Agnes O’Casey is having quite the year. In April, she attended the Irish Film and Television Awards (IFTAs) as a triple nominee: in film categories as leading actress for Lisa Mulcahy’s gothic thriller Lies We Tell, and supporting actress for Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s comedy drama The Miracle Club; and as rising star.

In February, Tim Mielants’ Small Things Like These was well received at the Berlinale. And she will be seen later this year alongside Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall: The Mirror And The Light, while Joe Barton’s Netflix spy series Black Doves is expected to land before year’s end.

It has been a rapid ascent for the English actress, who has taken the surname of her maternal great-grandfather, playwright Sean O’Casey, and enjoyed formative experiences visiting her grandmother in Dublin whenever a new production of her ancestor’s plays was staged. “I decided to be an actor when I was, like, six,” she recalls — a production of Sean O’Casey tragi­comedy The Shadow Of A Gunman being the specific trigger.

But first O’Casey spent a year studying art history and English literature at the University of Edinburgh — “I just did plays, and I dropped out. I remember turning 20 and thinking, ‘I’m old now, my dreams are done.’ I had a history of being very dramatic and pessimistic. It was so funny.” Eventually accepted to study acting at The Lir Academy, Dublin (“such a good time”), she landed an agent and the lead in BBC series Ridley Road before she had graduated.

O’Casey, who grew up in London and Devon, says she was “really bad at accents” when she arrived at The Lir, but performing plays there in standard Irish accent “forced me to get better”. O’Casey has since flipped between UK and Irish productions with ease.

Now gearing up for rehearsals for her upcoming role in David Eldridge’s adaptation of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold at Chichester Festival Theatre, O’Casey looks back at Lies We Tell — for which she won the best actress IFTA — with particular satisfaction. “I’m very proud of that film,” she says. “It was done on a crazily small budget, and each day the stakes were high. The [dramatic] stakes were high in the scenes as well. Everyone was really invested in it.”

Contact: Joe Powell, Curtis Brown; Susannah Norris, Susannah Norris Agency 

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