Tom Glynn-Carney Is Always in Pursuit

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Tom Glynn-Carney is no stranger to the trial by fire. In 2016, he left drama school early to film Christopher Nolan’s World War II blockbuster Dunkirk, spending weeks on a boat with Mark Rylance and Cillian Murphy—in his first film role ever. The next year, he earned an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Emerging Talent for his role in Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman—for his West End début. And now he’s wrapping up his Broadway run in The Ferryman this week—on what happens to be his first-ever trip to New York.

For Glynn-Carney, revisiting Shane Corcoran, a young firecracker and rebel in the extended family that forms the heart of The Ferryman, set on Harvest Day during the Troubles in 1981 Northern Ireland, has been both rewarding and, given the intense nature of the emotionally fraught play, exhausting. “We’ve all gone away for a year, done other things, experienced life, and come back to this,” he explains. “Over that time, we’ve all changed as individuals, as people. The characters haven’t changed, they’re still in exactly the same position that they were a year ago, and now it’s a challenge for us to find where that sits in us again, because it’s in a different place now.”

Through the second act of The Ferryman, Shane is aggressive, contemptuous, haughty, and, ultimately, vulnerable, demonstrating a complexity that Glynn-Carney says was immediately evident in the script by Butterworth, who was previously nominated for a Tony for Jerusalem and who based The Ferryman on the family history of his partner Laura Donnelly, who plays the matriarch Caitlin. “Shane’s feral, he’s a wild animal. He’s anxious, he’s wrought with anger, he’s so complex,” Glynn-Carney says. ”Shane has had a very traumatic and immediate experience with the Brits being in Northern Ireland. He has been actually personally involved in being pinned up against the wall and having a shotgun placed right next to his face and having the houses raided three times a night. The thing that made me fall in love with this character is because he’s very easy to dislike, but the thing is Shane understands what he’s experienced. I just fell in love with him and I thought, ‘To get my hands on this character and to even just attempt to get near him would be a huge challenge and incredibly fulfilling on my part,’ and it has been.”

But that is not to say the Olivier-winning The Ferryman is not without its difficulties. Running over three tense hours long and ending in death and tears, the play is not the sort of feel-good experience that makes for an easy sell on Broadway these days, which makes it all the more impressive that it has been selling out the theater and was extended through July soon after opening. For Glynn-Carney, part of the play’s power is how deeply painful it can be and how hard it is to shake. “It’s almost impossible to go straight home and to get in bed to go to sleep,” he admits. “Even if I do try and do that, I’m staring at the ceiling with my mind going a hundred miles an hour, the cogs turning, steam coming off them, feeling like the machine’s going to break down. It’s difficult to shake off, but I think it’s unavoidable because it’s imperative that you really invest in a play like this because it’s not something that can just be surface value. You have to allow it to penetrate you and allow it to affect you and doing so, it does stick around a little bit longer than maybe is hoped for, but you find ways.”

Still, it’s clear that Glynn-Carney, who just turned twenty-four, is the kind of adventurous actor who relishes that kind of intensity. Having worked professionally for barely over two years, he recalls initially being drawn to performance as a child growing up outside Manchester through a penchant for imitating others. “I would constantly be told by my mom to stop staring at people,” he laughs. “That is a phrase I remember very, very well from being a kid because I just used to sit and watch people. I loved doing impressions of people and messing about with silly voices and I always knew at school that I was never going to pursue a career sitting in an office. I was always very creative and that often was considered bad behavior at school but I just wanted to be in a room where I was allowed to express myself and create things and be imaginative and the drama studio at school allowed me to do that.” He began taking dance classes and took part in plays and musical theater through his teenage years before enrolling at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. A few years later, he was filming in the English Channel with Christopher Nolan.

Nolan’s Dunkirk, which came out in the summer of 2017, brought together established names like Rylance, Murphy, and Tom Hardy with newcomers like Glynn-Carney and his fellow rising castmates Fionn Whitehead, Barry Keoghan, Harry Styles, Jack Lowden, Billy Howle, and Aneurin Barnard. Glynn-Carney credits Nolan with helping shape his craft at a formative time, coming onto a multimillion-dollar film with one of the industry’s most prized directors. “He knew what he was taking on. He knew that I had no professional film credits before and no film credits in general,” he laughs about Nolan. “He really took me under his wing and he did with the rest of the inexperienced lads who were on that film as well. He just really took care of us, standing us to one side and giving us tips about casting shadows and angles with the camera and not being a magnet to it and all that stuff that I’ll remember forever. It was bizarre, but I could not have asked for a better springboard.”

With his Broadway début coming to an end, Glynn-Carney is looking ahead to a particularly busy year, with the biopic Tolkein starring Nicholas Hoult out in May and David Michôd’s The King opposite Timothée Chalamet and Robert Pattinson out in the fall. As for after that, the one thing that seems assured is that he will never be content to take it easy. “Everything is just in constant pursuit of something that I’m not quite sure exists,” he elaborates. “I’m constantly searching for something and never quite satisfied with what it is. Creatively, there’s always a different realm that I’m not quite sure how to break into and I want that to continue for my entire career because as soon as that dies down and gets shut off, you’re there, you’ve settled, you’ve peaked, and you plateau. I don’t want that to ever happen, because that’s when complacency comes, that’s when arrogance starts and all that poisonous, awful sordidness starts to manifest. People go, ‘What do you want to do, what do you want to achieve?’ I’m like, ‘I’m not quite sure, I just want to keep doing this and see what happens.’”