Liam Cunningham was late for our interview. Not by much, around five or 10 minutes or so. I assumed it was because he wanted to appear ‘fashionably late’. (“Stars want people to be thinking about them,” a New York celebrity psychologist and radio talk show host Cooper Lawrence once said on why celebrities tend to be late for their meetings.)

Yet, the man who showed up at the podcast studio didn’t seem to care much for the idea of celebrity or fashion. 

He was wearing a plain baby blue t-shirt, navy jeans and a black cardigan. The smart-casual look was pulled together with glasses and the salt and pepper beard, an adornment which earned him the nickname ‘sexy badger’, given to him by his Game of Thrones co-star Lena Headey.

By all accounts, the former ESB electrician would fade into a crowd. Then you start talking to him and you experience the familiar deep and gravelly voice that can be heard in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard or in the acclaimed television series Game of Thrones where he played arguably his most well known character – Ser Davos Seaworth. 

He explained his lateness was due to the Garda checkpoints, enforcing lockdown, that he met along the way.

Lockdown does not seem to bother Cunningham too much. He may have found himself rubbing shoulders with A-list actors at premieres and parties pre-Covid-19, but Cunningham is enjoying the quiet life right now. 

“There’s six of us at home, my wife of 150 years is at home, my daughter, and although they’re kind of in the process of getting their own place, and her fiance and my two boys, 24 and 20, we’ve been locked in together in the gaff and I’ve loved it,” he says. 

*****

We had a brief chat before we sat down for the podcast. I expected him to immediately lash out stories of working on Game of Thrones or the impact Covid-19 has had on his industry, topics which did come up during our recording , but instead, he began talking to me about his own podcast he is doing for online magazine Foreign Policy called Syria’s Lost Generation. Cunningham has long had a passion for humanitarian work and is involved with World Vision to raise awareness about the plight of refugees.

Then we entered the booth. His demeanour didn’t change. He didn’t switch on any persona, but he did throw me some fallback lines I’ve heard in previous interviews he’s done, such as: “We get paid to play dress up. We’re in an incredibly luxurious position.” – A modest line he’s used before to play down his acting career. 

Although he is humble about his craft, you could see he greatly enjoyed and appreciated his profession. You could feel this love especially when we talked about the impact the pandemic has had on movies and television. There was a certain frustration and sadness to this part of our conversation.

“It’s incredibly difficult in an already difficult world. It’s like being caught in a storm after you’ve already been drenched. It’s incredibly difficult. And we’re going to lose a lot of people who’ve just no choice,” says Cunningham. 

Despite it being a tough industry, Cunningham talks about turning down roles and knowing your worth when accepting a job, even if it means finding it harder to pay the bills.

He has paid his dues and knows the uncertainty of acting – “a ridiculous career choice” – but also the joy of it.

“I was chased down with murderous intent by the taxman, I was ten years trying to pay off a bill on that,” he says.

“Financially, a roller coaster isn’t the word for it. It’s just horrific. A huge amount of stress involved in that is especially when you have to turn down lucrative jobs because the stuff is crap. You have a reasonable opinion of where your talents are and you deserve to do better work than that,” says Cunningham.

At this point in the podcast, we had relaxed into a flowing conversation. It became more of a chat between two strangers who found each other in a pub. And like most pub-talk, the conversation eventually led to politics. 

“I’ve been known to have a whinge or two”

The twinkle in Cunningham’s eyes he had when talking about his work disappeared when we began talking about the government. Cunningham has strong views on political and corporate life. He gave his two cents on everything from the handling of the Davy scandal, to who he wants to be Taoiseach and why, as well as the influence of the EU. 

Like many voters across Ireland, he is looking for a change in Irish government in a place he has not looked before. There is maybe an indication of his frustration with the fact that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have had a hundred years of power when earlier in the interview, talking about how the public view celebrity, he quotes Tommy Lee Jones’s character from Men in Black, “A person is clever, but people are stupid.”

Cunningham is more convinced than ever of the need for change.

“I’ve never voted Sinn Fein. But I think they should be given a chance,” he says.

“I am left-leaning. It goes with the territory. If you’re an actor, you have to be a socialist. Jesus was a socialist. And they should be given a shot,” says Cunningham. 

*****

As we rounded the second half of our conversation together, and we had discussed his time working with the ESB, travelling to Africa as an electrician, the survival of his industry during Covid-19 and why he wouldn’t send his children to public school, there was an obvious subject to jump to next. His time on Game of Thrones which catapulted him to global fame and what he thought of the ending which divided fans everywhere. 

“Well, people seem to forget very quickly how pissed off people were with The Sopranos when it ended, when it just faded to black and everybody thought there was going to be a bomb in the restaurant and blah, blah, blah.

“When you take something off people that they’ve adored, there’s backlash,” says Cunningham. 

He refused to tell me whether he personally was a fan of the ending of the show or not. “It doesn’t matter whether I liked it or not,” I tell him that’s a politician’s answer. He shoots that down, perhaps because the idea of sounding like a politician is anathema to a man who has never hesitated to tell people what he believes in.