Underline | ‘Bryan Cranston: A Life in Parts’

Posted in Books by Fergus Writes Things

Bryan Cranston: A Life in Parts

I’m a man on a mission these days, a mission to underline all of my favourite quotes from the books I read. This is my ‘Underline’ series where I share those quotes with y’all.

PS: I underline in pencil of course, I’m not a monster.

This post is all about my favourite quotes from Bryan Cranston’s book, ‘A Life in Parts’.

Enjoy! 🙂

“Actors are storytellers and storytelling is the essential human art. It’s how we understand who we are.”
“That captured my imagination: swinging for the impossible, shooting the moon.”
“Don’t you want to know her first? Sure, but the weather is warm, there’s an ocean breeze and she’s wearing a bikini. What else do I need to know? I fell in and out of love several times over the course of a summer.”
“I occasionally wonder if some of the couples I married are still together and it
suddenly dawns on them: ‘Holy shit! Honey, I think Walter White married us!
“Was I really supposed to kiss her? Really? I went to the teacher and whispered ‘it says the couple is making out…should we really, uh, make out, or just pretend to do it?’
A valid question, I thought.
The teacher didn’t think so and dismissed me: ‘You’re not in high school anymore.’

Message received. I had to go for it.”
“Indifference was my go-to whenever I felt vulnerable. I was not mature enough to be honest and show surprise, even though that was my feeling.”
“A month later I wouldn’t remember her name. But she left me with something I’d never forget: I learned you could so fully inhabit a character that you could fool others, move others.
With talent and commitment, you could seduce or terrify. You could make someone feel utter hate or desolation or compassion or even love.”
“Being on the road simplified things in some ways, but complicated them in others. There’s no complacency on the road. We always had to be aware, we became experts at recognizing potentially dangerous situations.
Still, for every danger, there was a delight. Every face you see is a new one. Adventure and surprise are right around the next corner.”
“The greatest thing about youth is that you’re not yet battle-weary, so you’ll try anything.”
“I knew at that moment, lying inside a sleeping bag in a pup tent under a shelter on the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia: I was going to be an actor.”
“At that precise moment, I conjured up a credo that would guide me for the rest of my life: ‘I will pursue something that I love – and hopefully become good at it, instead of pursuing something that I’m good at – but didn’t love'”
“It was all I had in my hip pocket, so I gave it a shot.”
“I guarded against becoming a great classroom actor. Whenever I felt I was one of the best actors in a class, I left to find another one where I wasn’t.”
“The best teacher is experience. Find the educational in every situation.”
“Most of those guys hated their jobs, and probably hated their lives. It would be so easy to be sucked into that despair. But I didn’t allow that to come inside. It wasn’t welcome.
I wasn’t going to let them clutter my brain. I had something real to hold on to.”
“I looked at the blood. I felt how tenuous the boundary is between life and its opposite. I felt how limited our span is, and hoe easily squandered. I felt the need to embrace life. Put my arms around it.”
“Some actors complained about mild inconveniences like early start times, and I remember Lloyd Bridges said ‘Better than digging a ditch’.
That left an impression on me. He was the star, and he was appreciative. I remember thinking: ‘That’s how I want to be.’, and indeed I was grateful to be there, and it wasn’t digging ditch.”
“The only way to get lucky is to be prepared for luck to find you.”
“He fired me and I actually THANKED him. Damn, I wish I hadn’t done that.”
“Everyone needs a champion, and Linwood Boomer was mine.”
“When we finished that last take [on Malcolm in the Middle], not one member of the cast or crew had a dry eye. Seven years. We had become a family and we didn’t want to let it go.”
Aaron Paul was a shiny-eyed kid in his mid-twenties when I first met him. He was a puppy. He was attentive and playful and honest and present and vulnerable and richly talented.
As our dynamic within the story line varied and evolved, we became even tighter outside of work. That ‘Breaking Bad’ ride bonded us deeply. He’s a friend for life.”
“I want to know that I took full advantage of my good fortune. Even if I make mistakes along the way. I’d rather fail than regret.”
“On a break, I asked the same question that everyone asks Warren Buffet: ‘What’s our secret?’
‘Oh, it’s no secret,’ he said in his affable homespun way, ‘just make more right decisions than wrong ones and you’ll be fine.'”
“You’ve got to fail, or risk failure, to learn, to succeed. You’ve got to be hungry.”
“I always encouraged Taylor to wander, to feel it’s okay not to know exactly where you are. Figuring it out builds confidence.”
“Go ahead, get lost, It’s okay to be afraid. Being afraid can actually be a sign you’re doing something worthwhile.”
“I took three deep breaths. I shook those breaths into my body. And then I relaxed, I let it go. I went to take my place.

