Peter Coonan made huge waves on Irish television when he joined the cast of Love/Hate as the arch-enemy and madman, Fran Cooney in its second season.
From the missing tooth to the graphic prison rape scene with the snooker cue, Fran regularly competed with Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s Nidge for who scarred the audience more throughout the show’s five seasons.
Since the end of the show in 2014, Coonan has worked on many Irish productions, including shorts such as the romance piece ‘City of Roses’ as the narrator and emotional ‘The Bridge’, set in the west of Ireland.
Playing to his criminal strengths, Coonan appeared in another Dublin crime series, ‘Quirke’, an adaption on the novel Christine Falls written by Benjamin Black, in which he played Brendan Boyle.
The series was produced by both the BBC and RTE.
It was his role as Brendan Behan in the Gaiety Theatre production of Borstal Boy, in September 2014, that saw Coonan separate himself from the crime character he has been associated with.
Assuming the role of Behan in this adaptation of the autobiography, Coonan wowed audiences with his ability to play a young, naïve boy become weary of the hardened in the borstal school and seeing a common experience for working class Irish Catholics and English Protestants.
Coonan delved more into the comedic roles from that point, appearing in the TG4 feature film The Drummer and The Keeper in 2017. The movie explores the themes of mental health through the lens of the unlikely friends in a coming of age film.
The film was praised for its depiction mental illness through the protagonists Gabriel, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and Christopher, an institutionalised 17-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome.
But the appeal of crime seems to be to alluring to the actor, as Coonan reappeared on RTE as Donal Naylor, in the series Dublin Murders, based on the Tana French novels.
Last year, Coonan appeared as recurring characters Paddy and Ding Dong in the series Cold Courage and The Alienist: Angel of Darkness respectively.
The limited series, Cold Case, moved Coonan into the world of clandestine group crime fighting, but still felt at home portraying a character who acted beyond the law.
The period series The Alienist: Angel of Darkness saw Coonan appear beside big stars such as Dakota Fanning in this Sherlock Holmes inspired cat and mouse crimes series.
With an impressive repertoire under his belt, it won’t be long before Irish audiences see Coonan return as the big crime boss he was born to play on screen.
