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“WAIT FOR THE second episode, we’re not watching Glenroe anymore.”
Actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor is returning to the TV slot that made him a household name in this country with Love/Hate. But that’s old Sunday night staple he uses as a contrast to his new unruly RTÉ drama.
These Sacred Vows debuts tonight on RTÉ One and it’s Vaughan-Lawlor’s name that is front and centre of RTÉ’s promotion, even if it’s very much an ensemble cast across the six-episode run.
Set in Spain, the comedy-drama is an almost trippy take on the Irish wedding abroad. Vaughan-Lawlor plays a priest who is asked to officiate as a favour to old friends who are parents of the bride.
He arrives to find himself crashing in a villa with the young bride’s friends who are more interested in lounging and taking drugs than making him feel welcome.
Not really wanted by his Gen Z housemates, he tries to find some solace in his old friends who let it be known that the wedding couple don’t really care about him either.
He goes to see the local priest whose church they will be using and he’s met with suspicion, with the local padre only interested in showing him the size of his congregation compared to meagre attendances Fr Vincent is used to back home.
Oh, and Fr Vincent ends up dead. We know this because it’s literally the first scene in the series before the action goes back a week in time.
It’s been suggested that the show is kind of The Irish White Lotus given its a satirical look at society in exotic setting. In a literal plot sense it’s probably closer to Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, however.
This is because we know someone is going to die but there’s a lot of story to tell before we get there.
“He’s a good man who kind of feels like his time is up,” Vaughan-Lawlor says of his character.
“He’s trying to figure out how to be useful, where his identity lies. He’s flawed and he’s full of doubt, and then, as we find out, things kick up at the end of the first episode and he just starts to kind of unravel again.”
Vaughan-Lawlor is speaking at a roundtable of Irish showbiz journalists on a day of promotion for These Sacred Vows in Dublin city centre.
He’s also speaking just a week after Game of Thrones spin-off A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms premiered. Vaughan-Lawlor has a recurring part in the new HBO show and he says as a big fan of fantasy growing up that show was “so much fun” to be a part of.
Contrasting that show with this latest one, he explains that the “joy of being an actor” is the chance to play a character who is “far away from what you have played in the past”.
I think what’s amazing and interesting about the character is that he’s a man whose faith in God is totally intact, but his understanding of where he belongs in culture in the current Ireland is vague. He doesn’t know where to put himself to be of service to people.
Different perspectives
An Irish priest trying to find his way in a world that has passed him by has a symbolism in itself, but there’s plenty more going on here too.
Each episode focuses on a different character, with writer-director John Butler focusing more on the wedding guests than the couple on the aisle.
Speaking this week on RTÉ Radio 1 arts show Arena, Butler says he feels audiences are underserved by programmes about friendship compared to shows about romantic relationships.
“I think lots of wedding dramas and comedies focus on the travails of the bride and groom but that doesn’t feel as interesting to me because they’re going to perform this fairytale on an altar for us to watch, but the drama really lies with the people in the pews. The people who are dying of a hangover or have secrets of their own, haven’t resolved their love lives and don’t know where they’re going.”
One of those in the pews is Cormac, played by Adam John Richardson, who is the focus of the second episode.
RTÉ only provided journalists with a look at episode one in advance of today’s debut, so we have to take the word of Vaughan-Lawlor that Biddy and Miley would be horrified by the second.
Audiences might know Richardson as Ant (the brother) in Element/RTÉ production The Dry and again here he plays a gay character.
He’s part of the fun loving crew in the villa and explains that he thinks it’s a depiction of Dublin lives that hasn’t really been explored before.
“I think it’s very a modern perspective on Dublin life, or Dublin friends anyway, and that’s kind of exciting,” he says.
“Throughout the friendship group you have both sides of the spectrum, and in between, modernity versus maybe a more classic Irish life. I mean, Cormac himself is an openly gay, practicing Christian. So I suppose you don’t see that very often, or at least you don’t hear it,” he says.
If you’re gay, you’re supposed to kind of sacrifice your faith, because they can’t go hand in hand or whatever. And to see that actively challenged was kind of exciting because I have a few gay religious friends, and I haven’t seen that kind of represented before.
Fun in the sun
Richardson didn’t think the White Lotus comparisons were right either, saying that if people watch it they might think differently.
Asked this week to describe the show in 15 seconds, he instead said it said it had more of a “Heated Rivalry energy” given that it has “sun, sea, sex and suspicious parents”.
Vaughan-Lawlor echoed that comparison, calling it “sexy, funny, subversive” and a “romp through the Irish in the sun”.
The friendship group at the heart of the show is made up of several young talented Irish actors and one of the most enjoyable aspects of the first episode is seeing them all together on screen.
As well as Richardson, there’s Aoife Hinds, India Mullen, Aaron Heffernan and even comedian and podcaster Shane Daniel Byrne.
On The Late Late Show recently, Heffernan suggested that the young cast were partying it up during filming in Tenerife, but Richardson says there were “only three” proper nights out during 67 days filming.
Vaughan-Lawlor says that, as the elder statesman of the main cast, he had no part of the after-hours craic anyway but that there was no divide once the cameras were rolling.
Naturally, when the actor sits down with a group of Irish journalists he has to talk about the iconic Nidge from Love/Hate.
He feels the character, and as a result his face, did get kind of over-exposed there for a while but that he hasn’t waited a particular period before coming back to RTÉ or anything.
He recalls, for example, seeing memes of Nidge online in various situations like reading the news or doing the Toy Show and feeling it was perhaps all getting a bit much.
“I think it’s just opportunity and circumstance rather than anything pre-planned. It wasn’t like I said I’m not going to work for RTÉ for 10 years or something, it just happened,” he says.
I suppose there is that thing as well that you don’t want people to get sick of you. I think I was on the front cover of the Irish Times twice in one week and I thought maybe it was time to give the Irish people a break.
Sunday night fear
If Nidge was over-exposed, it was only because Love/Hate became such a juggernaut of a success for RTÉ, something the broadcaster hasn’t really been able to recapture in drama since.
When it was first broadcast the show did feel like something of a revolution, not least because it was so contemporary for a Sunday night audience that once expected Glenroe.
RTÉ’s latest big ticket efforts for the same slot have been a little safer, with Traitors Ireland and The Walsh Sisters coming to mind.
These Sacred Vows is certainly a bit riskier but such is the production values and satirical writing, one would hope that it can prove to be a success.
Vaughan-Lawlor says that’s down to everyone involved making sure they do their part:
“It’s our job to make it vibrant and make it a thing that people want to watch and people are hooked on and want to come back to. I think John already does this successfully in the momentum of the show, it has an energy that fires you through the episodes.”
The first episode of These Sacred Vows is on RTÉ One at 9.30pm tonight, with the first two episodes going up on the RTÉ Player afterwards.
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