Screen SAVERS

Typically, stars of the little screen (TV) aspire to make their mark on the big screen (movies). Sometimes it works — Eddie Murphy, Michael J. Fox and Bruce Willis, to name a few. Other times it doesn’t — Tom Selleck, David Caruso, Ted Danson — to name a few more.

And sometimes the source of popular success is reversed: Fairly anonymous screen actors make it big on the small screen.

Quite by accident, I recently came upon three good films (of the same genre) from the same country (Ireland) starring three performers who’ve recently had success in popular TV series, probably acquiring more viewer attention than was ever accorded them in the movies. This is not to say their film careers are over, only that their TV roles are very hot now.

Ruth Negga is an Ethiopian/Irish actress who plays Tulip, the fiery two-fisted girlfriend of the title character in AMC’s Preacher series. Her movie career began in 2005 when she appeared in two films, Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto and the lesser-known Isolation, a low-budget but extremely effective science-fiction/horror film which secured a nomination for Best Actress from the Irish Film & Television Awards.

Written and directed by Billy O’Brien, Isolation is reminiscent of early David Cronenberg films in ick factor terms. On a remote farm, a genetic experiment with cows aimed at accelerating pregnancy growth results in disastrous results, producing an almost indescribable kind of mutation as hungry as it is infectious. The small cast of characters are desperate to stay alive and contain the biological catastrophe within the confines of the farm.

Mary (Negga) is a young woman who, with her boyfriend, is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Ripley in the Alien films, it’s finally up to her to save the world from the monstrous mutation. Or not.

Irish actor Liam Cunningham, nearly 20 years older than Ms. Negga, has been appearing for two decades in mostly supporting roles in several TV series and some rather good TV films — like The Guard,Harry Brown and Centurion. But it’s in Game of Thrones that Cunningham has become most visible to American audiences as conflicted Ser Davos Seaworth, former advisor to Stannis Baratheon and now in league with Jon Snow.

In between seasons of the popular HBO series, Cunningham starred in director Brian O’Malley’s Let Us Prey (2014), playing the enigmatic Six, who’s quite literally the Devil Incarnate. Most of the action takes place at night in the police station where recent inmates and their jailors are forced to confront some deadly truths about themselves.

In many ways reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, O’Malley’s film is simultaneously suspenseful, violent and intelligent, with a neat twist on the old saw about selling your soul to the devil.

Though Cunningham gets top billing, the film’s protagonist is young rookie cop Rachel (Pollyanna McIntosh) who is plunged, like Mary in Isolation, into a completely unforeseen hell of a mess. Plucky and gutsy, however, (again like Mary) she proves to be the right girl for the job, impressing even the Devil himself.

Rupert Evans is a British actor in his late 30s whose career up till now has been mostly in British TV with occasional supporting big-screen roles, most notably in Hellboy and Agora. Last year, though, he became a familiar face to American TV viewers as Frank Frink in Amazon’s highly touted series The Man in the High Castle. A year earlier, he won the International Fantasy Film Award as Best Actor in Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal, yet another chilling, psychological horror/thriller from Ireland.

Evans plays happily married young film archivist David, who moves into a new house with his beautiful pregnant wife (Hannah Hoekstra of Hemel), only to have his world fall to pieces five years later. Learning that his wife is having an affair, David discovers from old archival film footage that his house has been the scene of multiple murders and tragedies, dating back decades. Struggling to maintain his sanity and his family, David begins to suspect spectral influences, whose existence he tries to document with the camera.

Experienced filmgoers might suspect where this is going, but the film has plenty of creepy surprises in the wings. While Evans and the entire cast are very good, Calum Heath (four and five years old at the time) is simply astonishing as David’s son.

Rupert Evans will be back as Frank in Season 2 of The Man in the High Castle in December, but we’ll have to wait for summer to welcome Ser Davos (Cunningham) and Tulip (Negga) back in their season openers.