Underline | ‘Five People You Meet In Heaven’

Posted in Books by Fergus Writes Things

I’m a man on a mission these days, a mission to underline all of my favourite quotes from the books I read. This is my ‘Underline’ series where I share those quotes with y’all.

PS: I underline in pencil of course, I’m not a monster.

This post is all about my favourite quotes from Mitch Albom’s book, ‘The Five People You Meet in Heaven’.

Enjoy! 🙂

“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
“Every life has one true-love snapshot.”
“But as she walked away, she turned and waved. That was the snapshot. For the rest of his life, whenever he thought of Marguerite, Eddie would see that moment, her waving over her shoulder, her dark hair falling over one eye, and he would feel the same arterial burst of love.
“No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.”
“The running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.”
“People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners.”
“Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen.”
“There are norandom acts. We are all connected. You can no more seperateone life from another than you can seperate a breeze from the wind.”
“Strangers,” the Blue Man said, “are just family you have yet to come to know.”
No life is a waste,” the Blue Man. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking that we are alone.”
“As always with Marguerite, Eddie mostly wants to freeze time.”
“War had crawled inside of Eddie, in his leg and his soul. He learned many things as a soldier. He came home a different man.”
“In the middle of a big war, you go looking for a small idea to believe in. When you find one, you hold it the way a soldier holds his crucifix when he’s praying in a foxhole.”
“Dying? Not the end of everything. We think it is. But what happens on earth is only the beginning.”
“The Capt grinned. ‘The way I see it, that’s what we’re getting here soldier. That’s what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays.'”
“You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big Sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father.”
“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
“You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.”
“He sat down in his life. And there he remained.”
“Religion? Government? Are we not loyal to such things, sometimes to the death? Eddie shrugged. “Better,” she said, “to be loyal to one another.”
“Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade and the harm we do, we do to ourselves.”
“You made me love you. I didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it. You made me love you and all the time you knew it, and all the time you knew it.”
“The secret of heaven: That each affects the other and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.”

24Dec2017

Perfection | Flash Fiction #3

Posted in Flash Fiction by Fergus Writes Things

“The sun was just beginning its mandatory descent, but remained at the perfect height for now, as it stretched its long illuminating arms far across his world, its warm and light touch catching on his week-old stubble.”

For Finn Alexander, this was it.

His arm lay heavy upon his forehead and blocked his eyes from the slowly descending warm glow of the Arizona light.

The gentle balmy breeze weaved and darted its way through the jungle of his hair occasionally brushing stray locks upon his dusty forehead, momentarily blocking his view.

He didn’t mind though.

His back lay still and full against the warm, welcoming crimson sand, his left knee was raised to the perfect level of comfort, while his toes, freed from the constraints of travel worn boots, curled themselves gratefully in and out of the soft earth.

The sun was just beginning its mandatory descent, but remained at the perfect height for now, stretching its long illuminating arms far across the world, its warm and light touch catching on his week-old stubble.

His neck had wriggled its way into the perfect position upon his backpackas his ears soaked up the sound of almost perfect silence around him.

The occasional scuffle of the local insects and the crackling sound of the dried wood upon his campfire were the only sounds that punctuated the perfection.

He didn’t mind though.

His weather-beaten car lay gratefully sleeping in the shade of the huge sycamore tree that had against all odds managed to thrive out here; his tents open door policy gladly welcomed in the blessed cool air.

The dirt track that he had taken was just away to his left, stretching for miles back into the desert, accompanied by the barely audible whisper of the ‘hoots and beeps’ of the Glendale traffic.

With the sounds of dinner slowly cooking nearby, he sat up and gazed out into the distance.

Do you ever have those fleeting moments of pure clarity?

The moments where nothing around you has changed, but suddenly everything is different.

Those perfect moments?

It didn’t matter what happened after this or what happened before. For this brief minute, his world and the world outside it was at peace and everything in it was just right.

For Finn Alexander, this moment was perfect.

6Oct2017

One Brief Moment | Flash Fiction #1

Posted in Blog Post by Fergus Writes Things

“He looked every bit the conquering hero that he’d always dreamed of being…”

The gun slipped from his blood-stained hand and clattered to the cavern floor.

Unsteady on his feet, his boots kicked up dust as he shuffled, his legs threatening to betray him. His shirt was soaked through from the wound in his side and blood was now dripping freely from his finger tips.

