James Nesbitt has made a career of playing Irish men in strange situations. In Cold Feet he was a charmer with a Northern Irish accent living in Manchester, not long after the IRA had detonated a bomb in the middle of the city. In Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies he was a dwarf with a gravity-defying moustache and a yeasty Ballymena burr. Now, in the Netflix series Run Away, he’s a wealth manager living in a large house somewhere in the north of England, searching for his missing daughter.
“My Irishness as an actor has always been very important to me. I fought to play my roles as Irish. Not because I can’t do other accents. But because I’ve always wanted to,” he says.
“I grew up in a time of conflict. I grew up where the rest of the world saw and heard my accent as something that related to only one thing, even as a child, even though I grew up kind of distant from the Troubles. When I say distance, I mean 10 miles away ... I also knew that I did not want that to be the picture painted about where I came from.”
Nesbitt has had a hugely successful life on screen. He has acted opposite Ian McKellen, Liam Neeson and Richard E Grant, clocked up Bafta and Golden Globe nominations, and served for 11 years
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