'It's very interesting to make work about your own life.'

"Tom Moran is a big fat filthy disgusting liar”.

Or so the title of his show that won the Best New Writing Award at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival last September would make you believe.

The Dunboyne man has a long list of productions under his belt, including appearing in plays and musicals such as 'Copper Face Jack's The Musical', various pantos, his podcast 'Personality Bingo with Tom Moran' and more.

The Fringe Festival show allowed him to showcase his skills not only as an actor but also as a writer, which he believes is an increasingly important aspect of show business.

“My background is as an actor, I did a three year degree but it’s kind of highly encouraged to write your own work because everyone knows that cliché of waiting by the phone, which is a miserable place to be because you've just no agency.”

The show examines lying and how it is often a smokescreen for insecurities in a person’s life.

“It explores a crazy lie that I told us a child”, explains Tom. “It was something I had forgotten about and I just completely disassociated myself from. The show tells the story of that lie and looks at how that little boy, grows up into a man in his 20s, which I am now and still either lies or feels the impulse to lie but now it’s less cool to lie now because the stakes are much higher and you can’t do that anymore.

“And then we want to show ultimately does is it makes the argument that people only lie with the presence of shame. So if you want to lie, that means there's clearly some shame or something that makes you uncomfortable with being yourself. So to stop lying, you kind of have to exercise all that shame or guilt or ugliness, whatever that thing is, you have to get rid of it to be okay with who you actually are.”

The play had more personal parts of his life, which was new territory for Tom, something he hadn’t done on stage before.

“Previously in plays, I was playing a character, whereas, in this one, I was using my real name”, he says.” It touches on sort of my relationship with my family and my mam in particular.

“It's very interesting to make work about your own life. It brings up the question of who owns the story. It's a delicate thing because you’re dealing with someone else's life. I had to send the script to my mam before it went on to make sure this was all right.”

While Tom doesn’t come from a theatrical household, where his father worked in insurance and his mother was a teacher and counsellor, he can trace his interest in performance back to his time in secondary school at St Peter's College Dunboyne, where several stars of the stage were produced.

“I think the biggest influence was being in school in Dunboyne. I had a lot of brilliant teachers, but I had one in particular called Pat Morris was her name. She was the music teacher, she was a brilliant woman.”

“It's amazing even out of my class and in my year and kind of the years around me, completely disproportionate many people are working in the arts professionally, at a good level. So she would have given me a bit of belief.

“We did a musical in Transition Year, which would have been my first time on stage as an actor which was quite late, I would have been 16 or 17. I'd never gone through drama schools and I was really into sports growing up and I was in a band and stuff like that. Singing was the thing that came first but like it was really through Pat that made me realise I liked telling stories through performing.”

After discovering a love for the stage in school Tom further developed his craft in The Solstice alongside a future megastar of the Irish acting scene. “School was a great gateway then into working doing shows in the solstice theatre navigate”, he says.

“There was a brilliant group called Meath Youth Musical Society. It was run by a great fella called Gareth O’Mahony. It’s no longer around which is such a pity. In 2012 I performed in Les Miserables alongside Paul Mescal. It was clear back then he was going to go on to do well, it was only a matter of time.

“But there are a couple of guys that are on the West End in London now from that group as well as people in every panto in town.”

Despite acting being a notoriously tricky way to earn a crust Tom is working full-time in the sector. While he acknowledges how difficult it is he says being pragmatic is essential to survive in that world.

“It is hard, but I remember being in drama school when I was like, 20 or 21. Everyone was coming out with big dreams and ideas, which is great. But there'd be people in there and they'd be giving out about certain productions on TV. It’s easy to say that’s crap. But you have to remember the actors themselves are fantastic.

“Most actors in Ireland want that job and can't get it. They're the ones who got it. Is the final product always brilliant? No, it's not but it's not the actor's fault. It's like they're working with a script that's not great because the writers are under time pressure or working with directors who have one take to get a shot right.

With that attitude in mind, Tom has always been keen to take the work that comes his way.

“I would say it's a kind of strength and a weakness of mine in a way I think I've been open to doing everything, I've done Panto, I've presented TV shows an RTE, I do a lot of voiceovers, I've presented bingo. I've also been in, some big-budget television and movies such as Vikings, and had some success with my writing.”

Last autumn Tom worked as part of a programme called The Next Stage which is the development section of the Dublin Theatre Festival.

“There were 18 emerging makers and we all looked at the plays in the Dublin Theatre Festival and did workshops. I’m looking at what to do with my show next at things like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Tom recently appeared in Staging The Treaty directed by Anu Productions where he played Eamon Duggan. The show was an 11 hour reenactment of the Treaty debates that was subsequently aired on RTE.

He has also just been selected by Screen Ireland for a mentorship initiative with Paul Howard (bestselling author of Ross O’Carroll Kelly) to develop a number of film and television projects for development in 2023.