For him though, none of this mattered, all he could do was stare dead ahead at the man he’d just killed.

His eyes never wavered from the spot where the body of nemesis lay. In that brief moment, he looked every bit the conquering hero that he’d always dreamed of being.

I made my way over through the rubble from the battle just as his feet gave way. I caught him mid-collapse and laid him gently against the rocky wall.

I don’t know if he knew I was there. His eyes had the look of someone very far away. It didn’t matter though, no words needed to be spoken then. I was content to sit in silence and just be.

I sat with him until he left, holding his hand as tight as I could.

I watched as his final breath caught in his throat and sat so long with him after that this became a distant memory.

I watched his far away eyes take off for greener pastures and watched as his soul departed, his body finally free of the terrible burdens placed upon him.

I bade goodbye to him soon after, leaving him there to rest, the man who’d saved my life.

26Jul2017

Fr Pat Aherne Interview | Founder of Siamsa Tíre

Posted in Interview by Fergus Writes Things

Fergus Dennehy talks to North Kerry’s Fr Pat Aherne, a man credited with revitalising the traditional music and dance scene in both Kerry and Ireland, when he founded the famous Siamsa Tíre. Here, he talks to us about growing up in a different time, how Siamsa Tíre came about and his fondest memories from a truly incredible life.

FOR those of us of the untrained eye, there have no doubt been times when our eyes have passed over the charming and familiar stone brick exterior of Siamsa Tíre and not given a moments thought to the incredible story and history hidden inside its hallowed vaults of knowledge.

As a Tralee native and someone who has too often been guilty of the above crime of ignorance, I was on a quest to right this wrong and where bettter to start than sitting in the living room of its now 85-year-old founder, Father Pat Aherne.

A Moyvane native, Father Aherne grew up surrounded by music – his mother and brother Seán were talented fiddle players and singers respectively – and he says that if there is anything that growing up in the 30’s and 40’s, surrounded by music, singing, dancing and working on the farm taught him, it is the importance of tradition.

In the context of Siamsa Tíre and its founding then, it is this sense of the importance of tradition that he holds that was to become ‘the seed’ for what would eventually grow into Siamsa Tíre.

Fr Aherne was first sent to Tralee as a young curate back in 1957 where he was tasked with setting up a new choir in Tralee – a task that he still remembers fondly to this day and one which he took to with relish.

“Back then in 1957, there was very little happening with regards to music in town and because of this, without the choir, a lot of the people who joined who never have had another outlet to learn music,” said Fr Aherne, talking on Thursday.

“It [setting up the choir] was a nice challenge for a young fella like myself but you have to remember, in those days, almost everything was in Latin, including the music!”

“A lot of the lads and ladies who joined originally, they wouldn’t have had it at all. That made the task of learning the music that little bit trickier for them,

“The choir just took off though, it was initially just boys and men – it was called St John’s Gregorian Choir. We had great times back then – we were all young and energetic and we worked hard. Everyone there learned to read music and these were people who would never have studied any bit of music, it was wonderful.”

The initial success of the choir led to them being asked to perform a short pageant to celebrate the centenary of the Lourdes apparitions, a pageant which the group called Massabielle and which was performed in the old CYMS hall in Tralee [now the KDYS].

This successful first outing was to prove to be a major stepping stone for Fr Aherne and his choir.

“Thanks to Massabielle and its success, this then led us on to do a more ambitious show later in 1963, the Passion Play in Tralee about the life of Christ. It went for a long run in the CYMS Hall.”

Again this performance by Fr Aherne’s choir was met with such acclaim that Dean Donal Reidy organised a special celebratory performance night in what was then the Manhattan Hotel [now Ballygarry House Hotel].

It was to be a performance that would serve as the impetus for the future Siamsa Tíre performances.

“I put on a little cabaret there, using the singers, dancers and musicians and it was went very well – it just skyrocketed and we

decided then and there that we wanted to do more things. This was then the little seed that started it all off for us,” he continued.

The rest, as they say is history. What followed was a period of great success both nationally and internationally for the group, which in 1974, was officially renamed as the Siamsa Tíre that we know today, woith its founder Fr Ahernem being named as Artistic Director, a position that he held until his retirement in 1998.

While he’s the first to admit that there has been too many good memories over the years to definitively pick out a favourite, he said that it was the words of a man called Brendan Regan that stand out as one of his proudest moments.

