Talented Athlone teen starring in upcoming Irish film

A gifted young actor from Kiltoom has taken another step on the road to a possible career in the film industry by playing one of the leading roles in an upcoming Irish movie.

Rhys Mannion, who turned 19 on Sunday, stars in It Is In Us All, a psychological thriller which was filmed in Donegal last autumn.

The movie was written by Antonia Campbell-Hughes and stars Cosmo Jarvis. A release date for it has not been fixed as of yet, and the producers are tight-lipped about the plot details at this stage.

However, Rhys' performance in the film came in for warm praise from one of its producers, Tamryn Reinecke of Pale Rebel Productions.

"Rhys is amazing, and he's done a fabulous job," Tamryn told the Westmeath Independent.

The role is the latest milestone in Rhys' artistic development after he wrote and directed a Famine-era musical, Dawn na Dorcha, bringing it to the stage at Dublin's Smock Alley Theatre in August of last year.

In addition to his various roles for stage and screen, he also had to deal with the small matter of his Leaving Cert, at Athlone Community College, this year.

"People keep saying, 'oh, wow, you juggled it all.' I don't know if I did!" he laughed. "I think a couple of balls might have dropped here or there, and we just didn't notice. But we'll find out pretty soon!"

A son of Mary and Ciaran Mannion, Rhys was twelve years old when he started his journey in acting at the Trading Faces stage school in Galway.

"It was a youth theatre group and they were really interactive. It was really all about the kids performing, and teaching them how to have a love for the stage," he explained.

At the age of 16, he started to move his focus away from the stage and towards film, taking weekly classes at Bow Street Film Academy in Dublin.

Then, last summer, he achieved a dream by bringing his own musical to the stage in the capital.

When asked what had inspired him to write Dawn na Dorcha, he said: "I always loved the idea of telling a story through music. I loved songs that had a story, or narration, through them.

"Hearing Hamilton, I kind of realised that one person could actually write a musical. I tried a couple of different ways of going about it, and it was nice to be in control of something.

"When you are doing a lot of auditions, your fate is left in someone else's hands. So I was always told that, to keep your sanity, try to write your own stuff and have that on the side so that, no matter where you go or what you do, you'll always have that to fall back on."

Never having staged a musical before, he said there was an element of "ignorance is bliss" about the challenges it would entail.

"It started off as an album idea. I didn't know that I was going to end up having a cast and being able to put it on in a theatre. It was something I was just following, and it kept rolling down the hill and developing a bit more," he said modestly.

It was hoped the Dawn na Dorcha cast, which included locals Leighann Coyle, Cian Mulhall, Joe Steiner, and Leon Brydone, along with Fionn McGlacken and Emer Hearns from the stage school in Galway, and Dubliners Jack Hanrahan and Jack Hopkins, would be able to reconvene to again perform the musical for the public.

Earlier this year there was a successful 'Kickstarter' online fundraising campaign to help finance another stage production, but with the ongoing uncertainty around the restrictions on in-person shows, it was decided to record it professionally for an audio release instead.

"With Covid, when all the cast is together, we could probably only have about 30 people in the audience and, at this stage, I wanted it to get out in the world a bit more than that.

"The handy thing was that I originally wrote it to be an album. There's a narration throughout the music that describes what's going on, so it is something you can just listen to and understand what's happening."

The cast went into the studio to record Dawn na Dorcha recently, and the funds raised during the Kickstarter campaign will be used towards the costs of the audio production and release.

"We're now at the mixing stage and we're going to put it up on Spotify, and on other music platforms, hopefully at the end of August," said Rhys. "I didn't know how it was going to turn out, but it's sounding great so far."

Last autumn he spent six weeks in Donegal for the shooting of It Is In Us All, which was his first appearance in a feature film.

"The experience was just fantastic. It was very different to stage, but I did feel a little more relaxed in that environment.

"You got to run with the same character over a series of weeks, and to really develop a connection to the script and to the character. Because it was a feature film it gave me time to get comfortable on screen."

The production company behind the film, Pale Rebel Productions, also made Redemption Of A Rogue, a dark comedy which won 'Best Irish Film' at the Galway Film Fleadh last year and is due for a cinema release at the end of this month.

Earlier this summer, Rhys also appeared in a short film made in Dublin by the same production company. "There are a couple of other projects I'm hoping to hear back from that I might be involved in pretty soon," he said.

His ambition is to continue making progress in the industry and, to this end, he will soon be commencing a full-time course at the Bow Street Film Academy in Dublin.

"I'm going to defer college for a year to focus on that," he said. "I'm just happy that I'll be getting to act for a full year. It will be fun to be able to focus on it and get a little better.

"And, after that, hopefully I'll be able to suspend college for a little longer and find another way to act," he smiled.