Anthony Boyle will never, ever get sick of Guinness

When did you find yourself locked into House of Guinness? Was it the Fontaines D.C. needle drop kicking off the chaos in the show’s opening funeral? Or the sight of the world’s most famous brewery going up in roaring flames? Nothing hits like a good pint of Guinness. Evidently, the story behind the drink goes down just as smooth: the Netflix series detailing a fictional history of the brand’s family dynasty shot straight to the top of the streamer’s chart when it debuted last week.

At its centre is Irish actor Anthony Boyle as head of the family, Arthur. When the patriarch dies, Arthur and his brother Edward (Louis Partridge) are left in charge of the Guinness empire in an uneasy partnership. Arthur would rather go out on the town than stay at home to run the family business, but his father’s will stipulates that if he abandons brewing, he’ll lose everything. Created by Steven Knight, the show aptly feels like the heir apparent to his previous hit, Peaky Blinders: cool slow-motion walks set to deliciously anachronistic rock music against a backdrop of politics and unscrupulous dealings. Naturally, it makes for addictive TV.

Arthur doesn’t take too well to his gilded cage – he practically rattles the bars of his enclosure. It’s a role that Boyle plays with delightful unpredictability and ferocity, at once revelling in the debaucherous life his extraordinary wealth affords him yet yearning for something truer to himself. House of Guinness also marks the Olivier Award-winning actor’s first time at the top of the call sheet. On screen, he’s had roles in Tolkien, Masters of the Air and Say Nothing – plus an unforgettable part as Erin’s crush in Derry Girls. ​“For years, people would just call me David Donnelly on the streets,” he says proudly. Now, maybe they’ll call him Arthur Guinness.

When you turn something you love into work, it can sometimes ruin your love for that thing. Has that been the case for Guinness?

I will never tire of Guinness or performing this role in [House of] Guinness. I love both so much. It’s interesting you said that [about] turning something you love into something that exhausts you. It does feel like that sometimes and I’m sort of going through it right now. I’m working on something, and then coming over here and promoting something else – you feel exhausted, and it is good to just take stock and have a moment to go, oh no, this is actually what I dreamed of doing. I feel really grateful.

Back in the first episode, Arthur’s sister Anne tells the siblings that ​“love is our hope”. I think that sentiment carries throughout the show. It can be dark and violent, but underneath all of that, it’s actually quite hopeful and romantic in many ways. I was wondering if that informed your character.

I think that ​“love is our hope” is a pretty prevalent theme throughout the whole show, and it’s something that all the characters keep coming back to. Love is their only hope. They get bogged down by so many different things, and if they could just find love, that would conquer it all.

That’s so present in Arthur especially. He has this front of authority, but really, he’s repressed and scared. Did you find yourself having to channel that into his physicality?

Yes, the physicality was interesting. I looked at this photograph of him, he looks very stern and has this thousand yard stare. But then he also has this little jaunty straw hat cocked to the side. And I thought, wow, who does that? Imagine him just seconds before the photo, looking in a mirror, making sure that had been cocked just right. There’s a great statue of him in Stephen’s Green in Dublin. All the other statues of people in the city are very stoic and their chests [are] puffed out. They’re looking off into the distance. He’s lounging on a chaise longue and has a cloak draped around him. I imagined him getting up and walking around the park. That was the kind of physicality stuff that I worked with.

I know this is a fictional take on the Guinness family, but how deep did you go into research?

Not too much. When I spoke to Steven about it, he [said he] used the story as a launch pad. It’s based on true events, but not every single little thing happened. We’re using a real guy, but he’s a fictitious character. I’ve done a lot of period pieces before, and I’ve played a lot of real people. Sometimes you’re doing it and you want to get it so right, so on the nose. How did he sound? How did he move? You really care about that. But with this, there’s so much artistic licence that we weren’t beholden to any sort of reality.

The show feels a little Succession, a little Peaky Blinders, but also very much its own thing. Did you have any touchstones for accessing the character beyond what was on the page?

Yeah, I looked a lot at Oscar Wilde, read some of his plays and short stories and watched a couple of documentaries on him. I feel like Oscar Wilde and Arthur would have been mates. They would’ve been cutting about together. I think some of Arthur’s acerbic wit feels like it’s coming out of an Oscar Wilde play. There’s a quote from one of his short stories: ​“The whole world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.” And I felt that about Arthur – he was badly cast to run the brewery. He wants to go off and have a craic, but unfortunately, he has to be a big tycoon and CEO.

You bought a Guinness truck on the last day of filming, right?

It came like four hours early! It was meant to come at six, and it came at lunch. So everyone got very excited, and it was the last day and we all got hammered. There’s one scene in the show, and it’s funny because everyone was drunk, even the camera man. There’s dodgy camera angles in this one shot – so many journalists brought it up today as one of their favourite scenes, and it’s so funny because everyone was hammered.

But it’s true that the circumstances of how a scene is created can also heighten the feeling of it. How old were you when you had your first pint?

For legal reasons, I’ll say 18.

I remember being five years old and my dad would let me taste the foam.

I’ve also done a little bit of foam tasting. There’s a great video online, it’s called ​“Pint Baby”, and it’s someone in a documentary in the early ​’90s in Ireland. They’re feeding this four-month-old a pint of Guinness. It’s great.