Peter Coonan plays dangerous or peculiar men as if they were ordinary ones, and the ordinariness is what unsettles. More than a decade on from Fran Cooney in Love/Hate, he is still most useful at the edge of a scene, making menace look like a Tuesday.
Fi1m perspective
In Hokum (2026), Damian McCarthy's horror about a rural Irish hotel with a witch upstairs, Peter Coonan's Mal is told what is living in the building and responds the way a man responds to a boiler that needs looking at. He and David Wilmot's Jerry never raise their voices about it. We laughed, properly, and we had not expected to in a film that had spent its first hour frightening us, because Adam Scott's guest is terrified and Coonan is faintly bored, and the gap between them is the joke. It is a small part, and the film is better for the way he refuses to make it bigger.
That refusal is the habit. Coonan had been taking small roles since 2000 and had first been noticed in Between the Canals (2011) and King of the Travellers (2012), where he played Mickey Moorehouse in a revenge drama, before Stuart Carolan's Love/Hate (2011–2014) gave him Fran Cooney, an unpredictable gangster who became the part people meant when they said his name. He has said of the series that it was the only reason he is here, and that it gave him the beginning of his career. It also fixed him, for a while, as the volatile one: the man you keep watching because you are not sure what he will do.
He has spent the years since trying not to be only that. There has been international television, The Alienist: Angel of Darkness (2020), Peaky Blinders (2022) as Connor Dunn, Bad Sisters (2022), and there have been leads in Irish features, King Frankie (2024) and Kathleen Is Here (2024), which we have not reviewed and will not judge here. On stage at the Abbey and the Gate he has gone the other way from his screen manner, into bigger and more physical work, including Brendan Behan. He has spoken openly about the worry of being cast as the crook or the psychopath forever, and the choices look like a man acting on that worry.
What we can say with confidence rests on what we have seen at length, which is one supporting turn in a horror film that we liked and found untidy. On that evidence, his strength is the flat delivery of a line that ought to be alarming, and the trust that the camera will notice what he is not doing. The open question is whether that stillness holds a film on its own or only steadies somebody else's. The thing to look for next is a lead in which nobody is frightened of him and he has to earn the attention some other way.
Biography
Peter Coonan is an Irish actor. Born in 1984 in Dublin, he began acting as a child and made his screen debut in the 2000 film Saltwater. His breakthrough came with the role of Dave 'Dots' Fennel in the 2011 film Between the Canals and as Fran Cooney in the RTÉ series Love/Hate (2010–2014).
Coonan won the IFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role – Television for Love/Hate in 2014. His other screen credits include Connor Dunn in Peaky Blinders (2022), Ben in Bad Sisters (2022), Ding Dong in The Alienist: Angel of Darkness (2020), and roles in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2019) and Hidden Assets (2021). He has also appeared in films such as King of the Travellers (2012), Doineann (2021) and The Drummer and the Keeper (2017).
On stage, Coonan has performed at the Abbey Theatre and Gate Theatre in productions including The Weir, A Whistle in the Dark and Juno and the Paycock. In 2026 he played Mal in the film Hokum.
