Dominic West: 'A lot of people don’t understand country life... I don’t really get that'

So, did the pond have him reaching for the whiskey all over again? West’s extended cackle is as hearty and rich as you might expect. 

“We’ve all been there with Ikea, there was no acting required in that, I can tell you,” he says.

The 56-year-old actor, famed for his roles not just in The Wire but also The Affair, The Crown and more, might seem an unlikely horticulturalist. 

The reason he’s discussing his homemade pond is because he is due to speak about it at the Festival of Gardens and Nature at Stradbally, in Co Laois, this month, an event driven in large part by his wife, the landscape designer, Catherine FitzGerald. 

He says he’s “totally Jimmy” when it comes to the gardening, but Catherine says, “He’s one of those men who loves getting on a mower.”

So the Sheffield-born actor will be among the throng in Stradbally, but when we speak he’s in Catania with his children. “It’s pleasure really,” he says of his stay in Sicily, “but I’m pretending it’s research because I’m playing a Sicilian-American in A View from the Bridge in a play in London in a couple of weeks. I play a Brooklyn docker whose Sicilian cousins come to stay so I am soaking up the Sicilian vibe and entertaining the kids while I’m at it.”

Whether it’s as Jimmy McNulty, with his unorthodox methods for cracking murder cases, or the author Noah Solloway in The Affair — another example of appointment TV which ran from 2014 to 2019 — West has often played characters with a clear lust for life, a sense of recklessness leavened by a boyish charm; even his narration on the animated version of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes has a lupine moreishness to it.

More recently West has portrayed Prince, now King, Charles in the final season of The Crown. It’s interesting how, as he reflects on the sometimes bruising elements of that show, he emphasises the more outré aspects of life as a monarch.

“Wearing those clothes and living in these amazing houses and everyone bows to you,” he says with a sense of wonder.

“The last week we shot The Crown, we were in York Minster with 400 extras bowing to us, me and Olivia Williams [his co-star, as Camilla Parker-Bowles] getting married, with a whole
orchestra and a full choir... it’s quite tricky going home after that and the kids, my wife, refusing to bow, things like that!”

His tongue is clearly in his cheek when he says this, and maybe he needed a sense of humour when dealing with the critical fallout from what was the final series of the Netflix hit. 

A TV juggernaut which started big and then got bigger, by the end it came in for some sharp criticism, with West admitting that some of it got him down, even if he can chuckle at the view expressed in some quarters that he was simply “too sexy” to play the role of Charles.

“Well I’ve had worse reviews, I’ve had a lot worse than that, yeah,” he says with a chuckle. Yet he draws a contrast between some of the shows earlier in his career and The Crown, where he and others “come in on the crest of the wave and there is only one way down from there”.

“I’ve done it in theatre a lot where you come in as a second cast on a hit show. I’ve done it twice, and you are on a hiding to nothing,” he continues, “but sometimes the part’s so good or the show’s so good that you can’t resist it. And in some ways, because Josh O’Connor [who played a younger version of Charles] was so successful in the previous series and the previous series of The Crown was so great, we were slightly up against it, but we knew that.

“I read the reviews and went to bed for a couple of days but I suppose you do get a bit depressed when you work really hard and you’re surrounded by people working really hard and the reviewers are a bit glib or dismissive about it, rather than taking it as seriously as they might.

That is the only thing I get depressed about, that sometimes people sneer without really taking on board that people have put their heart and soul into something.”

He says playing Charles bolstered his view that the current British King is a decent man trying his best.

“I kind-of liked him anyway and the more I researched him and listened to his book, Harmony, which is how I researched the voice, I sort-of got to like him a lot and respect him a lot.

“I think he has used his time pretty well and his position pretty well and he has in some ways carved out a plausible defence of monarchy in the contemporary world,” he says.

“I think he is able to do things that politicians haven’t been able to do. I am pretty sympathetic towards him.”

He admits that the trappings of royalty, or its sheer unreality, would likely wear thin but adds: “It’s nice to dip in though.”

Of course, any review of West’s career must tarry on his work on The Wire, a show that did more than dip into the American war on drugs and much else besides. Its five-season run from 2002 to 2008 is now widely acclaimed as one of the best shows of all time and West’s character, the inspired but erratic McNulty, was one element of a memorable cast. 

Fans of The Wire, such as your humble correspondent, tend to be evangelical about the show, which in the words of co-creator David Simon was less a tale of cops and criminals and more a show about the American city, in its case the often maligned Baltimore, Maryland. 

With yet another pivotal US presidential election looming, West sees The Wire as being as relevant ever.

“It really has aged well,” he says. “I have to say I look back — even on that awful man George W Bush — you look back at him thinking, ‘God, come back, all is forgiven’.

“Whatever was going wrong that David was trying to highlight and write about, it has taken on a whole new dimension since lockdown and Trump, really. I do look back nostalgically on those days in a way, what I thought at the time, how have we managed to get a moron to be the president of the United States, that was before we really got the moron. Actually I mustn’t say things like that...”

Thankfully he does say things like that, and he acutely observes that “everything you can say about America, the opposite is also true”.

He says there is a poignancy, as years slip by, to any rewatching of the series given how cast members such as Michael Kenneth Williams, Lance Reddick and Robert Chew — “so much the soul of the show” — have passed away.

He also admits to being “pretty scared” about the upcoming election, although he’s not clear if the themes in The Wire, ever enduring as they are, offer any comfort. As its tagline indicated, “all the pieces matter”; you just had to switch on to connect them.

