Kin is one of AMC+'s biggest original series' launches of the year. The Irish crime drama follows the Kinsella family as they are rocked by an unspeakable tragedy, drawing them deeper into Dublin's criminal underworld. After losing one of their own, the Kinsellas take on a larger crime syndicate while long-buried family secrets come to the forefront. The family conflict intensifies across Kin's eight-episode first season. The series is co-created by Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly and is now available to stream in its entirety on AMC+.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, McKenna shared the inspirations behind Kin. McKenna also praised the all-star cast, led by fan-favorite star Charlie Cox, and expressed his hopes for additional seasons to expand upon the Kinsella's crime odyssey and family drama.
How did the idea for Kin and the Kinsella family facing this tragedy amidst a crime story come about?
Peter McKenna: It came about from BRON Studios giving me an almost blank check, with an executive that I was dealing with called David Davoli, who is their President of TV. He said to me, "Go write the show you want to write." As a writer of 25 years, I don't comprehend. I went, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Go write a show, and let's see what we can do with it!" I like family dramas, so many of my favorite movies and TV shows are about dynamics within the family. I'd love to write a family drama and I was also interested in gangland crime.
We, in Ireland, almost treat our criminals like reality stars. They're in the papers with nicknames so they can't be named but we all know who they're talking about. Their Instagram posts are put up in newspapers, like their cars or what they're wearing -- they're treated almost like minor reality stars. When I began to look into it, what really struck me was just behind the glamorous exterior of big cars and the flash is incredible amounts of trauma. You'd read about a criminal or gangster and their brother would be killed. Their father overdosed or another brother is in jail -- It's just one trauma after another. The combination of family dynamics, as a storyteller, and the potential of all that trauma and pressure felt really kind of rich with potential and that was my starting point.
Frank is discovering the family's history of violence goes back farther than he thought while Michael is barely hanging on, the paradigm of the fury of a quiet man personified. How is it playing with those visceral themes and seeing the cast play off each other?
Michael is a really interesting character for me. In a way, Amanda kind of drives the show with what causes things to happen. Michael is a much more internal, interior character. That's a really hard job for an actor, you're putting him in scenes but you're not giving him a lot to work with on the surface.
I remember sitting down with Charlie [Cox] going over [Michael's] life -- his mother left, he's brought up by an abusive father, and all the trauma that's happened through his life. He had gone to jail for eight years and spent those eight years thinking he was going to see his daughter, that was the thing that keeps him going. Underneath it all is a man who has just lived through trauma all through his childhood. No matter what his intentions are and how much he tries to be good, he's known nothing else but this world. He didn't finish school and have all these qualifications.
On the one hand, you have all the glamor and risk and being part of a family; but on the other hand, you have few options so it almost feels like inevitable that he is going to come back. There's nothing left for him. I really liked that about this character, who wants to be good. Without giving too much away... We always felt like Amanda and Michael are the two main characters for the show and her journey -- however long this show goes on -- and it was planned to be a journey from light to darkness. She starts out as a mother and then she gets more involved [in crime and violence] and his journey is the opposite. He is a man with a dark past who will gradually get more towards the light. We wanted to set them on almost opposite trajectories.
It's wild to me that this is Clare Dunne's first major television gig, she's so good. What made her the one to bring Amanda to life?
Not just major, her first TV gig!
She had never been on TV before as a walk-on or guest. She had done lots of theater and some shorts. We looked at different people and I didn't know Clare's work very well when I started this process. I didn't even consider her and had seen her once in a play a long time ago and hadn't seen her in any screenwork. Various things happened and her agent sent us her film Herself, which is just coming out, and we watched it over a weekend. I had been going through this process with my wife and myself and my wife sat down during lockdown and watched it and my wife looks at me and goes, "You've found her!"
We knew immediately -- even though Herself is a completely different kind of role -- she's a character who's a victim of domestic abuse but is maybe a bit more optimistic. I knew almost immediately that we found her. In most of my favorite shows, I really didn't know the actors that well. I didn't know James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm -- I knew Bryan Cranston from Malcolm in the Middle -- but discovered them in the character and you don't have all this baggage with it. I think we've done that with Clare. Most people will come to this not having seen her before and she'll just be Amanda and there's something brilliant about that and she's amazing. She's incredibly smart and a hard-working actor and it really was a joy to work with her.
I was speaking with Maria Doyle Kennedy and she said she was able to work with you directly to help develop her character and her unspoken rivalry with Frank over who's running the family. How was it working with her on that?
That happened more with Maria than anybody else and that was because of the progression and genesis of the character. That character was originally Frank's mother -- a grandmother of the family and in her mid-70s and slightly inspired by the mother in the movie Animal Kingdom that Jackie Weaver plays -- that was the starting point. But then we were shooting in the pandemic and it was very hard to cast actors over seventy and we began to look at different actors and we looked at Maria. Maria wasn't available when we started looking because she was committed to Outlander and, when we got to Maria, the character had bounced around a bit and she was one of the characters that weren't really super-clear.
What Maria did is she just took hold of it and made it her own. She'd go out and walk around the areas where these people lived and she came back with really clear ideas of what she wanted her character to be and how she looked, with all that clothes, and really built it up. That was a consequence of the journey that character went on, more than the others. Some of the others didn't change that much and Maria's definitely did. She really made it her own.
As we get to the end of Season 1, what are you proud of and excited by from it and what are your hopes for the future of Kin?
My hope is that there will be more Kin, that's my big hope, and that I'll get a chance to do it again and learn from my experiences with the first [season].
The thing that I'm the most proud of is the performances. I know it's hard for me to be proud of that because I'm not an actor but it's the thing that I marvel the most at, the cast. When I watch the show, I've seen it so many times in editing and post-production and you can get weary but the one thing I never get tired of is watching this cast take my writing and make it much, much better and bring to life... I think they're amazing and I'm so lucky to have them.
Created by Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly, Kin is streaming now on AMC+.
0 Comments