October 15, 2002 "Bloody Sunday" - An Actor Speaks-out
Actor James Nesbitt on playing Ivan Cooper in "Bloody Sunday"

"I think there's a collective guilt and silence among the Protestant population that a great wrong was done. My mother and father never really talked about it. I thought 'Christ, I've wasted so much of my life not knowing about the back door that I live on'. The school I went to taught a very different history from the Catholic grammar schools, for example. So my memories of it were non-existent in a sense. You pick up snippets about it as you're growing up but I never really knew fully what went on, and never really knew the impact it had on the next thirty years until I did the film. The problem with the Protestants and the British is that no one ever wanted to own Bloody Sunday, and it's as much a British tragedy as an Irish tragedy. We're trying to make sense of it.

"I think people in Northern Ireland have had thirty years of trying to make some sense of terrorism in general. Thinking how could this be happening, losing people from their community all the time who were good God-fearing people. I think in the peace process going on at the minute, a big section of the Unionist community realise we can't walk away and we've got to sit down and acknowledge things and share things. So I hope BLOODY SUNDAY helps make people aware of this big wrong.

"The thing which was most powerful and most potent, was that in the late 1960s Ivan Cooper was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and his support was completely Catholic. The very fact that as a Protestant he could get that amount of support from a Catholic electorate - that gave me confidence for Jimmy Nesbitt, the Protestant actor, who was swanning into town to make a movie about the civil rights movement, the personal tragedies of the Catholic people, that they were not offended in any way. They gave me extraordinary support and the welcome I received there was overwhelming. It was immensely moving and incredibly important, giving me the confidence to feel that I could do justice to the film.

"I was very nervous of what I was getting into, and trying to do justice to it. This was about a real event with tragic consequences. I was playing a real person and I was at the centre of a film about a place that is still bearing witness to the awful scars.

"I don't think I made a courageous decision to be in the film. I think the people who were courageous about it were the people of Derry who've given me such support because they've lived with it for such a long time and are all desperate for it all to be right. So they are taking a bit of a gamble accepting someone like me to come in and do this. I was very worried about what my parents would think, but I talked to them and said it was important for me to do this. They encouraged me and supported me and I think that was courageous.

"In fact BLOODY SUNDAY might turn out to be such a watershed for me, in the same way that Bloody Sunday in itself was a watershed in Irish politics. It was a defining moment, in that for years acting was something I enjoyed but it didn't feed my soul. And then doing BLOODY SUNDAY - it brings me out in tears quite often - it was a difficult process, but it was also an extraordinary process. It made me think for the very first time why I loved the process. Why I love acting ... and why I love Ireland."