“Quarantine, for me, has been okay,” he said. “I’ve been very bored since I’m a very proactive person and I like being busy. After the first couple of weeks, I decided to just chill, and I embraced it. I felt like being back in school on summer vacation.”
“I’ve been a gym-goer my whole life, but I’ve got used to doing home workouts in my bedroom,” he said.
Purgatory is written by Michael Caissie, and co-directed by Caissie and Hayk Kbeyan. “Michael Caissie was fantastic. He was a hands-off director and he trusted his actors, he allowed us to roll with the punches and experiment,” Mahoney said. “I’ve never worked on a set where I had so much freedom to do my own thing before, and I loved that.”
On his experience in Purgatory, he said, “It was a lot of fun and very intense. It’s just a very intense show. Poor Chris has a massive secret that he has buried for eight years, and the truth is starting to come out while he is there. I love the intensity of it since it was definitely a workout for me, acting-wise. I’ve never played a role quite like this before.”
A challenge for him initially involved being dialogue-heavy since it is a very “dialogue-driven” show, where some scenes ran for 14 consecutive pages, but he was able to immerse himself in that process.
This series afforded him the privilege to work alongside such actors as Erik Fellows and Tatjana Marjanovic. “Oh my God. I love them,” he exclaimed. “Erik is great. He has been acting for a long time now, he knows the business and he knows the game so well. Tatjana is so focused and so good.”
As a film actor, Mahoney is known for his work in such movies as Florence Foster Jenkins, Love Will Take Over, and The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. “I adore all of those movies, and their great directors. Florence Foster Jenkins was great because I worked with Meryl Streep, and I had a scene with Dame Maggie Smith in The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The anticipation of acting with them is what every kid dreams of, and then, you are face-to-face with them,” he said.
On being an actor in the digital age, he said, “The digital age has been a huge benefit during the quarantine the last four months. It’s a different way of watching and consuming. The fact that Purgatory is being released each week is exciting, since it brings me back to when I was younger, when I had to wait one week to watch every new episode. There is a lot of value to that. It builds up much more anticipation.”
Purgatory is available for streaming on Popstar! TV.
To learn more about actor Danny Mahoney, check out his IMDb page and follow him on Instagram.
