A Friend In Need

Male friendship and mortality lie at the heart of Mayflies, a TV adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s heartbreaking novel. Starring in the lead role, Tony Curran tells James Mottram how he prepared himself for the show’s emotional and controversial storyline

For Tony Curran, coming back to Scotland always feels special. The Glasgow-born actor has lived in LA for years, enjoying a fruitful career in shows like Ray Donovan, Sons Of Anarchy and the recent Bryan Cranston vehicle Your Honor. But he’s also returned to home soil for films like Calibre and Robert The Bruce drama Outlaw King. ‘Yeah, I love it,’ he grins when we speak over Zoom. ‘Because normally I don’t have to put on a daft [foreign] accent. I’ve just got my own daft accent!’

That distinct Scottish burr is being put to the test in BBC drama Mayflies, the anticipated adaptation of Andrew O’Hagan’s devastating novel about male friendship. Shot around Scotland, with Daphne director Peter Mackie Burns at the helm, Curran plays the terminally ill Tully, who asks his long-standing friend Jimmy (Line Of Duty star Martin Compston) to do the seemingly impossible: arrange for him to go to a clinic in Switzerland and end his life.

Given how emotionally raw the subject matter is, Curran was helped by speaking to O’Hagan about the real person Tully was based on. But the actor looked inward as well. ‘The loss that I’ve had in my life, my father, other family members that have died, friends that have died . . . I tapped into that,’ he reveals. ‘I did go to a hypnotherapist quite a few times too. I just wanted to unearth some stuff and tap into some emotional areas of my life that maybe I haven’t tapped into before. And whenever I did go in those sessions, I would probably end up just weeping quite a lot.’

Raising the topic of assisted dying, the show confirmed Curran’s own thoughts on this very divisive subject: for many, it offers a merciful release. ‘If I think one of my family members had to look after me for a good part of their life . . . I know there’s love and compassion and empathy involved in that. But if I was just sitting there and I can’t feel anything, I’d rather be gone frankly.’

Mayflies also flashes back to Tully and Jimmy’s youth, when they bonded over movies and music, which vividly brought Curran’s thoughts round to his own childhood.

‘We had a snooker table in the attic, table-tennis table in the driveway, and everybody was at my house, having sandwiches, lemonade, Irn-Bru, all summer long. I was like 15, 16. And sometimes when everybody had to go home at 11pm, I’d start crying: “I don’t want it to end!” So I guess in some ways there’s a bit of Tully in there as well, with Jimmy (Martin’s character) always over at Tully’s place.’

At 52, Curran may be 14 years older than Compston, but they make for credible contemporaries in Mayflies, as if they’ve known each other for years. He’s full of praise for his younger co-star, believing it’s ‘one of the best things I’ve ever seen him do’. He hopes audiences will feel the same. ‘Maybe if everybody watches us, they’ll see an honesty and a gritty realism between these characters in the show that comes from somewhere deep.’

Mayflies is on BBC Scotland and BBC One in late December.