Tony Curran on Mayflies: 'I never imagined that I’d be here'

“I worked in a place in Bensonhurst for this store,” he says, just getting started. “I worked for American Bell which is the British Telecom over there. I worked on a building site. And I also worked for this guy called Tony and a guy called Vito.”

“And I kid you not, I went into their store one day because I was getting the L train up to Harlem of all places; 127th Street for a job interview, which was a very bad idea. The only white ginger kid in that area.

“But I went into this store and this guy said, ‘Hey, what’s your name kid?’ I said, ‘Tony.’ He said, ‘Why are you called Tony? Tony’s an Italian name. What are you, Irish?’

“I said, ‘I’m Scottish.’ He goes, ‘Oh yeah? What are you, a Catholic?’ I go, ‘Yeah.’

“‘Hey nice to meet you. What are you doing here?’

“I told him and then he shouts next door, ‘Vito.’ Of course Vito comes out. This guy – with all due respect to Vito – was a human version of Jabba the Hutt. He walks out and he doesn’t look happy. He’s got knives in his hands. ‘What is it? I’m busy.’

“‘I want you to meet somebody. Tell him your name, kid.’

“‘I just told you my name.’

“‘Well, tell him.’”

“‘Tony, my name’s Tony.’”

“He looks at me and goes, ‘Why are you called Tony? That’s an Italian name.’

“‘I know, he just told me that.’”

(Can you tell Curran is relishing this?)

“Anyway,” he continues, “for the next five months Vito and Tony, they would give me sandwiches, packages, and I would deliver them around Bensonhurst, which is a real Jewish-Italian neighbourhood. I would put them in the front of my bike and they would go, ‘Take this up to Johnny on 92nd Street. Don’t look inside.’

“I thought nothing of it. And then, years later, I saw a film called Goodfellas and when I watched that I was like, ‘Oh s**t’.”

There’s so much to like about this. The rhythm of it, the pitch-perfect New York Italian accents Curran gives to Tony and Vito in the telling, the punchline. But if I tell you this is also the story he tells me to explain how he moved on from being a bullied kid, well maybe that says something too.

For Curran, the story takes over. The story becomes about how life begins. And it ends with a movie reference.

Life and movies. What else is there? TV maybe. Curran is on Zoom to talk to me about the upcoming BBC drama Mayflies, based on Andrew O’Hagan’s much-lauded novel, produced by Andrea Gibb and Claire Mundell and directed by Peter Mackie Burns, who first directed the actor in a drama school performance of Waiting for Godot 27 years ago.

November 2022. It is evening in Scotland. Dark outside. But it’s just after nine in the morning in Los Angeles where Curran lives in a flat in Brentwood with his wife and their nine-year-old daughter Beau. He’s 5,000 miles (and counting) from where he grew up in Glasgow. This morning he’s just back from the school run, ready to talk.

And he talks, happily, discursively, loquaciously. He’s an entertaining conversationalist, whether he’s talking about his love of meditation or his love of Paul Weller or his mum.

“It’s Mary’s birthday today. Mary’s 89 today. The one and only Mary doll, as I call her. Thank you for everything mum and happy birthday.”

Curran is one of those well kent faces who has parlayed small roles in Grange Hill and Rab C Nesbitt back in the early 1990s into an international career that has seen him work with George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, Chris Pine and Steven Spielberg and even turn up in the Marvel universe. Of late he’s been working with Bryan Cranston on the TV series Your Honour and with director Barry (Diner, Tin Men) Levinson on The Calling for NBC Universal’s Peacock streaming service.

He’s been in LA for nearly two decades now. “I did that film League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in the Czech Republic. Alas, it was Sean Connery’s last film. And I ended up selling my house in North Peckham and lived to regret it. It is now worth £2.8m .... No that’s not true … It is worth considerably more,” he says, joking (I think).

“When you’re an actor and you get a big film like that, 20th Century Fox, and six months later you’re doing a little play in Notting Hill Gate, the Gate Theatre …”

Well, you get the story. “It’s a fluctuating economic life of an actor,” he adds. “I sold my house and I moved out here in 2004 or something like that.”

