Bloody Sunday: James Nesbitt's Personal Odyssey

There was some element of, “Oh, Christ, I almost wish I hadn’t read this,” Nesbitt recalls, “because having read [the script for Bloody Sunday] I couldn’t walk away from it.”

In the movie, which portrays what happened on January 30, 1972 when members of the British Army fired upon unarmed civil rights marchers in Derry, Nesbitt takes on the role of Ivan Cooper, a shirt-factory manager and local politician who was involved in the civil rights movement. Nesbitt, like Cooper, is a Protestant, and in accepting the role he knew there was a chance that he would be seen in his own community as “going over to the other side.” Indeed, he received death threats as well as praise for his performance. 

“I think Protestants have walked away from it for years,” he said. “No one wanted to own Bloody Sunday. As [producer] Jim Sheridan said, ‘The Irish don’t forget and the English don’t want to remember it.’”
Nesbitt grew up the son of a schoolteacher in rural County Antrim, near Ballymena, the only boy with three older sisters. His family is very proud of their Protestant culture, but he says that his father is “an egalitarian.” In fact, as a youngster Nesbitt was a boy soprano and his father used to take him to sing at Irish Feiseanna (festivals). He also took piano lessons in the local convent.

Despite his own exposure to Irish “Catholic” culture, he said there was “a great sense of denial about what was going on” in the province.
“The reality of life in Northern Ireland,” said Nesbitt, who was only six years old when Bloody Sunday happened, “is that if you were Protestant you learned British history and if you were Catholic you learned Irish history in school.”

The movie was a rite of passage for him – a growing up.

“I come from a generation in Northern Ireland where we sort of didn’t want to acknowledge the Troubles in our country. I was almost shamed by it when I read the script, and I couldn’t not do the movie.”

And so began what Nesbitt describes as an extraordinary journey, one that became much more than movie making. “It was a personal odyssey,” he says. “I felt I was making a film about my country, a country that I love and was trying to make sense of. It made me see for the first time why all these terrible things have happened.”

He described the shoot as “an emotionally wrenching experience,” but said his respect for British director Paul Greengrass saw him through.

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Nster.com