Actress Nora-Jane Noone moved back to Galway from LA two years ago when her daughter was three. After 20 years away from her childhood home, she found the city had changed, as had she. But she’s happy rediscovering Galway and working on new projects. JUDY MURPHY hears about her latest film, Bring Them Down.

“I was shy as a child,” says Nora-Jane Noone, “and acting gave me emotional freedom.”

Those early acting classes she attended uncovered a talent that has been on display since her teenage years, since she got her first major film role in 2002’s The Magdalene Sisters.

Among the movies she’s appeared in since are 2015’s Brooklyn and 2020’s Wildfire. The latest project from Nora-Jane is the just-released Bring Them Down, in which she appears alongside Barry Keoghan, Christopher Abbott and Colm Meaney.

TV work from the city woman has included a stint on Coronation Street and she featured in the Jack Taylor crime series, based on the novels of Galway writer Ken Bruen and shot locally. More recently, fans of the RTÉ’s Hidden Assets will have seen Nora-Jane play Detective Sergeant Claire Wallace in that series.

She moved back to Galway a couple of years ago after nine years in Los Angeles and a decade in London. The decision to return was largely down to motherhood. Nora-Jane’s daughter, who is now five, was two when the family moved back.

“When I got pregnant, I started thinking would I want her to grow up in Ireland, because it’s good to have family around,” she says of the pull of home.

Shortly after moving back with her husband, fellow actor Chris Marquette, and their daughter, Nora-Jane was offered the role in Hidden Assets. Filming was just finishing on Bring Them Down, a thriller about a simmering feud between neighbouring sheep farmers who are deeply damaged men.

“When you are asked if you want to be in a movie, working with Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott, you say yes,” she says with a laugh about how she accepted the role of Caroline in the film, which is set in in the West of Ireland and in which Gaeilge features prominently.

Although Nora-Jane’s role is minor compared to those of Keoghan and Abbott, she gives a luminescent performance, in this largely bleak and gritty film, which was shot in Wicklow.

Abbott plays Michael who lives with his ailing, tyrannical father, Ray (Colm Meaney), a man obsessed about the quality of their rams and determined not to let their neighbours gain the upper hand. Michael and Caroline were once in a relationship but she’s now married to his adversary, Gary (Paul Ready), who is in financial difficulties and prepared to take drastic action to stay afloat. Caroline and Gary’s son, Jack, played by Keoghan, is a troubled lad whose behaviour magnifies the tensions between the older men.

“Every character feels completely whole,” says Nora-Jane of the film, praising the writer Christopher Andrews who also directs.

“Caroline is a smaller role but she has so much going on and you get to see so much of her back story. You don’t always get that in films.”

The character also “has the most healthy response of any of them in needing to leave and get out of there”, Nora-Jane says.

“The men are stuck and are acting out – acting out their own demons. Obviously, she acts out too,” she says about Caroline’s anger in certain scenes.

“And that’s a true representation because you can’t be in an environment like that for long before it affects you,” Nora-Jane adds about the harsh world of Bring Them Down. When Caroline becomes shocked by her own behaviour, she knows she needs to leave.

Nora-Jane, from Newcastle in the city, first came to prominence playing the teenage Bernadette in Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters alongside Anne-Marie Duff and Geraldine McEwan. Since then, most of her work has been in independent films. As an actor, she is drawn to exploring the darker aspects of life, “facing them and moving through them, to heal and move forward”, she observes.

Pictured: Nora-Jane Noone, pictured in the Hardiman Hotel, grew up in the city’s Newcastle, in a house where books and films featured large.  PHOTO: JOE O’SHAUGHNESSY.