Mayflies, then, is something of a homecoming. Shot in Glasgow and Ayrshire and screening on BBC One just after Christmas it’s a tough, at times heartbreaking watch. But it is also full of light and life. Curran plays Tully Dawson, a married man (Ashley Jensen plays his wife) who phones his best mate Jimmy (Martin Compston) to tell him he has some bad news.

What follows is a story of friendship and how it changes down the years and in the face of a terminal illness.

Despite the subject matter, the shoot was something of a pleasure, Curran says.

“Mayflies is quite heavy subject matter, but I’ve never laughed so much on set in my life. Going out with Andrea Gibb and Claire, our producers, and Andrew O’Hagan, to the Ubiquitous Chip and having a few drinkies … I hadn’t actually drank in nine months and people were like, ‘Oh, have you stopped drinking?’ No, I haven’t. I just decided to stop to see what would happen.

“But Andrea Gibb, after a read-through one day, she goes, ‘I hear you’ve stopped drinking.’ ‘Yeah, I’m just clearing my head.’ And she goes, ‘Do you feel better?’ And before I have a chance to answer that question, she goes, ‘Probably not.’”

That said, he admits, he was nervous about the project. Playing the role of a man with terminal cancer has an obvious weight to it.

“It was so emotionally charged and so heavy at times,” Curran explains. “I thought it was definitely going to be a challenge. It scared me, to be honest. I was a little apprehensive.

“I’ve played vampires and I’ve played bad guys. ‘Yeah, I’ll put on some wings and some prosthetic depressions.’ Stick in your teeth and wallop.

“But this role … Parts of it felt familiar because it was set in Scotland in the 1980s, a time when I was in my teens. A lot of it was just to do with the character and the challenges that character brought and the humanity that Tully and Jimmy have. It’s a very tender story.”

Before filming he spent time at a Maggie’s Centre in Glasgow and talked to professionals and cancer patients.

“I spoke to a gentleman called Martin. He was a gentleman with terminal cancer and his story was extremely moving and extremely powerful and heart wrenching and I spoke with him at length.

“Hopefully with that experience you can try and give it your best shot.”

I think it’s safe to say he does.

Both Curran and I are in our 50s, albeit at different ends of that decade. He’s just turned 53. “What’s the opposite of 53? 35? I feel 35. I know I don’t look it.”

So, 53. It’s not old is it? But it’s not young either. It’s a time when mortality, if not front and centre, at least starts flirting around the edges of your vision.

“It’s so true, Teddy. Mortality, that word. Gosh, yeah, you do get very philosophical. There’s many questions that come …”

He breaks off, changes direction, catches another associative thought. “I like to meditate. I’ve always liked to meditate. People are like, ‘Why do you meditate?’ And I say, ‘Because I need to.’ As my auntie used to say when I was a small child, ‘Does he not know what his arse is for?’

“It’s the art of relaxation and a lot of people, myself included, find it hard to switch off; switch off the mind, the thoughts and fears and what to do next.

“I think as you get into your 50s something switches on. Not that you don’t give a monkeys any more, but there are many things that matter less, if that makes sense. Why did I get so wound up about her or him or that? What does it matter? It’s only energy.

“He who angers you owns you, as it were. Why was I so uptight about that?

“My daughter this morning she was under the sheets. I said, ‘Are you OK?’ ‘Yes, I’m hiding from the negative energy. I’m not coming out until I’ve got positive vibes.’ And I said, ‘Good for you, babe.”

Are you positive vibes only these days, Tony? “I am. I try to be. I went to this meditation class a few years ago and there was this monk there.

“I’d been meditating for a morning and then this guy cut me off and I got really angry. I started giving him some road rage. And I thought, ‘Great. That’s all that meditation gone to waste.’

“And the monk said, ‘Tony don’t worry. I’ve got a tip for you next time that happens. Just turn round to him and say,’ f*** you, thank you.’ Get it out and then just thank him because you’ve moved on from that.”

