Finding a lump and having my testicle replaced with a prosthesis made me realise stand-up comedy was nothing to fear
I was 27 when I found out I had cancer. I had just moved out of home.
Pathetic, I know, but rents were high and I was suffering from crippling
laziness. I was painting houses and doing deliveries. I was just
floating along. My mother sat me down one day and told me that if acting
was what I really wanted to do, I needed to move out, get a job and
start saving to go to London.
As a kid, I was always trying to break the silence with a laugh –
always looking for attention. Around the time of my Leaving Cert, I
decided I wanted to be an actor. I had a meeting with the Lisa Richards Agency.
They said, “You should really think about comedy. Your letter was
funny. That’s why you’re here. It’s not because of your passport-photo
headshot.”
I moved in with two girls I knew. It was like a sexless bigamist
marriage with passive-aggressive cleaning. I got myself a decent agent. I
got an audition for a part in Boardwalk Empire. I nearly had it too. There’s a lot of nearlys in this story. I started to get callbacks. There was a sense of momentum.
To celebrate, I was playing with myself in the shower. I found a lump. I
knew what to look out for, so once a month I would check. I went to the
doctor straight away. She said it would take three months to get a scan
on the public system because it wasn’t serious. I told her I wanted it
done tomorrow; I’d pay for it myself. When I went for the scan the next
morning, the man doing the ultrasound said, “These things are usually
nothing.” I watched him watching the screen. I said, “Don’t reveal the
sex of my balls; I want it to be a surprise.” He was silent. “There’s
definitely something we need to be concerned about,” he said. He
referred me to a urologist. I drove home, blubbing in the car.
‘Get rid of the ball’
The urologist talked in a slow, neutral way, like Obama when he talks about war but doesn’t want to alarm anyone. “The likelihood is you’ll be fine.” He wanted to do a biopsy first. I said, “No, get rid of the ball. It’s the smaller one anyway. The weaker of the two.”I went back three weeks later for the histology results. His office was really busy because he’s the big prostate guy. I was always the youngest person in the waiting room. He said, “What we found was quite aggressive. We have a question that we need to answer. Do you want it all removed or do you want to monitor it?”
I decided to have the testicle removed. I’d get a prosthesis. I didn’t
want to be reminded of it every time I looked down. I was single at the
time and I didn’t want to always have to have a pre-coitus cancer
conversation.
When you have cancer, people say mad things to you. A friend said,
“Well, in fairness, you did smoke.” My dad’s friend said, “If it’s gonna
kill you, at least you know what got you.”
I’d lie awake at night thinking, why did I want to be an actor? Why
didn’t I do something normal so I wouldn’t have to be worried about
money on top of this?
It’s a bang-up job down there, however. It feels like a Persil liquid tab. It looks 10 years younger than the other one.
A call from Brendan Gleeson
While I was recovering, my dad met Brendan Gleeson and asked him would he ring me with a bit of acting advice. On the phone Gleeson told me, “You need to not want it too much. Have something going on the side, so when you go into the audition, you’re not relying on the money.”When I told him I was sick, he said, “Your dad didn’t tell me.” I thought he had called me in a sort of Jim’ll Fix It way.
When I was all healed, I got to work. I got a sales job and a
restaurant job. I had an audition for a Mace ad. Because I didn’t care, I
got the part. After the Mace ad, I had an audition for a Lotto ad. “It
could be you.” I got that too.
An old friend told me there was a room available in his house in London, so I went. There are so many more opportunities there.
Des Bishop once told me that with acting, you’re waiting for the phone
to ring, but with stand-up, you write your own stuff and make your own
calls. I had tried stand-up before, and it went really badly. I got
heckled. I got in a fight afterwards. But losing the ball made me
realise stand-up wasn’t something to fear. The confidence comes from
doing it again and again.
When my savings ran out, I got another job in a restaurant. I ended up
serving Jimmy Carr one day. I told him I was doing the rookie circuit
where everyone in the audience is another stand-up. He said, “Get
yourself to Edinburgh. Save. Do a free show.” I booked in the next day. I
didn’t know what I was doing. I was handing out my own flyers, and they
were overflowing from the nearest bin. I had audiences of four and
five. Luckily, I got a good review from The Skinny. It opened doors to paid gigs in London.
Things were moving in the right direction. I got an audition for a short film, Scratch. I got paid gigs in the International Bar in Dublin. It took leaving Ireland
to be able to do that. People leave to get back in. In acting, the
talent is often secondary to getting into the room. Comedy is more of a
meritocracy.
Last Christmas, I was getting a routine check-up and they found a
problem in my good ball. There was another tumour. The oncologist told
me I should freeze some of my little men. This time, though, the doctor
said that he wanted to go in and take out only the tumour. I was back in
my parents’ house again, waiting. Six weeks later, I found out it was
benign.
Do I feel lucky? Well, I’d prefer to be the winning the lottery kind of
lucky. But I knew I needed to work harder. A comedy agent offered me a
gig in a small place in Leicester Square. I opened a show for Romesh
Ranganthan. Scratch was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. I got to meet Robert de Niro. That made me feel lucky.
I don’t think the cancer changed my life that much. For a moment, you
appreciate the important things, and then you get on with thinking about
what you’re going to watch on TV at night. Writing a show about it
worried me because I didn’t want to be “the balls guy”. But I’ve always
talked about it. It made me feel better to share it with people. I wrote
Nutjob, which is running at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. I
went through something a lot of guys would be afraid of, but it isn’t
the worst thing. It made me confront my own mortality. For the first
time, I thought, I can’t have children if I’m struggling like this, so I
need to keep working at it.
I made things more difficult
It’s on my mind that I’m not making use of the opportunities and privileges I had growing up. I went to a private school. I went to university. I’ve made things more difficult for myself and for my parents. A lot of their friends’ children are doing things that are more traditional. I bumped into a guy I know from home. “Thank God for you,” he said. “You’re the example my mam always used as someone I don’t want to end up like.”I went to a school reunion last year. I was really apprehensive about it. I was 30 and I’d been in London for a year. I didn’t want to go because I’m nowhere near where I’d like to be. Dad said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s a 10-year reunion. Most people have no idea after 10 years what they’re doing. If you still feel like this at the 20-year reunion, then don’t go.”
I went, and it was a relief to discover that lots of people were
unhappy. One or two guys were particularly successful, but almost
everyone else was climbing a ladder of some sort and not too sure if it
was the right one. A lot of guys had gone travelling at 25 and come back
to nothing. People were coming up to me saying, “It’s great to see you
doing so well.” The only time they had seen me since school was on the
Lotto ad. One said, “It’s great to see someone I know doing exactly what
they want to do.”
