‘Don’t judge the person you’re playing’: Say Nothing actor Josh Finan on playing Gerry Adams

Based on the book of the same name, Say Nothing is Disney’s tilt at turning the Troubles into prestige TV. Set against the early days of the conflict in the late 1960s, it begins as the Provisional IRA is upping its campaign against the British state. The series anchors itself in the disappearance of mother-of-10 Jean McConville.  

One night in 1972, McConville disappeared from her flat in Belfast. Senior republicans Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, two of the series’ central characters, later admitted involvement in McConville’s kidnapping and murder, and the IRA went on to claim she had passed information to British forces. Both said Gerry Adams ordered the disappearance. A 2014 investigation into McConville’s death saw police arrest Adams and question him for four days, but did not charge him owing to a lack of evidence. 

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by author Patrick Radden Keefe was published to widespread acclaim in 2018 and spent six weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list. In its television adaptation, Dolours and her sister Marian make their journeys from civil rights marchers into the inner circle of the IRA, and discover it is Adams who pulls the strings in West Belfast. Tasked with playing Adams in a drama that’s at odds with the Sinn Féin leader’s ongoing denials of IRA membership, is Josh Finan. 

Finan will be best known to audiences for starring alongside Martin Freeman in Scouse police drama The Responder, counting cash in Guy Ritchie’s Netflix serialisation of The Gentlemen or his turn in Baby Reindeer. Taking on Gerry Adams is Finan’s biggest role yet, and while the context is not lost on him, he is able to step away from it.  

“What I knew about the real guy was obviously incredibly helpful,” says Finan. “But in a funny sort of way, the more that slips away, the more you actually just go into a scene and look your fellow person in the eye, and feel what you feel because of them – not because of what you’ve seen in a documentary or read on the news – then that is more beneficial for the work. 

“Maybe it was deliberate at the time to not want to come to a finite conclusion about a real person, when I know the limits of my job is to bring life to an essentially fictionalised character.  

“It all comes back to that thing of don’t judge the person you’re playing, and you have to be alive on the day. I don’t know, and I think that is deliberate on my part.” 

Whatever Finan’s verdict, the drama is causing a stir. The Times has hailed it as “finally” portraying Adams as a “murderous IRA commander”. Adams later became central to the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process, went on to become an MP and president of Sinn Féin, and shook Prince Charles’s hand. But when Say Nothing’s viewers meet Adams, he’s just picked up a megaphone to direct rioters throwing petrol bombs.  

As the story progresses, Finan’s Adams is arrested, beaten by British forces and interned. This, Finan felt, was a pivotal point – although here he admits taking his “one bit of creative liberty” with the character. 

“I looked at that, and I looked at what he went through, and I thought, ‘fuck, he’s so young, and he’s had the living shit beaten out of him’. And then the next thing that happens is he gets let out and flown to London to negotiate with [then-Northern Ireland secretary] Willie Whitelaw,” Finan says. “And then you get back, and you go, ‘fuck me, like, I’m unstoppable. I’m still alive. Every day’s a gift’. For that to happen at such a young age was something I was really fascinated by.” 

Along with the historical and political weight of playing a figure of Adams’ magnitude, there was the technical challenge. The keys to Adams’s brogue were the different vowel sounds in ‘how’ and ‘now’ (“har” and “nye” respectively), he explains. But as a 31-year-old Englishman of a generation where the Troubles exists as obscured and unspoken history, taking on the role was also a spur 
to learn. 

“It’s conspicuous by its absence, the lack of schooling or learning we get about that time in history, which is so recent and so near that it does feel pretty shocking. Other than the things you pick up piecemeal through films, largely, or you see old newsreels or whatever,” he says.  

“As soon as I picked up this book and many others, I realised how inferior my understanding of that time really was.” 

In fact, keen for credibility among his co-stars, Finan used his casting as a catalyst to figure out if he had Irish roots. Nothing in living memory, he discovered from an auntie, but there was a great-granddad from Newry, a city near the northern side of the Irish border.  

The cast’s Northern Irish pedigree includes Bloodlands star Lola Petticrew as Dolours Price and Danny Boy’s Anthony Boyle as Hughes. As Finan learned from them, the conflict seeps into the bones of those who live with its legacy. Say Nothing reflects this, with friendships and murder, suspicion and hope all piling on top of one another. Or, in Finan’s words, the breadth of human experience. “It’s an exploration of what happens when normal people are forced into a position where they feel like using violence to effect change is the only way forward,” he says. 

“It seems like in this period of time, the people that joined the IRA were just regular people who’d rather be doing anything else, and the situation was such that they felt like they had to do something extreme. It’s about regular folk, it’s about normal people, who I certainly recognise.” 

The show’s title, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s source book, is taken from a line of a Seamus Heaney poem “Whatever you say, say nothing”. It is from his 1975 collection North, and the first time the Nobel laureate really tackled The Troubles. The idea of people of the North of Ireland refusing to speak as this would either assist authorities or identify them as one side or the other, potentially with catastrophic consequences, has become part of the character of the place. Many involved told their stories only on the condition the truth would not come out in their lifetimes. Drama, then, offers a way in to the most traumatising period. 

“I think what this show does in particular is give you as good a starting point as any to have a grasp on some things that might have eluded our public discourse.  

“Before I read the book and was involved in this, I was very ignorant around the historical context as to why the conflict started. 

“This is a show that you should be able to watch irrespective of whether you know anything about Gerry Adams or anything about any of the other people.” 

Say Nothing is available on Disney+ from 14 November.

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