The opening episodes of House of Guinness are clear on what an unlikely pairing the brothers are. Anthony Boyle’s Arthur is charming and stylish, but has secrets—one scene being filmed at the brewery is his rendezvous with a gay lover—and a volcanic temper. We get a bit of Oscar Wilde in his fur-lined coat and dandyish curled mustache, and “a bit of Hitler and a bit of Donald Trump” in his thundering political oratory, says Boyle. Louis Partridge’s Edward is a dour workhouse with lots of business plans but no friends. Partridge says he “had a lot of fun arguing with Anthony” in the long, dialogue-filled scenes Knight wrote.
The two actors themselves disagree, gently, on their characters’ Succession parallels. Boyle says Arthur is “a mixture between Kendall and Logan” Roy – a man with a daddy complex who’s also “a tyrant in his own right”. Partridge thinks Arthur is more like the feckless Roman Roy. “My character would be Kendall or Logan; maybe more Kendall, who takes it all really seriously. I’m going to veto [Boyle’s] answer.”
Sean Rafferty, played by James Norton, is a fictional brewery foreman and the brothers’ fixer-slash-enforcer: swaggering and menacing, and not averse to some light torture to get his way. The smoky, fiery brewery set seems built for him more than for his upper-class bosses. Norton says he was one of the “token Englishmen” on set: the rest of the cast is heavy on Irish actors, including Jack Gleeson—Game of Thrones’ Joffrey Baratheon—in one of his first roles since returning to acting after a multi-year hiatus. Working with him was “such a fucking joy,” says Boyle. “We’re so thankful that he’s back.”
And when you pull a bunch of Irish and British actors together for a TV series about Guinness, you’d expect them to drink a bit of it too. On camera, it was non-alcoholic, off-the-shelf Guinness 0.0, though Partridge was convinced “that if you drink enough of it within a scene, you can start to feel pretty woozy”. In the evenings, they got stuck into the regular stuff. “My record’s been about five [pints a session] on this job,” says Partridge; Norton says the cast spent plenty of time in Liverpool’s Irish bars, including the well-known Shenanigan’s.
Knight had no idea that Guinness would be the beer of the moment by the time his series came out, though he’s obviously pleased with the coincidence—in a world of splitting-the-G and pelican-branded merch, House of Guinness can practically market itself. And with Fontaines D.C. and Kneecap needle drops in the first episode, the show has deftly hitched itself to the ascendency of Irish culture going on right now.
Much of its drama takes place away from the brewery. Partly, it’s in the world of politics: Arthur Guinness was elected a Conservative MP for Dublin, and House of Guinness includes several “Fenians” agitating for Ireland’s independence at a time when the country was firmly part of Britain. But mostly, it’s in the world of castles, and their ballrooms. We never forget the Guinnesses are really, really rich. Stately homes across the UK were used as stand-ins for family properties. Bullock’s production team nosed around Iveagh House, the Guinnesses’ Dublin residence at the time, but couldn’t film there—because it’s now the Irish government’s foreign ministry.
