Nick Moran: from Lock Stock to The Kid

Lock Stock star turned director Nick Moran talks to JOE about violence, projectionists and the problems with having an Irish surname.

By Nick Bradshaw

Nick Moran is not a happy man. There’s just been a screening of the actor-turned-director’s new film The Kid, the screen has gone dark, and as the lights go up Nick can be heard screaming at the projectionist.

“No, no, no! Don’t put the lights up! For f*ck’s sake! Didn’t you listen to what I f*cking said earlier?! Put the sound back on...”

It’s not working. With the lights up we get to see a man being interviewed by Fern Britton and Philip Schofield on the set of This Morning. We get to see him, but not hear him. Clearly that’s a big problem.

“Fine, fine,” the star of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels says in a way that makes it clear that things aren’t fine. “Go ahead and f*ck up the ending. Brilliant.”

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Nick’s new film tells the story of Englishman Kevin Lewis played brilliantly by Rupert Friend, a bright, introverted man who spent much of his early life in and out of care in the 70s and 80s, who was battered by his harridan of a mother and who was conned into taking part in bare knuckle fights (under the alias of ‘The Kid’) by shady characters who pretended to befriend him when he was deeply in debt, only to subsequently rip him off.

Not a cheery tale. But, against the odds, Kevin fought back and wrote down in detail about the experiences that he found it hard to talk about. That account became a bestseller entitled The Kid. That bestseller has become a film that, while violent, has a rich texture and plenty of heart.

“It’s so frustrating,” Nick says over a coffee in a Dublin bar, the morning after the screening. He’s calmer now, but only just. “I say to projectionists that they need to leave the film to run after the screen initially goes dark, but do they listen?

Rupert Friend (right) as Kevin in a more tender moments

“At the end of the film the screen goes blank and you then get to see the real Kevin speak during an interview on This Morning. You get to see why Rupert Friend made him sound the way he did in the film.

“Kevin is not your typical fighter. He’s a gentle man who speaks in a really precise way and Rupert worked really hard to get his mannerisms just right. When you see the real Kevin being interviewed you get to see what a brilliant job Rupert did of bringing Kevin to the screen.”

“We had a few problems when the real Kevin first saw the film. He was convinced that he didn’t sound the way we’d made him sound. That’s until he watched the This Morning interview and realised Rupert had captured his voice and mannerisms perfectly.

The real-life Kevin does indeed sound more like David Beckham than a bare-knuckle fighter. A slight, fey man, he’s the most unlikely bare-knuckle boxer ever to be immortalised on film. Watching his upbringing at the hands of his viciously jealous mother, and watched on by an ineffectual drunken father, you quickly understand why violence became the replacement for the full range of emotions that a young lad should be developing.

To prepare the lead actor for the fight scenes, Moran called on former world middleweight champion boxer Steve Collins. The Irishman wasn’t prepared for how slight Friend is. “As Rupert walked up to us, Steve said ‘He’s a right handbag.'

“We needed him to help Rupert come across as a credible fighter. Rupert certainly wasn’t expecting what happened next, which was that Steve called up a trainer in New York, arranged for him to train and got him put on the card for an actual bout four weeks later.”

As he’s been talking, Nick has been joined by Collins (who appears as an Irish bare-knuckle champ in the film) and by Con O’Neill (the star of Nick’s previous film Telstar and the actor who plays Kevin’s father Dennis in The Kid). Collins takes up the story: “I would never have intended for Rupert to actually get in a fight, but I didn’t want him to know that. As far as he was concerned his training would end with a bout. It definitely helped to focus him.”

Collins and his skinny protégé got to spar in one of the film’s three main fight scenes. It looked realistic, and at one point it was.

“I was trying to get in to him as close as possible,” Steve says. “Unfortunately on one take I made contact with his shoulder. I thought I’d caught him on the chin at first, at which point I was seriously impressed that he’d not been knocked out."

“Rupert didn’t say anything at first, but he couldn’t move his arm for a while after.”

At times The Kid is an uncomfortably violent film – there’s no Hollywood gloss, there’s just the shocking realism of it all. “Men who’ve seen it see the violence,” says Nick, “but, interestingly, a lot of women who’ve seen it seem to see past that. They see the heart of the film.”

“We never actually show the beatings that Kevin gets. It’s clear that he’s getting them, but we cut away or just show the aftermath. I don’t think we’re glorifying violence at all in this film. Violence has been a part of Kevin’s life, but it’s something he mentally and physically fought to be free of.”

Rupert’s mother is played by Natasha McElhone (Solaris, Californication). A beautiful actress, but you wouldn’t know it from the film. “Natasha was perfect for the role. The way she transformed herself was incredible. I’d had a number of high-profile actresses approach me, Oscar-winning actresses in some cases, but when they saw how ugly they’d need to be, they all backed away. Natasha threw herself into the role and you can tell.”

Nick (centre) back in the Lock Stockdays

“The transformation was amazing,” agrees Con O’Neill, the Olivier Award-winning actor who plays Kevin’s alcoholic father in the film. “In my case there wasn’t so much of a transformation, I just had to avoid shaving for a couple of days to look a bit rougher than I normally do.”

Unlike Friend, who could meet with and analyse the real-life Kevin, Con couldn’t do the same with Kevin’s real-life father. “Dennis died a while back,” Con explains. “It wasn’t an issue, though. The film is seen through Kevin’s eyes, so Kevin’s character needs to be true to that, but in my case I just had to make sure that my portrayal was true to what Nick wanted from me. I wasn’t trying to be the real Dennis, I was trying to be the Dennis that Nick needed to help move Kevin’s story along.”

The camaraderie between Nick, Con and Steve is apparent as they sit together in Dublin. Steve is bona fide Irish, and clearly with surnames like Moran and O’Neill there’s a touch of Emerald about the other two.

“There were a good few of us with Irish roots involved in the film,” Nick confirms, “which probably did its bit to enhance the atmosphere on the set.”

“It’s good being in Ireland now because it’s the one place where my surname is pronounced as it should be,” Nick says. “My father changed it from ‘MORan’ to ‘MoRAN’ because English people kept pronouncing it ‘Moron’.”

The Kid is currently on general release across Ireland.