He’s got an app on his phone called “Unplug: Meditation”, he tells me. He has had a go at hypnotherapy too.

“People are like, ‘What did ye dae that fir?’ I said, ‘Because I wanted to delve into something.’ ‘What is that like?’ ‘Well, I do a lot of weeping. I think about my father who passed away from cancer. I think about other things because I’m an actor. Forgive me if this is a bit crude. My body is a tool.’

“It’s about accessibility; physically mentally, spiritually, everything.

“As an actor, as I get older in any walk of life, sometimes you doubt yourself. Sometimes, with real confidence, arrogance can be right next to that. And you want to get that ego and that arrogance pushed away and just try to feel calm within yourself.”

I want to ask him about his dad. Earlier in our conversation he had mentioned the tension in Mayflies between his character Tully and his father Woodbine.

“If you ask any young man or young woman in the west coast of Scotland, relationships with your parents can be quite tumultuous if the father drank,” Curran points out.

“Even my relationship with my father … of course you want love, you want someone to put their arm around you and tell you that they love you, you’re a good kid and you’re going to be alright. And sometimes that doesn’t happen and it can be tough.”

It’s a subject we return to later in the conversation. Curran’s father died when his son was just 27. What was his relationship with his dad?

“It wasn’t as close as I think it could have been. My dad didn’t work for a while. He complained about back pain, he never went to the doctor. And of course it wasn’t back pain, it was lung cancer. He had mesothelioma. He worked in the shipyards when he was 20 and that’s where he contracted it, ripping out asbestos from the ships.”

But they had good moments together, he adds. His father, he says, gave him a generosity of spirit. “Don’t be a feartie, don’t bury your head in the sand, open your mind.”

The desire now is to be comfortable in your own skin, he says. Was the teenage Curran comfortable in his? “No, not really it was a f****** nightmare actually. I got bullied because I was so f****** good-looking and talented. I would have been jealous … Kidding.”

He pulls back from the compulsion to joke about it and takes the question seriously.

“I had a tough time as a kid and it’s maybe something I’ve not really addressed. I got bullied to the point where at lunchtime I was so f***** off that I would go to the edge of the school – this is quite sad actually – with my book, right in the corner where nobody hung out, and I would sit on the fire escape with my lunch and read my book on my own.

“I don’t know what that says psychologically. The guys who bullied me are dead or they’re in prison … Maybe they’re entrepreneurs. I don’t know what they’re doing. There were moments like that. And I’m not sharing this to go ‘woe is me’ — I’m just sharing it because it affected me.”

This is when he tells me his New York story. “I got out of Scotland and I travelled and I think that six-month trip to New York City … I don’t know … If you could bottle that for kids it would be a pretty informative adventurous thing to do.”

There’s a line in Mayflies: “Weirdos get out.” I’m not sure that’s him, but Tony Curran got out. Reinvented himself. Found himself.

Does he feel far away from that teenager he was? To answer this he tells me a story because that’s what he does.

“For my 50th birthday, a friend of mine, Bobby, we were drinking. And he turned to me here in LA. He said, ‘Look at you, you’ve got a family, you’ve got a career. You’re winning at life.’

“I knew what he meant. I guess my point is, I’m a ways away from that kid. I’m happy where I am. I’m grateful. I think it’s important to be grateful.

“I never imagined that I’d be here. Maybe I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

He tells me another story because he can’t help himself. He’s a keen skier these days and last year he and his daughter met an 85-year-old man up on Mammoth Mountain in California

“And he was with this younger woman. And at first I was like, ‘Oh are they a couple?’ You never know these days. And they laughed. It was his daughter and they just had this sweet connection.

“And he was still this vibrant, fit, 85-year-old man and I saw him ski down the mountain and I was like, ‘Good God, that’s amazing.’

“You can’t stop. I said to my mum the other day ... some people were talking about getting old ... and she turned to me and said, ‘Well son, what is the alternative?’”

Mayflies will be on BBC Scotland on December 27 and December 28 at 10pm and is also

available on BBCiPlayer, and then on BBC One on December 28 and December 29, at 9pm