Irish crime series Kin is premiering on AMC+ on September 9, and it’s sure to get everybody talking. When the Kinsella crime family loses a son, they go to war with an international cartel as a result. What they lack in power, however, they make up for in blood bonds.
Maria Doyle Kennedy, who plays the matriarch of the family, spoke to Screen Rant about the complicated dynamics that run through the series and how they affect her character.
Screen Rant: Can you tell me a little bit about Birdy and what attracted you to the role?
Maria Doyle Kennedy: Birdy is kind of the matriarch of the Kinsella family. She's at the top end of the family; her brother, Frank Kinsella [Aidan Gillen], runs the whole operation because their other brother is in jail. She's really interesting to me.
When I got the scripts, I read them and just was page-turning. I really was compelled by it and just kept wanting to read and to find out, "What did they do next? What other terrible decision did they make?" I really liked it.
Peter McKenna, the writer, and Diarmuid Goggins, the director, set it up. They called me and said, "Would you like to have a meeting and talk about her?" The really interesting thing from my point of view was they hadn't really decided exactly who she was. Peter had written her, and they knew that they wanted to have a woman at the top end of the family - just so that it would create a different dynamic that a woman would in that position rather than another man. They knew the impact and the strands she would pull together, but they hadn't really decided who she was. They were saying, "Do you like her? Would you be interested? How did she get there?"
That's [a] brilliant present as an actor. You get to really get the character off the page and put them up on legs. And I really enjoyed trying to imagine how she could get there because she's very contradictory. She's loving and she's tender, family is everything to her and loyalty is enormous for her, but she's also very ruthless and practical above everything. She sees the need to do things that are difficult and illegal, and for many people immoral, but she sees that the end justifies the means for her. It was really interesting to figure out how she could get to that place where she justified things like that to herself.
And I haven't told anybody else this yet, but I really had a lot of fun dressing her. I hope people will get a good laugh out of how slightly wrong she gets it all the time. She doesn't have her own kids at home, so she has lots of time for her personal grooming. She obviously likes a bit of style and a bit of bling, and she has a bit of money to throw at it. Time and money, but she's stuck in 1994 and constantly gets it a little bit wrong.
We really had fun trying to make that work, but we decided that she would be really into Fun Fur. So, she's got a lot of fake fur jackets and coats and things like that - we decided that she's probably secretly a member of PETA. In real life, she would have no problem with ordering a hit on somebody, but she would never ever be mean to an animal. So, it was all of these kinds of things that just made me think it would be a really fun and interesting character to play and try and make people care about; make them believe in her, and make them care about her.
When Michael (Charlie Cox) returns to the family, it's almost like the prodigal son. Can you talk to me about the effects that the family feels with Michael's return?
Maria Doyle Kennedy: I think it's enormous. There used to be a tradition in older Ireland - older than this drama is set - when people immigrated at the beginning of the 1900s, and even up to the twenties and thirties and forties. I've seen photographs in my own in my family, and in my mother's family and her father's family, where people went away. They used to do this thing where they would - and they were Catholic families, so there are loads of them - they would line people up on the wall for [a] family photo, and they would leave a space where the person had gone. It would go: Sean, Tom, Pauline, space because they were gone to America, Joe, space because they were going to London or whatever. I thought it was the most incredible visual clue of what was happening in a family, the space in a photograph rather than bunching them together and knowing themselves the person had gone.
That's kind of what this family has done while he's been in jail. They've held this space for him. I imagine there would have been constantly a chair that was Michael's chair in Birdy's house. When people come in, she's like, "No, don't sit there. It's Michael's chair." Even though he's been inside for eight years, they've been holding the space open for him and waiting for his return. And it's a really big thing.
There are a lot of tangled relationships. He's very close to his family, but there's also a lot of enormous dysfunction that he knows is bad for him. They all know little bits of their relationships are bad for them, but there's also a big magnetic vortex in the middle. They just are compelled to be there and to keep creating and maintaining these patterns and relationships. Yeah, it's fascinating.
What would you like to explore in Birdy's past throughout the course of the series?
Maria Doyle Kennedy: I'd love to see her relationship with her husband. She was younger then obviously, and I feel that she was a little bit more naïve. She'd come up through this very violent family, and she certainly had to witness and put up with a lot of that all through her own childhood. Then she's totally sidelined for the main job because she's a woman. So, there's all that going on for her.
But I think she really did love her husband. She had a great hope back then that things might be different for them. They were never going to leave the family, and she is so smart, but I think she always had ambitions that they might be sidelined into the more legit end of things. Maybe they'd be the people fronting the garage, and they'd be out on the jobs. But then, of course, he dies in violence as part of the world. So, something died within her then.
I'd love to go back to before that time and just really explore the amount of hope that she had, or the ways she thought that she might go parallel - not out of the family, but parallel. And it's certainly clear that's the vision she has for the younger ones: they really want them to have a different way. Crime is certainly the way that they've earned their money, but they want the younger boys to have a different opportunity.
I think Peter McKenna's scripts are amazing. Can you talk to me about working with him on fleshing out some of the stories and characters?
Maria Doyle Kennedy: Well, he's really open. He really invited all of us to talk about our characters before we began. He began fleshing out things from stuff that we would say, and that we added into it. If you came upon a scene and for some reason, it wasn't working, he was there all the time and you could ask him.
He was on set almost all the time, and he was totally open to reworking anything that was not working. Or if you just said, "Do I need to say that line? Could I not just give him a serious look? Because I really think that's all it needs," and he'd be like "Yeah, great." He wanted us to succeed. His intention was more about that than any kind of preciousness about his words. What more can you ask for, really? It's brilliant.
Does Birdy think that Frank is handling every situation that the family gets involved with properly?
Maria Doyle Kennedy: Birdy thinks that there are things that she definitely would have done differently. She loves Frank, and she would never show it to anybody else that she was not on his side, because that would be causing divisions and she's not about that. And she's always been protective of him. He's been bullied, and he's had a tough time. She's always been there for him and protective of him, but I do think she's a little bit resentful as well of the power that he has. I do think that she believes that she might do or have done a better job.
Kin premieres on September 9 exclusively on AMC+.