How Do You Bring a Powerful Bestseller Like ‘Say Nothing’ to TV? Call FX

At a tastemaker screening in NYC attended by IndieWire, the cast and creative team opened up about the difficult material behind the powerful non-fiction book — which may just be TV's next big hit.

Anthony Boyle knew his latest TV project had a high bar to clear. The actor, a Broadway vet who recently portrayed John Wilkes Booth in “Manhunt,” took on the role of Brendan Hughes in FX‘s upcoming “Say Nothing,” based on the beloved nonfiction bestseller of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe about The Troubles in Ireland and the IRA.

“I was so nervous to show my mom and dad, because this is their life,” Boyle said onstage during a recent panel discussion in NYC. “You know, for me, it’s a story, and I’ve lived in the hangover of this conflict. But for them, it was there every day. It was like just their existence. So when I showed them it, like two weeks ago in Belfast, I was really nervous, and I was looking at them sitting behind them, kind of seeing if they were liking it.”

He continued, “And there’s a scene where Dolours’ father gets pulled down the stairs and get [taken away]. And one of my mom’s earliest memories is seeing her father get pulled down the stairs by the British Army, and she just let [out a] shriek. She just started crying in our living room. We had to pause the show and and sit and sort of talk to her through it. And I thought, ‘I feel like we’ve got this right. … My mom and dad loved it. I really hope people from Belfast like it.”

On October 6, FX hosted a screening of the first two episodes of the upcoming nine-episode series, attended by IndieWire. In that same onstage conversation afterwards, author Keefe and show creator Joshua Zetumer discussed the authenticity they hoped to capture as outsiders to that time period and conflict.

“This project started, it’s crazy to think, more than 10 years ago when Dolours Price died and I read an obituary in 2013 and was just fascinated by the life that was described in this New York Times obituary,” Keefe said. “And I wrote about her, initially in a piece, and then in the book, and then we have now spent as much time making this series as I did on the book. … Lola Petticrew, [who] play Young Dolours, said that, in a strange way, this is the kind of thing that that RTE or the BBC probably couldn’t make, that there’s a license you have as an outsider. I also think there’s a responsibility, though. I think that the kind of price of admission, the sort of price of trespassing into someone else’s world, be that an American writing about people in Belfast or a guy writing about young women, is that you have to get it right. You sort of have to earn the right to tell that story.”

The show opens with the kidnapping of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10. Over the following nine hours, the program traces the rise of the IRA and zeroes in on the key players, including Boyle’s Brendan Hughes, Petticrew as Dolours Price, Hazel Doupe as Marian Price, and Josh Finan as Gerry Adams, who interestingly would go on to negotiate peace and has always denied any involvement with the IRA. (The legal disclaimer note explaining this after each episode drew chuckles at the screening.)

Like any piece of media focusing on individuals who have done horrible things, audiences’ sympathies naturally align with whomever is telling the story. The “Say Nothing” team was conscientious about that reality.

“They’re complicated,” Keefe said. “How you feel about them should shift. And I think that the challenge for us, this was true for me with the book, very, very true with the series, is: How do you capture the romance of those politics without romanticizing them yourself? And I think part of the answer is that you show the costs not just in the final episodes, which, there is all kinds of stuff that comes out in the later episodes, but from the very first scene. The first person you meet is Jean McConville. And the hope is that the sense of those costs kind of hangs over the whole series, even when it’s kind of lark-y bank heists and so forth, that you have a sense that there is this kind of Tell-Tale Heart beating in the background.”

Added Zetumer, “I think one of the things we were trying to do from the beginning was capture the energy of what it feels like to be in your twenties or a teenager and really get caught up in a cause. That was the sort of guiding principle that was driving us forward. And then at the same time, you would have the counterpoint of that where you have somebody who is a little bit older and looks back on what they’ve done with deeply mixed emotions. That kind of counterpoint, that was the sort of the idea of the series.”

“Say Nothing” will premiere all nine episodes on Hulu on Thursday, November 14.