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Bursting onto our Sunday evening television screens with a jive, jump and swagger, actor Johnny Ward boogied all the way to the Dancing with the Stars grand finale. Throughout the competition he and his partner Emily Barker received high praise and the elusive three 10s from the judges.
But, sitting down with Irish Country Living, Johnny reveals that his first foray on the floor was not quite as successful as his latest endeavour.
“People when they looked at it (Dancing with the Stars) used to go, ‘Well he’s a trained professional dancer’. No I’m not, I’ve never done any dance lessons.
“I think I was kicked out of an Irish dancing lesson when I was about six, because, well, I hit someone and they said to my mum: ‘Get him into judo’,” Johnny recalls.
Undoubtedly, Johnny was very impressive on the show, but he also had a lot to contend with. His father sadly passed away during the series. Before he died, he asked Johnny to reach the final for him.
And so, his son soldiered on and did just that, using dancing as a distraction. The week following his father’s funeral, Johnny and Emily’s contemporary ballroom piece to the song Rise like a Phoenix was emotive and admired by all.
“We started that dance two hours after my father’s funeral. It was straight into rehearsals, we just put so much into it. I found myself saying, ‘Oh ya, let’s do it’. Anything Emily asked me to do I just kept saying, ‘Ya’, as opposed to, ‘I’m not doing that’.
“It was really therapeutic, you’ve so much going on inside you, you’ve so much depression in you and you’ve so much guilt, regret – what if I’d said that, what if I’d said this? There was so much negative energy, we were like, let’s use it, let’s use this dance floor as a blank canvas.”
The day after the competition, Johnny’s mother had a heart attack, but thankfully she is feeling better now and is out of hospital. The actor moved back in with his mother in their Dublin family home and is happy to see his mum on the mend.
Copper Face Jacks
Despite these challenging circumstances, Johnny is upbeat throughout the interview. He remembers his father warmly, recounting the support he supplied in abundance over the years – taking his son to auditions and learning lines.
Flicking through the voice recording app on his phone, Johnny shows all the recordings of the two of them reading scripts together, which he would listen back to so as to commit them to memory. His father also got to see him star in last year’s Copper Face Jacks: The Musical.
This summer the acclaimed production is once again returning to the Olympia Theatre in Dublin. Initially, it was Paul Howard – of Ross O’Carroll Kelly fame and writer of Copper Face Jacks: The Musical – that attracted Johnny to the play.
“I saw it advertised that Copper Face Jacks: The Musical was going to be a thing and I said, ‘That’s not going to work out at all, is it? That’s going to be absolute crap. I’m not having anything to do with it’,” laughs Johnny. “But then I just saw two words: Paul Howard. I was like, this is going to brilliant. He’s just so good at what he does.”
It’s a love story as well as being hilarious and I find with Paul’s work, you can ham it up, panto it up and do it OTT, but there’s actually a lovely sincerity to it as well
Johnny plays Dublin bad boy Gino Wildes, who extensively styles himself off Conor McGregor. Despite the pomp and ceremony associated with this character, who subsequently falls for Noleen Nic Gearailt from Kerry, Johnny says there is substance to him.
“It’s a love story as well as being hilarious and I find with Paul’s work, you can ham it up, panto it up and do it OTT, but there’s actually a lovely sincerity to it as well and if you play the part more sincerely, it comes across a lot funnier.
“I didn’t want to completely do a Conor McGregor impression, because there are all those sincere moments, where he’s genuine and has feelings for Noleen, which I think is actually a really lovely thing to see you know, because he’s not like that at the start.”
Showbiz and stage school
From acting to dancing and musicals, really and truly, Johnny’s stardom is on the rise. But, it has been steadily since his breakthrough role as Paulie in Love/Hate (another bad boy character, which Johnny laughs has no reflection on his real life).
However, he is quite pragmatic about fame, and says that you can’t get complacent. “My mum always says to me, ‘Be careful who you meet on the way up, because you’ll meet them on the way back down’. You can never get comfortable.”
I took on my own advice that I give my students in drama; that if something’s bad, because we all have ups and we all have downs, to use it emotionally to your advantage
Interestingly, one of his favourite elements of showbiz is teaching stage school. “It’s really rewarding for me to see a child coming in who’s really timid in September. There could be something at home or they could be being bullied in school or pressure because of exams. Then come June, you just can’t shut them up, because they have found this new lease of life.
“It’s like what I said I did (on Dancing with the Stars), I took on my own advice that I give my students in drama; that if something’s bad, because we all have ups and we all have downs, to use it emotionally to your advantage. Use that emotion as a colour and actually be more creative with it.”
With Johnny passing down his tips to the next generation of budding actors and actresses, we are sure the future of the stage and screen is in safe hands.
Copper Face Jacks: The Musical returns to the Olympia Theatre, Dublin 10 July to 10 August. For ticket information and booking, see www.ticketmaster.ie.
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