Martin McDonagh, a reluctant playwright turned movie director

Martin McDonagh recently discussed The Banshees of Inisherin with Taylor Swift. The singer told the writer-director she was a fan of his film, a black comedy of two warring friends on a small Irish island in 1923. The movie features the self-inflicted severing of a man’s fingers. Swift said that she had talked about this with a therapist friend, who analysed the symbolism. McDonagh smiled. “I just thought it was funny,” he said.

This week, The Banshees of Inisherin received nine Oscar nominations. McDonagh was shortlisted both as writer and director. His conversation with Swift had been staged by industry trade paper Variety as part of awards season in Hollywood. The attendant glitz can feel an odd fit for the movie, which is expertly grim and not wholly kidding.

Indeed, McDonagh’s idea of funny has always been macabre, and his work filled with petty grievances, absurdist murders and dead cats. But publicly unpicking deeper meanings has never enthused a man who began his career as a playwright.

Matthew Dunster has worked with McDonagh for several years, directing his plays Hangmen and A Very, Very, Very Dark Matter. “It’s strange,” he says. “Martin’s communiques are loud and clear. People can be brutal to each other. And he is a punk rocker. But the actual Martin is a long way from that side of the writing.”

McDonagh describes the film that may now sweep the Oscars as a “break-up story” — a melancholy bookend to his first feature-length film, 2008’s In Bruges. There, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson played gangsters forging an unlikely bond. Now, their new characters’ friendship crumples amid what the director calls “male ego and male despair”. When I talked to McDonagh recently, we discussed research suggesting older men often withdraw from friendship altogether. McDonagh is 52. I asked when he last made a male friend. He paused. “Do friends of your partner count?” he asked eventually. “I’m counting that.”

McDonagh’s partner is writer and actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The couple live in east London, though McDonagh grew up south of the Thames, in Camberwell. In the 1980s, the area was still home to a large Irish community, McDonagh’s parents among them. While he speaks with a London accent, McDonagh said recently he didn’t have a British passport. He described himself as “London Irish.” Later, his parents moved back to Galway, on the Irish west coast. Inishmore, where The Banshees of Inisherin was filmed, is just out to sea in Galway Bay.

The Oscar nominations are landmarks in a double evolution: from theatre to film and from writer to director. McDonagh was 25 when his first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was staged. Like the quick-fire productions that followed, it was set in a pinched rural Ireland. It was also the first of six hit plays in seven years, leading to his work smoothly transferring from London’s Royal Court or National Theatre to Broadway. Avid press attention in Britain and the US fell on an uncommonly frank young gun, who spoke openly of wanting a future in movies and felt limited affection for the stage.

“I would be unhappy if I wrote 90 good plays and didn’t make a good film,” he told journalist Fintan O’Toole. After In Bruges, McDonagh would continue to write hugely successful plays, while speaking of theatre in the tone of someone mentioning a first marriage.

Among the Oscar nods, his nomination as best director will probably mean most to him. If triumphs as a playwright fast-tracked him into directing films, McDonagh has sometimes seemed uncertain in his own abilities. In Bruges won a cult fan base, but he credits Gleeson and Farrell for having helped guide him through filming. And meteoric rises can still stall. His next movie, comic crime thriller Seven Psychopaths, failed. A sudden question mark was placed over his brilliant new career. Critical drubbings were hard, too, for someone who admits to reading his reviews.

Some in the industry report a sharp edge to their dealings with McDonagh. There is also unprompted affection. And while men have dominated his writing, colleagues note he has found crucial roles for women. Among the cast of his latest film is Irish actress Kerry Condon, who worked with McDonagh on his 2001 play The Lieutenant of Inishmore. Condon went on to a solid career, but not, perhaps, of the scale her talent deserved. McDonagh then cast her in his well-received third feature-length film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. And a starring role in Banshees was written expressly for her. “It’s funny when you’re friends with someone who can also employ you,” she told me recently. “They are two different things. But he is a good friend.” Condon was also nominated for an Oscar this week.

Dunster too speaks warmly of a figure who is, he says, comradely even when the most powerful person in the room. But he wonders whether multiple Oscars may seal a permanent change. In 2020, with Britain emerging from a Covid lockdown, he and McDonagh had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in King’s Cross. “And Martin said, ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ll write another play.’ He said he was concerned about how much time he had left. He wanted to leave these indelible marks behind. Which films are, and plays can’t be.”

On seeing The Banshees of Inisherin, Dunster smiled. “Because then he goes and makes a film about a man cutting off his fingers. Like a bit of his life he didn’t want anymore.”

danny.leigh@ft.com