Peter Coonan
Peter Coonan is an actor.
Everything starts with Fran Cooney. Love/Hate, the Dublin crime serial that ran into 2014, gave Peter Coonan a character who became the most quotable and most frightening presence in it, and the role won him Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Television, at the eleventh Irish Film and Television Awards. Fran is funny, which is the trick of him: the comedy and the menace come out of the same mouth in the same breath, and you stop being able to hear which one is arriving.
There was King of the Travellers in 2012 as well, and since then he has worked the way most successful Irish actors do, moving between homegrown drama and the international productions that shoot in Ireland. Penance, Dublin Murders, Arracht, Cold Courage, Doineann, then a run through The Alienist, Peaky Blinders and Bad Sisters.
The risk in a breakout that big is obvious, and he has spent the years since being offered variations on hard men. The interesting credits are where somebody casts against it: the period-mystery register of Quirke, the domestic comedy of Bad Sisters, the small-town Irish thrillers where the threat is atmosphere rather than muscle.
Movies (3)
TV (5)
Where to start with Peter Coonan
Love/Hate first, without much argument. It is the show he is known for and the one that uses him best, though it takes a season to work out how good he is, so give it that long before judging.
For range, Bad Sisters drops him into a black comedy about family loyalty, and the contrast with Fran is instructive. Quirke is the handsome period option, Hidden Assets the cold procedural one, and The Alienist shows what he does inside an American production. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the outlier, a Shirley Jackson adaptation where his job is to make a whole village feel hostile, and he is well cast for it. Two 2026 titles, Hokum and TRAD, sit at the end of the list, so the run is not finished.