Rising Irish comedian and actor Tadhg J Devery has said he never dreamt of being on stage let alone launching his first ever sketch-based tour of Ireland.
The 40-year-old, who was born in Galway but grew up in Ferbane, Co Offaly, launches A Day in the Country, his 10-date tour in March and it sees him bring his rogue's gallery of heightened rural archetypes across the country.
"That kind of kept it going for me but never did I think I’d be standing on stage with these characters."
Drawing from his experiences of growing up in smalltown Ireland, working on his father’s cattle farm and later working in construction in Australia, he’s conjured up a cast of everyday Irish people with everyday Irish eccentricities.
These clips contain bad language
There’s Noel, a typical country father; Breda, the "dramatic and slightly raunchy housewife"; Christy, the well-meaning but unlucky builder; Fr. Nettles, the tea-loving priest; Seamus, the worst plumber of a generation; and the Garda "who couldn't solve a 10-piece jigsaw".
"You do meet a lot of different characters around the country. You have the quiet ones and the mad ones and the mad ones are the ones you want to talk to because that's where the material comes from."
Devery’s rural-based comedy is as broad as the Shannon and he would have been influenced by The 2 Johnnies, who have made a career out of affectionally lampooning the charming oddities of Irish people. Devery may also have something in common with Pat Shortt and maybe even Hall’s Pictorial Weekly.
"It’s the kind of comedy I find funny," he says. "They always say make the kind of stuff you enjoy and you’re always going to have an audience. I said it to my girlfriend a few weeks ago - I feel like I’m in a cartoon world when I’m playing these characters.
"I throw on a wig and a hat and I become a different person. I feel like a cartoon character."
Devery, who is a carpenter by trade, grew up wanting to be a movie star and has a particular fondness for Liam Neeson, DeNiro and Pacino but he took a circuitous route into acting.
"I aways wanted to be an actor and a friend of mine in Australia told me to do it because I was always going on about it," he says.
He enrolled in Sydney Drama school and landed small roles in Oz and when he returned to Ireland, he attended the Irish Film Academy in Dublin.
He has since appeared in short films, commercials, and radio plays, and was also cast in two feature films, including a small part in The Cured (2017), starring Elliot Page, and a supporting role in Follow the Dead (2020), directed by Adam William Cahill, who also directed Devery in the sci-fi short Inertia (2017).
He won a Best Supporting Actor award at the Dublin International Comedy Film Festival, a Standout Performance award at Achill Film Festival and Spirit of the Festival award at Spook Screen for his role as the "Chi" in Follow the Dead, a zombie apocalypse film (now streaming on Amazon Prime). He even appeared in the Cadbury’s Christmas ad.
But it was the pandemic that proved a bit of a breakthrough. Like many upcoming Irish comedians and actors, Devery began filming comedy shorts on his phone and uploading them on social media.
"I took the phone out and ordered some wigs from a party shop in Dublin and invented some mad characters and that was it. it took off," he says. "I saw so many other people uploading clips so I thought I’d give it a go.
"Comedy was never really something I really looked at. It was more the action drama stuff. I would never have thought about comedy at the time but it turns out I’m quite good at it."
Having got the hang of the editing tools on his phone, he has written, shot, and edited a new sketch every week, showcasing his versatility by playing multiple characters.
He has also recently added posh Dublin dolt Charles to the cast but the obvious question is - are these characters based on people he knows? "My parents and family and anyone who would know my father would say I’m taking the p*** out of him but that was never the intention with the Noel character," he says.
"My father is a very quiet man. I guess you could say Noel is a very extreme version of my father.
"He watches the clips and he enjoys them. Noel is really meant to be about the old guys who live around my area. Christy and Seamus, I worked with over the years on building sites, that’s where they came from."
Devery plays the newly re-opened Ambassador in Dublin as part of his tour but does he think there’s a disconnect between the capital and the rest of the country?
"One thing that p****es me off is how the government don’t seem to see anything outside of Dublin. It’s like the rest of Ireland is left to fend for itself. That’s really annoying," he says.
"It’s worse than ever. I’m sitting in the house right now and we’ve had no Wi-Fi for the last four weeks. I’m in rural Ireland and we’re left until last to sort out the problems. I guess they don’t know what it’s like to live in this part of the country, they can’t relate.
"They keep getting voted in, I don’t know why. We didn’t get Storm Éowyn as bad as the west but we got it bad enough. There’s a lot of trees and powerlines down. We had no power for days."
Now that he’s back in action, Devery hopes to take the country by storm with his debut tour and let’s face it, he’ll never run out of source material.
"You do meet a lot of different characters around the country," he says. "You have the quiet ones and the mad ones and the mad ones are the ones you want to talk to because that’s where the material comes from. What is going on in this person’s life, what can I pull out of it?"
Who knows - Tadhg Devery could become the most famous ex-carpenter since Jesus Christ and Harrison Ford.
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