Fra Fee's new role in 'complex' religious cult drama

Fra Fee has taken the acting world by storm in recent years, with roles spanning stage and screen.

He has said his upbringing in Northern Ireland helped inform his latest performance in a new drama about a fictitious extreme religious cult.

In Unchosen, the cult members deliberately remove themselves from modern life and modern technology, such as mobile phones.

"Coming from a place where religion has very, very much informed our society, there were those obvious, sort of, comparisons," Fee said.

"But this is quite a unique world, it's so, so insular, it's so small and it's separate from modern life, it's quite an extreme version in Unchosen for sure," he told BBC Radio Ulster's Good Morning Ulster programme.

Fee said he grew up in a "highly church-governed world".

"Whatever side of the fence you happened to grow up in [Catholic or Protestant], we're all sort of victims of that old school, traditional religious belief system and going to separate religious-based schools and everything," he said.

"Sometimes when I look back I feel a bit saddened by that because it kept my world really small and it wasn't until I left that I met people that were maybe a little bit different or whatever," he said, adding that "thankfully times are changing".

Fee, who is from Dungannon, County Tyrone, but now lives in England, said he was "extremely" fond of Northern Ireland and loved returning home.

"Your childhood is your childhood and in your formative years you want to see what's on the other side of the rainbow and that was how I felt about leaving home. I wanted to see what life was like and just be fully myself and authentic in a place that was so, so unfamiliar, like a different world," he said.

"I love being from the north of Ireland and most of my mates are from back home. Belfast is just the best city."

Fee's acting credits to date include roles in Les Mis - on stage and screen - The Ferry Man on Broadway, Cabaret on the West End, the Disney+ series Hawkeye and sci-fi epic Rebel Moon.

He has also had roles in Irish films such as horror-comedy Boys From The County Hell and the modern Irish western thriller, Pixie.

Fee stars in Unchosen alongside well-known actors including Molly Windsor, Asa Butterfield and Christopher Eccleston.

The Netflix drama sees Rosie (Windsor) living with her husband Adam (Butterfield) and daughter in a cloistered Christian sect.

The arrival of escaped prisoner Sam, played by Fee, reveals the reality and restraints of Rosie's world - perhaps this hidden religious community does not have her best interests at heart.

However, with Sam's criminal past, the question arises - does the greatest danger lie with the cult or with Sam?

Fee said he was "over the moon" when he was chosen to play the part.

"It's not very often that something comes through that is just so, so brilliantly written and so beautifully nuanced and complex," he said.

"I hadn't figured him out in the beginning at all. On the surface, he's our obvious antagonist in this story, the bad guy, but to reduce it to those terms would do him such an injustice because he's just wonderfully complicated," he said.

Fee added: "It's so easy to paint him in a particular light, but I found myself really falling in love with him, the more that I stayed with him and sort of created this person in my mind."

Unchosen, a six-part series, is available to watch on Netflix from 21 April.