“We were doing a week in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and a man came backstage to see us after the show and this man was Brendan O’ Regan. He was a big, big name at the time, a visionary if you like. He was the man who founded the Shannon Free Airport Development and he was the chairman of Bord Fáilte aswell,” said Father Aherne, taking another sip of tea, his foot stretched out, relaxing on the chair in front of him.

“He said ‘I’ve been to New York, where I have seen the Russian ballet and when I watched it, I dreamt of a similiar show in Ireland. Father, in your performance tonight, I’ve found that show.’ He was a man of clout and he said that we had to get all of this on a firm footing – this was not just an amazing appreciative moment of all of our hard work, this was the beginning of Siamsa Tíre. It was an excellent thing for us to hear, from someone so revered,” he continued.

A tour of America was to follow for Fr Aherne and his merry band of singers, musicians and dancers and for some of the group, a lot of whom were leaving Ireland for the first ever time, finding themselves in cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago was a magical, magical experience.

“I’ll always remember one man, Gerry Nolan, he was out of my own parish in Moyvane. He was a beautiful, beautiful step dancer and of course, he had never been out of the country and this man from Moyvane brought down the house in every city we went to!”

“It was amazing, the reaction to his performances. He was a simple and quiet man you know? Going to New York to him was the same as going to Dublin. Here we were in Broadway then, performing in the home of theatre and performance and he went out and the audience, they just clapped and clapped and clapped and even when he came off the stage, they were still clapping and he just turned to the fella next to him and says ‘jaysus, they must know me!’” Fr Aherne says, letting out a chuckle at the memory of his friend.

It was the success of this tour, Fr Aherne said, that gave great creedence to the idea of using Irish folklore and music and dance as a performance art an again cemented the need for Siamsa Tíre.

One man whose core message and style still permeates through Kerry today was a travelling dace teacher called Jeremiah Moly- neaux, or ‘Munnix’ as Fr Aherne affectionately calls him.

Munnix was a man, that Fr Aherne credits with not just helping to bring through some of Siamsa’s most talented dancers, the supremely gifted Jimmy Smith being one of these, but also a man who first ‘wowed’ a young Fr Aherne into wanting to learn to dance.

“He was a beautiful, beautiful dancer. I had met when I was in school in Moyvane and he came to teach in the school. He said, ‘anyone who’s interested in dancing, head into the hall there’.”

“He went out on the floor and danced the hornpipe and my god, I’ll never forget it, the impact it had on me. What this man could do with his two feet, it was absolutely phenomenal, I’d never seen anything like it. It was amazing.”

Finally and fittingly, a man always with a sense of tradition at the back of his mind, Father Aherne, between sips of tea and an odd biscuit or two, tells me of how importantly he viewed the Irish language and all of the old stories and poems hidden within it in helping shape Siamsa’s work.

“The Irish language is one that enshrines all of our best traditions. Irish is the repository of all of our most important traditions. If you want to know the midset of a people, you must first understand the language,” he finished.

Traditional to the last.

15Jun2017

Dermot & Dave | Ah Sure, Look It

Posted in Interview by Fergus Writes Things

By Fergus Dennehy

#ThrowbackThursday to March 2017 when I nervously interviewed Dermot & Dave of Today FM for work and how I completely forgot to put it up on this until now.

Happy reading! 🙂

IN the hours leading up to interview with Today FM’s Dermot Whelan and Dave Moore, I will admit that I was feeling nervous; a duo that are renowned for their wit and oftentimes random sense of humour, I was left wondering how I could possibly keep up with them throughout the course of an interview.

To help soothe my nerves, I took to Twitter and send out a mini cry for help in coming up with questions which I could ask the duo and sure enough, in a matter of minutes, I only got one reply…from Dermot Whelan himself.

‘Ketchup or brown sauce?’ it reads.

A question that is so unexpected, so random and so wonderfully Irish does enough to snap me out of my nerves and a half an hour later, when I get the lads on the phone, I feel much more at ease and we quickly get to talking about their upcoming INEC show on Thursday, March 16, the first night of their brilliantly titled ‘Ah, Sure, Look it’ Tour.

“We’re very, very proud of the name!” says Dermot, the pride evident in his voice

“We were stuck trying to think of a name for it and someone just happened to walk by us and we just heard them say ‘Ah sure look it, isn’t that it’ and honestly that’s how the whole thing came about,” he says letting out a hearty laugh.

The wonderful rapport between the two presenters is evident even over the phone, evidence of the 12 years they have spent working together, first in Dublin’s 98FM and now on Today FM, a rapport that they now will bring in front of a live audience in Killarney next week.

