As men of a similar age, Éanna Hardwicke and I suffer from the same minor affliction: our social media feeds are constantly clogged with clips of Roy Keane on The Overlap podcast. The former Manchester United enforcer is an inescapable pundit these days. His trademark brand of withering takedowns – all in that distinctive Cork accent – is almost tailor-made for social media impressions. Lines like, “I might smash into somebody, just to make me feel better,” delivered after a particularly poor United performance, for instance.
For Hardwicke, this presented a problem. The 29-year-old actor, who hails from the same neck of the woods as Keane, was preparing to play the footballer in a new film about the infamous Saipan incident that erupted ahead of the 2002 World Cup. “I kind of had to wean myself off it,” he says of the podcast, “because it’s really only so helpful listening to things from 2025.”
