Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe have reflected on their time revisiting The Troubles for new movie 'Belfast'.
The actors, from Holywood and Dublin, chatted to Vogue about Kenneth Branagh's new semi-autobiographical film and their own experiences of childhood.
'Belfast' centres around nine-year-old Buddy as he navigates life in the city at the beginning of The Troubles in 1969, with Catriona and Jamie playing his parents, Ma and Pa.
In the interview, Dornan said religion “is just not for” him.
“Whatever you feel you need, whatever helps you.
“I just never felt like I needed religion to tell me to treat people well.”
Catriona, 42, the daughter of a Catholic marriage counsellor mum added: “I see the value in terms of, like, community.
“But it’s the organised sort of hypocrisy of it all that kind of gets me…”
Jamie, 39, added: "If you’re born there, and you’re raised there, you’re very cognisant of the fact that you are from a very complicated place."
The Holywood man, who was raised in a Protestant upper-middle-class family, pointed out to Vogue how he had a privileged existence, but added: “From the day I was born, until the day I left, people pretty much were fighting a civil war.”
Catriona lived on the border in Monaghan and added: "A very IRA-leaning area. But my dad was a police sergeant – that’s why we were there – so we were brought up very apolitical.”
Dornan added: “I always think back to stuff that became normal, that was not normal... like trying to meet your mates on Saturday afternoons in town and there’d been a bomb scare.”
Catriona continued: “I remember we used to go weekly shopping in the north... and you would go through checkpoints at least once a week. We didn’t even really think about it until our cousins came up from the south and they would be terrified going through, because you’d have British soldiers with machine guns pointed at the car asking for your papers.”
“Now, I have kids,” Dornan added.
“F**k me.... The idea of them checking under their cars for bombs in their driveways… That was normal. You can’t even fathom it now.”
Although based on the Troubles, 'Belfast' also shows, street parties, singing, love stories and more.
“At the very beginning of the conflict, I almost wouldn’t have known that it was like that, that actually, despite the barricades, there was dancing in the street.
“It wasn’t pure terror from the off. There was still hope. I think it’s really important to see that," Jamie said.
Asked by Vogue how he feels about the movie coming out in Belfast, the Holywood actor thinks it's going to be "brutal".
Catriona added: "There’s a young generation who are coming up, who didn’t live through the Troubles, and there is again that kind of romanticism to having a cause and fighting for a cause...
“Maybe it’s too much to ask for a film to change people’s minds, but I think it’s important that people see it.”
Jamie agreed: “Anything that can prove that there are no winners at the end of all that is good for the next generation to see.”
The February issue of British Vogue is on sale now.