When asked about what people can expect from their stand up show in Killarney, I refer back to their quotes in the INEC press release.

“Imagine a bonkers radio show that grows legs and arms and a head and starts firing out craic and waving its arms like an angry King Kong in that movie. Not even close.”

“It’s all our listeners’ favourite characters, stand-up, improvised comedy, music and an interactive gardening segment – what’s not to love?!” added Dave.

When I point out how random and bizarre the night sounds like it is going to be, all I can hear is heavy laughter from the pair.

“Yep, that sounds pretty accurate,” Dave chuckles.

“We did the show in Cork and Galway last year for a comedy festival and Jason Byrne was on after us on one of the shows and he couldn’t believe how much things we crammed into our show, usually comedians have a t-shirt, a microphone and thats it, ours is eh, a little bit different,” Dave laughs gulitily.

“There’s going to be props, costumes, songs, video footage, characters, stand up comedy, improvised comedy and musical impressions; it’s going to be like a circus is happening inside our heads and we’ll just take everything we think of and put it out on stage,” Dermot says, laughing again.

I ask the lads if there will be any of that dreaded audience interaction and particpation on the night and there is a small moment of devilish silence as no doubt their brains whir with all the thoughts of what they’re going to be doing.

“There will of course be some interaction!” says Dave

“The show begins with audience interaction, and ends with audience interaction and just for good measure, we’ve thrown a bit of interaction into the middle of the show aswell, just to be consistent,” he continues.

“Don’t worry though, we won’t make anyone feel bad, we won’t be picking on anyone.” Dermot chimes in.

On how they manage to come up with some of the very random ideas that populate their both their radio show and their live stage show, the pair admit that it’s something that into; simply put, whatever makes them laugh, it has a good chance of getting into the show in some form or another.

“Usually, anything that we’re laughing about or chatting about at our desks, this is a good indicator of what is going to work; if we’re just messing around the office and something makes us laugh, then that will end up working on the radio orat the very least, we’ll end up giving it a shot,” Dermot continues.

“I tend to love comedy where there’s no script and you just have to improvise and talk off the top of your head and see what comes out; that has allowed us to maybe try out different things than other comedy duos so I think that I’m definitely a wild card on stage as to what I’ll come out with,” Dermot finishes.

The ‘Ah, Sure, Look it’ show in the INEC on Thursday (March 16) will be the first time that the duo have performed on stage there and they admit that they are very excited to get on stage.

“We were down in Killarney for the Ring of Kerry last year and it was such a brilliant atmosphere and such a beautiful town aswell; we’ve been down at a load of gigs in the INEC but this will our first time on stage. A load of mad Kerry people in front of us, what’s not to love?! says Dermot.

Doors open at 7:30pm and he show starts at 8:30pm with tickets available from the INEC box office.

4Apr2017

Keith Barry Interview | Magic Man

Posted in Interview by Fergus Writes Things

Keith Barry |Magic Man

Ahead of his first ever show in Sneem, Fergus Dennehy talks to the world famous magician and hypnotist that is Keith Barry about his new show entitled ‘HypnoMagick’, his love of fishing in Kerry, working in Hollywood with some of the worlds biggest actors and how he thinks that Donald Trump and his White House Staff are in fact master manipulators.

THROUGHOUT his stellar career, Ireland’s Keith Barry has been known by a great many titles. He’s been labelled a magician, a mentalist, hypnotist, brain hacker, an activist for the elderly and in more recent times, he’s even become Hollywood’s go-to resident magic consultant.

Ahead of his upcoming new show entitled ‘HypnoMagick’ in the Sneem Hotel on April 14, I was given the chance to interview the man of the hour and after listening to him speak about his love for his craft, I started to think that there is still one more item that can be added to the above list of titlesand that is that simply put, Keith Barry, is a man incredibly passionate about his craft and someone who is constantly driven to improve and expand upon his already burgeoning repertoire of skills.

Skills gained from a very young age and honed well into his teenage years, Keith admits that practising magic and hypnotiosm weren’t exactly the regular things that a boy his age should have been getting up to.

“I got a Paul Daniels magic set back when I was 5 or 6 and that kind of spawned my initial interest in the whole side of magic and then when I was 14 or 15, I was given another book on the subject called the ‘Klutz Book of Magic’ and this when I first started to perform in the public eye, using all the tricks from that book.”

“At the same time then, I got this little pamphlet on hypnosis called ‘Practical Hypnosis’ and so I started getting involved in that side of things aswell from here and in the years that followed, it all sort of escalated on from there into this amazing career that I have now.”

