“Yes I did down the Guinness, seven or eight times actually — of course, I’m Irish!” says Niamh McCormack, breakout star of House of Guinness, whose character has a memorable scene where she takes a drink from an adversary and necks it in one. “It was Guinness 0.0, although I definitely had a placebo effect because I felt tipsy afterwards.”
McCormack, 24, plays Ellen Cochrane, an Irish Republican Brotherhood leader, in Steven Knight’s Netflix series about the Guinness dynasty. It follows what happens after Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, the head of the brewing family, dies in 1868 — leaving his children to pick up the pieces. Dubbed the “stout Succession”, it is also set against the politically charged backdrop of Irish rebellion, with the Guinnesses on the Unionist side. Ellen becomes embroiled in the Guinness family drama, and in McCormack’s hands is a charismatic, dangerous figure.
“She isn’t based on a real person but given the time period I had to think about how she would have carried herself in a male- dominated field,” she says. Born and bred in Dublin, McCormack— a former teen model now ripping it up on screen (she was also in Netflix’s Everything Now) — delved deep into Irish history in preparation for the role, but it was only late on that she discovered she had personal ties to the story.
“My great aunt, Angela, told me towards the end of filming that my great granddad was a lieutenant in the Irish Republican Brotherhood,” she says. “That blew my mind. I think it’s quite hard for Irish people to talk about it. It was such a traumatic time and people don’t really like to speak about it. When she told me, she didn’t say it with a lot of pride. It was like, ‘let’s keep this between us.’ Now I’m telling everyone, because I think it’s the coolest thing ever.”
It’s a vital point, though, that there is a lot of collective trauma and silence that the show is blowing apart in Knight’s usual pulp fashion. Kneecap are on the soundtrack and the show is very much part of a new wave of artists shedding light on Irish history. It’s certainly something McCormack has heartfelt intent about. Of Cochrane, she says: “She represents hundreds and hundreds of poor Irish women who fought for freedom, but were completely forgotten in history or written out because they didn’t have the wealth or the status to be remembered.”
Not that they didn’t have fun on set, getting British co-star James Norton up to speed — “He’s brilliant but he’s playing a Dubliner and he’s a posh boy, so we were getting him over, having pints of Guinness, telling stories about Ireland” — and, well, having yet more (not 0.0) Guinnesses. “I mean, you’ve got a big Irish cast, you’re shooting a show about Guinness, what are you going to do?”
House of Guinness is on Netflix now
