Brendan O'Carroll has played Agnes Brown in the TV series Mrs Brown’s Boys since 2011.
Brendan O'Carroll as Agnes Brown Photo: Graeme Hunter
He created the character of the loud-mouthed Irish matriarch for a radio play in the 1990s that he expected to run two or three weeks, but instead it continued for 450 episodes.
O’Carroll voiced Agnes Brown in the radio series when the actress booked for the part had to pull out due to illness. When it transferred to stage, he asked a make-up artist to create what he thought was Mrs Brown might look like. “He made me up … and he turned me round to the mirror, and I went; “Oh my god it’s my mother.”
The first play ran for a sellout 16 weeks, he says. Four more plays followed, along with TV successes in the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
“I had no idea when I first sat down to write this first five-minute piece that anything like this was possible.
“I’d love to be able to say I had a plan. I have no plan - I’m just literally following this wherever it takes me.”
O’Carroll left school at the age of 12. “I couldn’t hack it at school; I loved reading but I’m a very slow reader.” It wasn’t until years later he discovered he has dyslexia, at the time his son was assessed as dyslexic.“It didn’t bother me, it didn’t change me,” O’Carroll says.
The show is a family affair, with his wife, son and daughter and spouses, grandson, sister and sister-in-law all involved.
“You couldn’t throw a stone at the stage without hitting an O’Carroll.”
He says Mrs Brown’s Boys appeals to audiences that had been left behind by comedy for many years.
"Comedy got very intellectual, it got very snarky, and sometimes comedy tried to be more clever than funny.
“I don’t try to be clever, I just try to be funny, and so far, touching wood, it’s working.”
The show isn’t universally admired by the critics, though.
“I think the audience is too busy laughing to be reading the critics,” O’Carroll says.
“There was one critic said it was the worst comedy ever made and I thank him for that - because we got a lot of column inches out of that.”
O’Carroll takes notice, selectively. He says some of the comments are right, but some critics have no interest in the show and just want to fill their columns.
“There will always be a donkey telling the racehorse how he should have run the race.”
O’Carroll says he was surprised to receive letters from hundreds of parents of autistic children in response to the first TV series and tour.
“[They] either heard their child laugh for the first time or heard their child laugh in context for the first time.”
He says it prompted him to donate to research on the connection between visual comedy and autism being carried out at the time in Dublin and Los Angeles.
The stage show, For the Love of Mrs Brown, is on in Christchurch from 28 February to 2 March and in Auckland from 7-10 March.