Keith’s show in Sneem on April 14 will be the first time that he’s performed his shows outside of the INEC in Killarney and he says that while he’s looking forward to hitting the road to new locations, he jokes that if his performing career doesn’t take off any further, he wouldn’t mind setlling down in some quiet Kerry location and fishing his days away.

“I’ve been down in the direction of Sneem a couple of times myself doing a spot of fishing and it’s a truly stunning area. It’s not beyond the real,s of possibility that I’ll spotted sporting a giant beard and living by a river fishing away,” he jokes.

“This will be our first official performance down there and we’re very much looking forward to it; we’ve always played in the Killarney area and we obviously love the INEC and performing there but we realised that Killarney might in reality be too far away for some people to travel to and so we just made the decision to hit the road to places that we’ve never been before.”

“As you can guess from the title ‘HypnoMagick’, the show is going to be divided up into a mixture of hypnotism, mentalism and magic; so parts of the show will involve me manipulating peoples sense of reality and what I like about the performance is that it doesn’t matter if you’re on the stage or in the audience, everybody at some point is going to be a part of the show.”

“Now, obviously I know that some people are nervous when they come to see a show such as mine that they might be landed on the stage with me or something, so I don’t force anybody to come up at all. I just invite people who want to come up and who are willing to give things a go, but still, that being said, it is still a hugely interactive show.”

“In one portion of the show, I basically just perform this mass experiment on all the people in the audience where they will hallucinate for ten seconds into believing that two people are dematerialising right in front of their eyes and it’s a magic trick that really just takes place in the minds of the audience and we’ve been posting the reactions of the crowds from other shows up on social media and you can actually see the people going temporarily insane,” he laughs.

“They can tell that the trick is only happening in their minds but they are powerless to stop it actually happening, even if you believe yourself to a cynic or a sceptic; another thing that I like to do and what people can expect is that every night under hypnosis, I create this ‘UFC Fight Night Conference’ where I hypnotise one person into believing that they are Conor McGregor and I hypnotise the other person into believing they are this Japanese UFC fighter, who can only speak Japanese.

“There is just going to be a load of mentalism throughout the night and people are going to have the opportunity to catch me out and win some money aswell so yeah, people are going to have a really fun time,” he says.

For those of us not in the loop on Keith’s latest exploits these past few years, a litle bit of research shows that the Waterford man has not taken not been resting on his laurels too much; even taking his renowned skills to the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood Hills where he has been busy consulting on the hit ‘Now You See Me’ trilogy, films which follow a group of talented magicians who operate a number of bank robberies and heists.

“I consulted on the first ‘Now You See Me Film’ for couple of weeks a number of years ago; I just looked at the script and I was working with actors such as Woody Harrelson and a number of others aswell.”

“The second film then, ‘Now You See Me 2’, I worked as a consultancy basis for a full twelve month period from day one of production and then I worked on the set for a full three months after this; I was working with all the actors on set to help them with the tricks, we wanted to use as little CGI as possible when it came to the tricks so I had to physically teach all the actors how to do them.”

“We were working on how to produce doves out of thin air, I taught Dave Franco and the rest of the cast how to properly throw and spin cards into a hat for this one big heist sequence at the end of the film and then when it came to the script, if I came up with an idea, I could approach the director and say ‘look, I think this would be a good addition here’ and then we’d go off and look at the practicalities of getting it all done.”

“I still pinch myself everyday because I managed to turn my hobby into my profession and I’ve been loving every minute of it all since I started; I’ve been very lucky to have worked with some amazing people and gotten to do some amazing things so yeah, it’s all been fantastic so far.”

Such is the student of psychology and behaviour that Keith Barry is, I cannot let him go without asking his opinion of the newest and most divisive figure in the world at the moment, American President, Donald Trump.

“He’s got all the hallmarks of a dictator, I suppose, for want of a better word; I mean, people think that he is this lone wolf kind of character that is operating against the grain, but what you have to realise is that he has this huge team behind him who, instead of discouraging his behaviour, are actually actively encouraging him to do this.” he said.

“His advisors are telling him to continue to behaviour I’m convinced because it was this type of action that got him elected; they know exactly what they are doing, they know that people follow certain language patterns and that they can influenced in certain ways,” he finished.

Keith’s ‘HypnoMagick’ show is set to be staged in Sneem Hotel on the night of April 14 with tickets available to buy from http://www.keithbarry.com and they are being priced from €30 onwards.