A few months ago, Chris Walley devoured the autobiography of one of theatre’s original young offenders, Anthony Hopkins.
While the slapstick physical humour with which Walley is associated is a long way from Oscar-winning Hopkins parts such as Hannibal Lecter, the Cork-born star was fascinated to read the memoirs of a fellow Celt who had likewise attended a lodestar of British theatre, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.
“I loved Rada. I had a brilliant time there,” Walley says.
Hopkins had a different view, writing that he found it hard to fit in. (His raging alcoholism at the time, and tendency to brawl, probably didn’t help.)
“I know a lot of people who maybe didn’t and people who had different experiences of the place,” Walley says. “It’s very, very personal. Training differs greatly from person to person. I loved it.
“It was my first time living away from home, and I was moving over to London. I didn’t know anyone. It felt like an adventure I was going on alone – but in a great way.”
Walley is speaking from the British capital, where he has been appearing in a run of Orphans, Lyle Kessler’s 1983 psychological drama about two brothers in 1950s Philadelphia trapped in a toxic relationship.
It marks the start of a busy 12 months for the 30-year-old. The Young Offenders, his beloved Cork-set comedy, returns later in 2026, and he will appear opposite Anthony Boyle and Róisín Gallagher in Skintown, a period piece unfolding in a 1990s Belfast nightclub.
He will also be shooting his debut feature, Covenant, a thriller set in Co Clare, produced by the actor Jamie Dornan with a script by Walley and his friend and fellow actor Frank Blake, “about two brothers and an event that changes their lives”.
But for now Orphans has been taking up all his time, as you would expect with a dark, often violent work that Broadway World praised for its “fast-paced aggressive slapstick”. Walley describes it as “particularly intense” – even more so than the 2018 revival of Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore, for which the actor won an Olivier Award.
“There’s no going out partying afterwards,” he says. “On other jobs there has been. But I was younger then as well. I’m still young, but I’m 30. As you get older work takes priority. You don’t want to short-change anything. And especially a play like this, it does demand a lot, because it is very intense, but also very fast. There is a degree of living like a monk, I would say. But a fun monk.”
Chris Walley and Alex Murphy in The Young Offenders.
Walley auditioned twice for Rada. Having been initially rejected, he went home to Cork. As he pondered his future, he was surprised to be offered a part in an indie project by an aspiring film-maker who was bankrolling the entire €60,000 production cost out of his pocket.
It was based on the real case of the washing ashore at Mizen Head of 1.5 tonnes of cocaine. In this new telling, two scallywags from the northside of Cork City pedal through west Co Cork hoping for a drug pay-day – only for their plans to go hilariously awry.
The film-maker was Peter Foott, a director and producer of RTÉ’s Republic of Telly, and the movie was The Young Offenders. Walley and his costar Alex Murphy, another young Cork actor, played the not-so-dynamic duo of Jock and Conor.
“I had finished secondary school. I was doing drama and theatre in Cork, and there was an open audition,” Walley says. “I’d done drama classes, but it was my first ever professional job.
“It was a baptism of fire. We’re playing the two leads in this film that we really didn’t know what was going to become of it. We didn’t know if it was going to be seen. We were very green to the whole thing.”
[ The Young Offenders film review: hugely funny, genuinely sweet Irish comedyOpens in new window ]
The pair have both gone on to bigger things, Walley with his Olivier Award, Murphy playing an FAI flunkey in the new Saipan film. When they made The Young Offenders they were kids making it up as they went.
“We were showing up on location shooting – there was little to no budget. It was wild. It was incredibly fun for our first job. And I also think it was probably helpful that myself and Alex didn’t know any better. We weren’t, like, ‘This isn’t how it usually is.’ We were enjoying it.”
Actor Chris Walley. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
A few days in, as they journeyed into the wilds of west Co Cork, it dawned on Walley that The Young Offenders could be more than just another shoestring Irish indie movie. “Very quickly on set, there was a feeling we were making something that felt special. Whatever was going to happen with that was in the hands of the gods. Thankfully it did take off.”
The critical response to The Young Offenders was glowing. (In The Irish Times, my colleague Donald Clarke wrote that Walley and Murphy were “brilliant as track-suited layabouts who, though lazy, impulsive and ignorant, remain endlessly lovable”.)
Audiences shared the enthusiasm, and The Young Offenders took more than €1 million at the box office in Ireland. This encouraged the BBC to take a punt on Foott, Walley and Murphy with a spin-off Young Offenders series, which has chronicled the further adventures of Conor and Jock across four seasons and is now set to return for a fifth.
The movie and the TV series are largely set in the working-class Cork neighbourhood of Gurranabraher. This isn’t a world that Walley will have known first-hand. He grew up in the middle-class surroundings of Glanmire and attended the fee-paying Christian Brothers College, one of a handful of elite schools in the city. (Cillian Murphy studied at another, Presentation Brothers College.)
Given his comparatively well-to-do background, there is the risk that The Young Offenders might come across as punching down, yet it never falls into that trap.
“Everyone from Cork loves Cork. Some of the best people, the best characters I’ve ever met are Cork people. It’s a very specific type of person, and loving person, that comes from Cork,” Walley says.
“There’s so much heart and humour and everything. I don’t think it’s difficult to depict those stories. It’s kind of what we grew up with. I feel very fortunate to be able to tell them, and to be able to tell them with such humour and heart, which is really down to the creation that Peter made.”
Jock and Conor are good people who do stupid things, he says. “Everyone likes to watch people do stupid things. What Peter does so well is that you see them make the mistake, they learn and then they make amends. By the time the next episode comes out they’ve forgotten, and they do it again. They’re in this cycle of messing up, making amends, learning, and then they forget.”
He grew up a few doors down from Éanna Hardwicke, who is currently playing Roy Keane in the film Saipan. Glanmire is also the home of the actor Sarah Greene, who babysat the infant Hardwicke and starred opposite Walley in the West End run of The Lieutenant of Inishmore. The Oscar-winning Murphy is another acquaintance.
“I got a Bafta breakthrough [award] a few years ago. Cillian was one of my mentors. I met him in Dublin for a coffee and a stroll. We hung out for the day and chatted about many things. Meeting him and spending time with him, he’s incredibly decent and nice. He was very kind to me.”
Acting commitments meant that Walley was absent from the first half of the most recent season of The Young Offenders, to the detriment of the comedy. He’s back for series five, however, and wants to be involved with it for as long as it airs.
“I love what that show has done for me. Everyone in it is like family at this point. And I would always have time to go back to do The Young Offenders. Of course, it depends what scheduling is for everyone. But, no, I would never, ever say that I’m stepping away from that show for good.”
He says this with a grin – and for just a moment the earnest theatre actor is replaced by jocular Jock, a cheeky monkey with a few swings around the slapstick maypole left in him yet.
Orphans ends at Jermyn Street Theatre, London, on Saturday, January 24th