The Wire rewarded viewers who pushed past any initial difficulties over dialogue and inter-connected plot lines and West can’t resist when I reveal that one of my friends, a pure TV aficionado, still hasn’t watched it.

“I don’t think you should continue with this friendship,” he laughs. “I’m sorry, but some people you just have to let go.”

It seems he’s having similar problems closer to home.

“My sons, who aren’t total fools, they watch Suits, and I came in and I said ‘what the hell are you watching Suits for? Watch The Wire!’ And they said [adopting classic teenage tone] ‘oh, we tried, it’s boring’, so I sat and said you have to watch four episodes straight through, which is my rule generally — you can’t give up til you’ve done four.

“I do actually think it has held up,” he continues, “but I don’t really like watching myself so my favourite season is season four still, because I’m not in it much, and also because I think it’s an amazing season. So I am trying to hand it on to the next generation and it’s failing at the moment.”

West and Catherine have four children and, like a certain monarch, spend much of the year in an actual castle: Glin Castle in Co Limerick, seat of the Anglo-Norman FitzGerald dynasty.

“My wife, her family has been there 700 years or something,” he says. The property was put up for sale at one point but Catherine has dedicated herself to its continued upkeep. Both she and Dominic see it as a possible venue for the Festival of Gardens and Nature next year — these old properties are very financially onerous to maintain.

“It’s a hell of a burden, yeah, not for me but for my wife,” Dominic says. “You can’t give up that sort of history lightly and every time I have tried to persuade her to, you can’t.

“She has got a responsibility, an enormous amount of Irish history is in that house and in that family and a lot of Irish craftsmen and Irish builders have been involved in it and her thing is the garden, which has been around for a couple of centuries, and she has made it her life’s work.

“And so creating this festival of gardening and nature is, in a way, another way of trying to make the place live and be part of the community and of use to the community.

“She is always trying to come up with ways to make that happen and make these historic places live, because so many have been sold off and have turned into hotels for very rich people and you know, these places should be open to all for everyone to appreciate Irish history.”

Catherine’s father, Desmond, was the 29th and last Knight of Glin — due to the anachronistic lack of a male heir — although the Glin Castle website says his grandson will become the 30th in the line.

It’s certainly tempting to dream up a dramatisation of various eras and characters based on Knights of the past.

“There are a few colourful characters in there,” West says. “There was a hilarious knight called the ‘Crack’d Knight’ who used to ride his horse up the stairs to bed, but generally it was a pretty solid family who ran the farm and were fairly unremarkable but did OK in the times that mattered.

“In the Famine, they did the right thing, so it is a good history and it is one I’ve loved being a part of and seeing my wife try to deal with.

“It’s a great story and the garden tells that story and hopefully lots of people can get to know that story through this festival.”

Dominic’s embrace of Irish country life, forged through his own family, time in TCD and marriage, has also included hosting fox hunting, which has drawn outside criticism.

“I think a lot of people don’t understand country life and a lot of them are very vociferous and I don’t really get that,” he says, bluntly. “I don’t really get the opposition to fox hunting. In the UK, it’s regarded as a sort of upper-class thing but in Ireland ... I don’t know, it’s democratic everywhere but it’s certainly more democratic in Ireland, these are all dairy farmers from north Kerry, these are the north Kerry harriers and they are great men and women and real country people doing something that their families have been doing for generations as well as looking after dairy cows, which is something that is sort of under threat as well.”

Maybe he’s on safer territory advocating for his natural swimming pond, the subject of his talk at Stradbally. 

A fan of wild swimming, he says the pond came mainly out of “necessity” given the state of the river near Glin. Following the example of David Pagan Butler, another speaker at the festival, he got a neighbour to help dig out the ground before literally following the YouTube instructions. 

As he describes it, “it’s cheap as chips and it has no sophisticated filters”. An air pump keeps the water fresh and “crystal clear”.

“And now my kids have had two or three summers, all the kids from the village come and they are swimming in it every day for seven or eight weeks and I’m swimming in it for the rest of the year and I love it, it’s brilliant,” he says.

West still has more things he would like to do. He says he is thrilled with his recent return to the theatre, a reminder of why he wanted to be an actor in the first place.

“I do slightly regret not doing all the big Shakespeares when I could when I was young enough to, but I suppose Ian McKellan just played Hamlet so why not?” he says, when musing on any parts he feels he may have missed out on.

“So there is a bit of that, but no, the play that really got me was The Motive and the Cue [a backstage drama about a Broadway production of Hamlet, starring Burton and John Gielgud in the 60s], in which Johnny Flynn is playing Richard Burton, and I thought, ‘Fuck, if only this play had been written 10 years earlier’, because I played Richard Burton with Helen Bonham Carter in a TV film called  Burton and Taylor. So Johnny is coming to the festival and playing [he is also a musician] and talking about his collaboration with Robert MacFarlane, who is a great nature writer, so he will be playing music and I haven’t told him yet but I think we are going to have a Burton-off, because I would love to have done that play, which he was brilliant in — I wish I had been in it.” 

Well, at least he still has his pond. West even goes so far as to say it’s “the best thing I’ve ever done”. Certain critics and viewers may disagree.

• The Festival of Gardens and Nature runs at Ballintubbert Gardens and House at Stradbally, Co Laois from April 20 - 21