Matthew McNulty talks his brilliant new supernatural crime drama, and facing up to ghosts himself – whether real or induced by alcohol.
Your character Tom Rees, the estranged father of murdered teenager Neve Kelly in The Rising, is in a terrible state when we first meet him, isn’t he?
Tom is a complex character. He’s got loads of layers and sharp edges and broken pieces. His soul!
He’s looking a little bit on the dishevelled side…
Tom is the sort of person who wears a coat indoors. Even when it’s boiling hot he won’t take his coat off.
My mind-set with that was that when you’ve got an addiction like alcoholism you always want to feel like you are going somewhere. It’s because you are in such a pit. Tom’s house is a mess, his life’s a mess and all his relationships are a mess. He’s got to feel like he is doing something.
So when I put the coats on I felt the weight of them and then used that to weigh his posture down a little bit. He does everything a bit slower and kind of trudges everywhere.
Do parts like Tom stay with you?
At the end of this job I went to see a chiropractor for the first time in my life. I only went because somebody said that it feels good but the amount of crunching that came out of my body I was like, ‘Bloody hell! I didn’t think I had any issues!’ I had never heard cracking like it. I guess that’s how I got Tom out of my system.
What’s Tom’s relationship like with Neve (Clara Rugaard) who haunts from beyond the grave to try to find her killer?
I think because of the drink Tom has probably failed Neve a lot of times. At the start of the story he has guilt for not being there when he should have and for not being the dad that he probably wants to be.
Rather than trying to be better he just wallows in self-pity but because Neve is so laser focused and so astute and intelligent and this force of nature she hasn’t got time for that.
Do you believe in sixth senses and the supernatural?
I’ve had experiences but they are normally when I am hungover and still half-asleep!
One time I was in a hotel half an hour from Galway in the middle of nowhere on the West coast of Ireland, which was known for being haunted. I’d had a few drinks, went to bed and I had a vision of an old guy.
First he sat on the bed and then he peed in the wardrobe. I was like, ‘What are you doing?!’ Then I woke up. It was just a very vivid, real dream, alcohol-induced but I guess there might be a little something in that. At least it wasn’t me that peed in the wardrobe. I did check.
At one point Tom looks into theories about the multiverse. What job might you be doing in a parallel universe?
Before I started acting I was working in demolition. That is the complete opposite of what I am doing now. That was so hard. I reckon the two years I did demolition have taken 10 years off my life.
The Rising starts on Sky Max from Friday at 9pm.
