ACTOR PETER COONAN has spoken of his shock at finding out the details of his character’s rape in Love/Hate.
In the RTÉ series’ season finale on Sunday night, Fran was held down and raped with a pool cue in the showers of Mountjoy Prison.
“After the script was handed out [...] I came into work one day, and people were kinda looking at me,” he told Newstalk Breakfast.
“And then I read it, and I had to kinda sit back for a minute and really think about it.”
After speaking with writer Stuart Carolan, he felt more comfortable with it.
“It made sense in regards to the arc of the character, you know, for this alpha male to be brought down to this level,” Coonan said, “and was it the right choice?”
It was hard to watch as well for me.
Coonan said the “tough” scene itself took as long as eight hours to film.
He added that he often gets Fran’s phrases, such as “coola-boola”, shouted at him in public but that he “hasn’t walked the streets” since Sunday’s episode.
Cooonan also said that he didn’t know of Nidge’s fate, and that after he found out that Siobhán had been killed, he didn’t want to accept it and so asked no more questions until watching the episode “just like everyone else” on Sunday night.
And what about another series?
“We are normally the last people to find out”.
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