Anthony Boyle was unlucky. He was expelled from his Catholic boys’ school on account of “behavior problems”. He was also fired from his job at a nightclub after he was caught drinking on the job.
And so Boyle, then 16, got here to the conclusion that it was a very good time to satisfy the dream that was starting to take shape in his head. He typed a string of words into Google: “Belfast acting auditions.”
He eventually landed several unconventional roles, including a job in a performance of “Romeo and Juliet” performed on an enormous chessboard and a component in a ghost tour in which he wore a black bag over his head and scared people by pretending to be the offended ghost of an 18th century Irish revolutionary .
Although Boyle later returned to highschool, he didn’t stop playing.
“I never thought there was another option,” he said in a recent video interview. “I never felt like there was a backup plan where I could study medicine or do something else. It was always just acting.”
More than a decade later, Boyle reached one other turning point in his performing profession. Although he was successful on stages in London and New York, a yr ago he only got small roles on screen.
Now the person who hated school suddenly appears to be everyone’s favorite historical drama actor. Boyle plays Major Harry Crosby, an airborne navigator scuffling with airsickness and self-doubt in the Apple TV+ series “Masters of the Air,” a story in regards to the hardships faced by the U.S. a centesimal Bomb Group during World War II, and executive producers are Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman.
He may also star in the film “Manhunt,” which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, playing actor John Wilkes Booth, who kills Abraham Lincoln and tries to avoid capture.
For 29-year-old Boyle, that push didn’t come a moment too soon. He still looks young, with a mischievous smile, thick brown hair and a boyish face, but he has also turn out to be more aware of the passage of time. In a recent interview, someone asked him how he felt about turning 30 in June.
“I had a bit of an existential crisis halfway through the interview,” he said with fun.
Boyle comes from a working-class family in the Catholic west of Belfast. His mother was a receptionist and his father worked in security. None of his relatives or anyone else he knew ever took up acting. Boyle grew up watching movies like Quadrophenia and This Is England and imagining himself on screen.
Traditional learning never suited him and he received numerous suspensions for impersonating his teachers. After being expelled on the age of 16, he was transferred with a bunch of other unruly boys to a big Catholic girls’ school that had just decided to confess boys.
During this time, he performed in small local theaters, including Simon Stephens’ play “Herons.” A teacher on the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama saw him in this performance and convinced him to enroll as a student.
Boyle said leaving Belfast and attending a complicated college in Wales – a college where people ate foods he had never tried and starred in Shakespearean plays – was like entering a brand new culture.
“I remember calling my family and saying, ‘They’re offering me hummus,’ and my family shouted down the phone, ‘Don’t eat that! Do not eat this!” – he said.
Attending school allowed him to reach new heights in acting. After two years, he left to take on the role of Scorpius Malfoy in the West End and Broadway productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” – for which he received an Olivier Award and a Tony nomination.
“My longest adventure was five days in a community center in East Belfast and then in the West End, so that was a real change,” he said. “It was a baptism by fire.”
He later played minor roles in “Tolkien,” a 2019 film about the early life of author JRR Tolkien, and “Tetris,” a 2023 thriller on Apple TV+, before being cast in “The Airbenders.”
Boyle was attracted to Crosby because of the aviator’s shyness and humanity. He was a conflicted character who vomited on other crew members and accidentally led his plane astray into enemy-occupied France.
In 2021, to prepare for the role, Boyle and the rest of the cast, including Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan and Callum Turner, went to a boot camp.
“In most rehearsals, you sit with the director and the cast, go through the script, drink lattes and talk about childhood trauma,” he said. “It was such as you got there and there was a man screaming at you, calling you by your character’s name and saying, ‘Drop it and give me 20, you worm.'”
For three weeks, Boyle performed push-ups and other fitness exercises and learned how to study maps for navigation purposes. Filming took place in B-17 replicas suspended 50 feet above the ground and surrounded by 360-degree screens.
After filming on “Masters of the Air” wrapped, Boyle had about three months to grow a bushy mustache for his next role as a historical figure, the infamous John Wilkes Booth. Monica Beletsky, one of the producers of “Manhunt”, stated that Boyle was the right choice for the role of Booth due to his charisma and sass, as well as his background.
“He is classically trained,” she said. “And I think that lends itself to being persuasive in other periods.”
To prepare for the role, Boyle spends weeks with a group of cowboys, drinking whiskey, chewing tobacco and learning to ride horses. In “Manhunt”, he replaces his Irish accent with an American one and presents Booth as a charismatic, narcissistic figure, steeped in rage and racism.
His historical drama series will continue with Say Nothing, an FX show about the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles; Boyle was cast as an officer in the Irish Republican Army. He also plays an investigator in the Disney+ series “Shardlake,” a crime drama about a murder in 16th-century England, premiering later this year.
Boyle still doesn’t seem to know exactly why he keeps getting cast in historical roles. But he has a theory.
“I have a face that looks like it can’t understand the Internet,” he said.
