In The Oxford Companion to Irish literature, the ‘stage Irishman’ is described as "garrulous, boastful, unreliable, hard-drinking, belligerent (though cowardly), and chronically impecunious." This archetype, which can be traced back to before Shakespeare and still exists today, is designed to perpetuate the idea that Irish people are either drunkards on the verge of an early death or leprechauns with an accent representative of no real place. Or both.
Last night, while watching Eternals with my dad and my brother, I thought I was hearing things. In a world where actual Irishman Jamie Dornan is instructed by an American director to eschew his Irish accent for an egregious pot o’ gold twang, it is rare to see characters from the Emerald Isle treated with due reverence. And yet here we are, watching a blockbuster Marvel film on the big screen, with Dublin man Barry Keoghan chatting shit as if he was out for a pint with the lads.
I don’t mean to claim that Ireland is an unknown country in the back arse of nowhere that is universally detested by the rest of the world. We are in the EU; as of April 2021, we had the third-highest GDP per capita in the world; when I am abroad, only some of the people I meet are rude for no reason.
Still, it is intensely rare to see an accurate Irish character in fiction made outside of Ireland. Liam Neeson and Colin Farrell are occasionally allowed to keep their natural accents in Hollywood, although it’s difficult to think of many others who receive the same liberty. Most of the ‘Irish’ characters in big movies are Americans whose great- or great-great-grandad came to Ellis Island on a coffin ship 175 years ago. It might not seem like it for anyone who is not viewing Irish characters from an Irish perspective, but outside of Red Dead Redemption 2’s Sean MacGuire, decent, mainstream depictions are few, far between, and frequently forgotten about.
Another thing people might not recognise - which largely comes as a result of an intentionally historiographical UK history curriculum - is the historical lens Irish people were traditionally viewed through. In a letter to his wife, clergyman and friend of Charles Darwin Charles Kingsley once wrote, “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw [in Ireland] ... I don't believe they are our fault … To see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much.” As recently as the ‘60s, establishments in England hung signs stating, “No Irish, no Blacks, no dogs.” Further west, the famously tolerant H. P. Lovecraft wrote of combatting the “mythical Irish Republic” with propaganda, before labeling former Irish Taoiseach Éamon de Valera a “mongrel wretch” and demanding that the “Irish malcontents” be “killed off or throttled somehow.”
It is easy to dismiss these statements as irrelevant on account of the fact they come from the 19th and 20th Centuries. Earlier this year, however, UK family adventure park Pontins was found to have an “undesirable guests” list on its intranet. According to a report from the BBC, the list included over 40 names, most or all of which were Irish, while staff were specifically instructed to refuse or cancel bookings made by people with Irish accents or surnames.
With all of this considered, it should come as little surprise that any Irish person watching Eternals will likely feel at least a little bit of solace and national pride the first time they hear Druig speak. Until yesterday, I never even considered the prospect of there being an Irish hero in the MCU. And yet there he is, 29-year-old Barry Keoghan from Summerhill in the heart of Dublin, standing next to Kumail Nanjiani and Salma Hayek as a hero attempting to save the world.
Speaking of which, it’s important to look at Nanjiani, Hayek, and the rest of the cast too. Although Druig stuck out for me personally, the Eternals lineup in general is diverse, varied, and refreshingly true-to-life in a way that few if any other superhero films have been to date. Among its top-billed cast are people of Pakistani, Mexican, South Korean, and Indian descent. There are deaf characters played by deaf actors. There are people of colour. There are gay people. The film is directed by a Chinese woman. It is the quintessential superhero movie because it is arguably the first one to state the universal truth that superheroes come in all shapes and sizes, from various cultures and heritages, with distinct outlooks and identities. Earlier this week, Salma Hayek said she cried the first time she saw herself as Ajak on the big screen. This thoughtfulness and truth is not just something Eternals does well - it’s something it essentialises going forward.
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As a means of proving that, it’s worth noting that Druig isn't even my favourite character - as Kingo says at one point in the film, “Druig sucks." He’s got some funny scenes and is arguably the most philosophical and conscientious of the group, but he's also up against the likes of Gilgamesh, Makkari, and Phastos - characters played by South Korean-American Don Lee, deaf Mexican-African-American Lauren Ridloff, and African-American Brian Tyree Henry, respectively. I’m not saying that I saw this film and automatically loved it because it had one (1) Irish actor who was allowed to speak with their proper accent.
Instead, I’m arguing the importance of seeing people of all different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds being portrayed as heroes to aspire to. Regardless of where you’re from in the world, you should be given a way to naturally access these stories. We’ve all seen 50 shades of 6’4” white man speaking the Queen’s English or barking to a Beverly Hills beat. When you look at 2008’s Iron Man, half of the landing page on IMDb is made up of white men - a significant amount of the remaining slots go to either white women or non-white actors who play bad guys. This is true across the MCU where just three characters of colour - Black Panther, Falcon, and Shang-Chi - have been named in the titles of the 29 Marvel projects to date. Two of those are from this year, which shows how white the MCU has been for most of its existence.
Eternals, on the other hand, has six white men in its bill of 18. One only appears in a mid-credit scene; one is a bad guy; one is an alien; and I can’t for the life of me remember who the other one even played. As opposed to Iron Man, six of the 11 Eternals aren’t white. Of the remaining five, two are not English or American. It’s an improvement in terms of numbers, but also in terms of respect and truth. Superheroes, if they actually existed, would not all come from the same block in Manhattan.
Superheroes would come from Dublin, Delhi, and Damascus. They’d come from Beijing, Buenos Aires, and Baghdad; Tokyo, Tripoli, and Tunis; Perth, Pristina, and Port-au-Prince. Marvel casting actors from different parts of the world isn’t playing into some woke agenda or pandering to some non-existent diversity yardstick. On the contrary, Marvel casting actors from different parts of the world is Marvel finally realising that a world outside America exists as more than set dressing in need of saving.