Ardal O'Hanlon
Ardal O'Hanlon is an actor, born 1965.
Ardal O'Hanlon was a stand-up from Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, before he was anything else, and the stand-up is still audible in the acting: the pauses, the willingness to let a line sit there and be stupid for a moment longer than is comfortable.
Father Dougal McGuire, played from 1995 to 1998, is one of the great idiot performances in Irish and British comedy, and it survives rewatching because Dougal is never played as a fool trying to seem clever. He is played as a man with total, cheerful confidence in an empty head. That is a specific choice and a hard one to hold across the run without it curdling into smugness.
The two long jobs since were both about being the reasonable one in the room. George Sunday, alias Thermoman, in My Hero ran from 2000 to 2005, and DI Jack Mooney in Death in Paradise from 2017 to 2020, with a return to the character in the spin-off Return to Paradise. In between he has been quietly good in other people's work, as Mr Purcell in The Butcher Boy and Eammon in Derry Girls. He has also written three novels, The Talk of the Town in 1998, Brouhaha in 2022 and A Plot to Die For in 2026, which is a sideline most sitcom actors do not sustain for twenty-eight years.
Movies (3)
TV (11)
Where to start with Ardal O'Hanlon
Father Ted first, and if anyone tells you to skip to a best episode, ignore them and begin at the beginning. The show's rhythm takes an episode or two to establish, and Dougal is funnier once you understand how completely the other two have given up on him.
Then Death in Paradise, which he joined as the lead detective in 2017 and played with more melancholy than the format usually permits, and Return to Paradise if you want to see where the character went next. My Hero is the broadest thing here, a teatime superhero sitcom, and it is fine.
The two to seek out are the dramatic ones: The Butcher Boy, where he is small and very effective inside a bleak film, and Derry Girls, where he gets a handful of scenes and takes them. Handsome Devil rounds it out.