Daryl McCormack won’t easily forget his first leading role. “It was like, OK, for your first lead, you’re gonna just do a two-hander with Oscar-winner Emma Thompson,” says the 32-year-old Irish actor. He was cast in 2022’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, playing a sympathetic sex worker. It was, he admits, a “baptism of fire”.
Thankfully he put on a good performance of remaining professionally unruffled. “You just have to get on with it,” he smiles. Following his breakthrough, he won the Cannes Film Festival’s Chopard Trophy and earned Bafta nominations for the Best Leading Actor and Rising Star awards. He has since starred as a detective opposite Ruth Wilson in the television drama The Woman in the Wall, joined Cillian Murphy in Peaky Blinders and played a reluctant insurance investigator in Bad Sisters, the black comedy by Sharon Horgan that stars Eve Hewson and Fiona Shaw.
Daryl McCormack wears Guess by Marciano stretch viscose-mix overshirt, £120, and cotton T-shirt (just seen), £25. Johnstons of Elgin cashmere polo shirt, £625 © Zachary Handley
Now he’s one of the suspects in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, part of a starry ensemble cast led by Daniel Craig and Glenn Close. The third instalment of the successful Knives Out franchise, set in an upstate New York church, it has all the features of a classic whodunnit: a picturesque setting, gothic overtones and buried secrets. McCormack’s character, Cy Draven, is a rage-baiting politico armed with an iPhone and a wardrobe full of gilets and overly technical sportswear. McCormack said yes to the part even though he knew only the bare bones of the plot. “When someone like Rian Johnson [the director] offers you a chance to be in his world, it’s pretty much a no-brainer,” he says.
