By the end of Love/Hate, Tom Vaughan‑Lawlor knew things were getting out of hand. “I was on the front cover of The Irish Times twice in one week,” he says, laughing. “Maybe it was time to give the Irish people a break.”
Vaughan‑Lawlor was a character actor who had worked largely in theatre when he was cast in the RTÉ crime drama as the shaven‑headed scallywag Nidge. Something about the character – this artful dodger in a tracksuit and chunky runners – clicked with audiences. His death in the Love/Hate finale, in November 2014, made national news. One tabloid splashed him on the front with the headline “RIP Nidge”.
Twelve years on, the softly spoken Dubliner still struggles to process the scale his fame reached. Love/Hate mania was very real – and people still shout “Howya, Nidge!” at Vaughan‑Lawlor when he’s out in public. He describes the attention as a blessing but admits that he did sense it was getting out of hand.
“I remember there was one time . . . there were four images . . . they were cartoons. There was me in Love/Hate. There was Nidge reading the news. There was me as Nidge doing [a home-improvement show]. There was me as Nidge doing . . . like, I don’t know, the Toy Show.”
He hasn’t worked much with RTÉ since. But now he’s back with his first leading role for the national broadcaster for more than a decade, playing a bumbling priest in the new dark comedy These Sacred Vows.
The show, which is written and directed by John Butler, is a sort of bargain‑holiday Irish take on The White Lotus, in which a group of despicable south Dubliners gather at a holiday villa in Tenerife for a wedding and are all sorts of unpleasant with one another until the discovery of a body plunges the vacation into crisis.
In the middle of this hellscape of horseplay is Vaughan‑Lawlor’s Fr Vincent, an old‑school priest who is flown in to preside over the nuptials and ends up aghast at the unfolding Bacchanalia.
Vaughan‑Lawlor has played all sorts in his career. He was a sidekick to the mega-baddie Thanos in Marvel’s Avengers and a minor nobleman in A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO’s recent Game of Thrones spin‑off. But portraying a priest brought it all back home for the Dubliner, who lives in Kent in southeast England with his wife, the actor Claire Cox.
“My uncle’s a priest. I love going to Mass. I quite enjoyed going to confession as a kid,” he says. “You had to think of three sins – two small ones and a big one. Just to make it look good. They were never real. All the big ones you kept to yourself. I always used confession to get out of class. I don’t know if that’s still a thing. I don’t know if they even still do confession.”
Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Fr Vincent in These Sacred Vows, written by John Butler
These Sacred Vows, which also stars Adam John Richardson, Justine Mitchell, Shane Daniel Byrne and Mark O’Halloran, among others, is likely to divide viewers: comedy is always subjective and not everyone will connect with the acidic script and cast of thoroughly disagreeable protagonists. But whatever about the sheer nastiness of the characters or the debt the series does or does not owe to The White Lotus, Vaughan‑Lawlor makes for an impressive padre.
His performance perfectly captures the nervous energy of the modern priest, terrified of being seen to judge anyone yet haunted by the nagging sense that maybe he should be doing exactly that. He wants to be liked, but his thoughts are constantly interrupted by the sound of God tutting in the background.
The role is certainly a big switch‑up for the actor, who came to the production straight from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, in which he plays a steward overseeing a jousting tournament. It was a jarring contrast: one moment he was tramping around muddy Westeros, the next he was jumping into a pool off the coast of Africa.
It’s also a sign of Vaughan‑Lawlor’s versatility: his ability to switch from a big‑budget HBO series to a more modest RTÉ drama and look completely comfortable in both.
“I loved fantasy growing up, so getting to do real fantasy on screen is so much fun,” he says of Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. But he had just as much fun on These Secret Vows – and says the quality of the script was up there with that of the HBO series.
“When the writing is that good, like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms with Ira Parker, or John Butler on this show . . . the writing is so elegant, so detailed . . . It’s your job to come up to the mark. Sometimes it’s the other way around, where the writing is a bit spare.
“For John, it’s so classy. I was offered [another] job – and then my agent sent me this script and after three pages I called him and said, ‘I’m doing this’. Because it’s just so brilliant.”
Vaughan‑Lawlor was born in Dundrum in 1977. His father, Tom snr, is also an actor. (He played a priest in Love/Hate.) After graduating from Trinity College Dublin with a degree in drama studies, Vaughan-Lawlor jnr went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he was the first Irish actor to receive the Laurence Olivier bursary.
He returns to RTÉ at a time when Irish actors bask in global acclaim. This year sees Jessie Buckley at the Oscars, where she is up for best actress for her role in Hamnet. Alison Oliver stars in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and Barry Keoghan plays Ringo Starr in Sam Mendes’ four-part Beatles biopic.
These are halcyon days, Vaughan‑Lawlor agrees, but he says it’s important to acknowledge the contribution of previous generations of Irish actors, who trod the boards in Ireland and did not receive the international exposure of today’s young stars.
“Niall Buggy … Marie Mullen, Seán McGinley … There are loads. I was on a set once and I remember a [third assistant director] shouting at an 80‑year‑old actor. I was, like, ‘That man gave his f***ing life to theatre in this county. Don’t shout at him.’
“It’s about a bit of respect for older actors. They don’t fly to London; they don’t fly to LA. But they’ve given their lives to theatre and the arts. You see them growing up and they’re as good as anyone.”
The portrayal of priests on screen has changed radically over the decades. They were traditionally depicted as forbidding and judgmental – God’s stern shepherds sent to guide the flock by any means necessary. Later, with Father Ted, they were played for comic relief.
Fr Vincent is somewhere in the middle. Vaughan-Lawlor pitches him as a hangdog Everyman of the cloth, desperately trying to keep it together while his holiday companions take drugs and make a disgrace of themselves.
“I think it’s funny about priests and how priests are written. Maybe we’re coming out with a different kind of depiction of priests in Ireland. [Vincent] is a good man who feels like his time is up, and he’s trying to figure out how to be useful, where his identity lies. He’s flawed, he’s full of doubt . . .
“And then, as we find out, things pick up at the end of the first episode and [he] just starts to kind of unravel again. To get a character arc like that in six episodes is rare.”
Vaughan-Lawlor didn’t intend to be absent from RTÉ for so long. As much as he understood that the cult of Nidge meant he risked overexposure, he wasn’t avoiding Irish television. He has nothing but positive memories of Love/Hate.
“When things were very intense, it was very intense. I cannot remember a single interaction I have ever had that hasn’t been . . . they’ve always been positive. It’s a total blessing . . . I’m fortunate and I feel lucky.”
Nidge, played by Tom Vaughan Lawlor
There are often rumours of a Love/Hate revival and Vaughan-Lawlor doesn’t rule out a return. When it comes to Nidge, never say never.
“It was an amazing time, an amazing experience. You hope to move on as much as you can. But the actor’s life is, like, ‘Who knows?’. Maybe I’ll do pantomime in a few years’ time – the Love/Hate panto. ‘He told us he’d never come back’. I’m broke!”
These Sacred Vows is on RTÉ One at 9.30pm on Sundays