tackle\u201d for a flavour of his playing style. To lose him on the eve of the World Cup was nothing short of catastrophe.<\/p>\n
Like anyone, I crave validation. To get it from Roy Keane\u2026 You’d always appreciate the thumbs up<\/p>\n
Hardwicke says his family fell \u201cquite strongly on Keane\u2019s side\u201d of the debate, \u201cbeing Cork people.\u201d His brothers were particularly fervent. \u201cKeane cast such a big shadow and was so influential in terms of his commitment and dedication that a lot of young people, especially, really went with him. And there was kind of a generational divide of who you empathized with or whose vision you subscribed to.\u201d<\/p>\n
The actor recalls hearing the Irish director Lenny Abrahamson (Frank) talking about \u201csoundness\u201d \u2013 the idea of being sound as a human quality. \u201cI can\u2019t speak for other countries, but it is a really big virtue in Ireland, to be sound is to get on with people and not cause a ruckus or a stir. I think that was maybe one of the dividing lines. Roy wasn\u2019t afraid to stand out from the crowd. He wasn\u2019t afraid to piss people off, and he didn\u2019t diminish himself in front of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hardwicke plays Keane with a frightening electricity, like a rattled Coke can ready to fizz over at any moment. He is brilliantly cast \u2013 as is Coogan as a perma-cringe McCarthy \u2013 though, admittedly bears little physical similarity to the footballer. \u201cRoy Keane has the face of a mercenary,\u201d the playwright Alan Bennett wrote in one 2005 diary entry. \u201cMeet him before the walls of 15th-century Florence and one\u2019s heart would sink.\u201d Hardwicke, appearing over Zoom from his home in north London, is less brutish and more avian. His name, \u00c9anna, literally means \u201cbird-like\u201d in Gaelic. His long, angular jaw tilts sideways as he considers a question, small black eyes flicking skyward. <\/p>\n
![\"It\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/SAIPAN-(Photo-Credit_Aidan-Monaghan).jpeg\")
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It\u2019s getting hot in here: Hardwicke stars opposite Steve Coogan in ‘Saipan’ (Vertigo Releasing\/Wildcard Distribution)<\/p>\n
Hardwicke was part of the generation that grew up on Coogan and his delusional radio presenter, Alan Partridge. \u201cWhen we were teenagers, we were just endlessly quoting his work,\u201d he says. \u201cI would say he was one of the most influential actors and writers on my career.\u201d Was it daunting, acting opposite one of his heroes? \u201cThere is that bit of you that worries that you\u2019ll get nervous or very self-conscious in front of them when you\u2019re acting,\u201d he says, \u201cbut in my experience, when I\u2019ve worked with very brilliant actors, they just make it easier, not harder.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hardwicke doesn\u2019t know whether Keane has seen the film and he chose not to contact the footballer while preparing for the role, relying instead on the wealth of source material already available. \u201cWe weren\u2019t making a biopic,\u201d he reminds me. \u201cI felt his perspective was so clear\u2026 My job was just to tell his story and obviously, it\u2019s a dramatised version of it.\u201d Still, what if Keane were to give the performance his rare seal of approval? Hardwicke laughs. \u201cYeah, like anyone, I crave validation. To get it from Roy\u2026\u201d he trails off. \u201cYou\u2019d always appreciate the thumbs up. But, at the same time, I\u2019m conscious it\u2019s a strange thing for anyone to have a film made about something that they lived through.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not Hardwicke\u2019s first time playing a real person. In 2023, he won plaudits for his truly chilling performance in The Sixth Commandment. The series followed the horrific true story of retired Stowe schoolmaster Peter Farquhar (Timothy Spall) and his neighbour Ann Moore-Martin (Anne Reid), both of whom were befriended and later murdered by a young churchwarden, Ben Field (Hardwicke). Field ingratiated himself into their lives and persuaded them to rewrite their wills in his favour after months of poisoning and psychological cruelty. The deftly handled series \u2013 more interested in Field\u2019s victims than his crimes \u2013 stood in stark contrast to exploitative true crime fodder like Ryan Murphy\u2019s gory Monsters franchise.<\/p>\n
![\"Hardwicke](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/435443.jpg\")
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Hardwicke as the terrifying Ben Field in \u2018The Sixth Commandment\u2019 (Wild Mercury Productions\/BBC)<\/p>\n
\u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of TV that does [true crime] in quite a manipulative way,\u201d Hardwicke says of the genre. \u201cThat is about wanting to fetishise people who do appalling things. I have no interest in getting into the head of someone who committed these crimes, because I actually think \u2013 when you boil it down to the narcissism that it is \u2013 it\u2019s very uninteresting. What I am interested in is the families of Peter and Ann, the police who investigated the case, the lawyers who worked on the case. I\u2019m interested in how that affects all of their lives and how they respond and how they persevere through it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hardwicke is part of a wave of Irish talent that seems to dominate the film industry at the moment. On Thursday, Jessie Buckley was among the nominees for the 2026 Academy Awards, joining a roll call of recent Irish Oscar winners and nominees including Colin Farrell, Barry Keoghan, Cillian Murphy and Paul Mescal. Hardwicke says he was lucky to come up alongside the latter, as well as the half-Irish Daisy Edgar-Jones, with Normal People. The Sally Rooney adaptation \u2013 released during a period of international wallowing during the pandemic \u2013 \u201cbrought Irish culture to a kind of global level,\u201d Hardwicke contends. \u201cWe were very, very lucky to graduate at that time when that TV show was being made. It was a bit like college or school or something. It was kind of a formative experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019s still close with Mescal, with whom he went to college, and Edgar-Jones. The careers of both actors have gone stratospheric since they co-led the 2020 series. Seeing as he\u2019s already run the acting gamut from sociopathic killers to celebrity footballers, it\u2019s not hard to imagine Hardwicke doing the same.<\/p>\n
\u2018Saipan\u2019 is in cinemas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385873,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-385872","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}