Oscar pioneer James Martin: ‘When I was growing up I was bullied. Big time’

In a village pub overlooking Cushendun bay in the Glens of Antrim, Oscar winner James Martin is waiting for a Thursday evening quiz to begin.

To his left, a one-bar gas heater warms the former hotel room once packed with guests during its 1930s heyday and behind him a silver candelabra is perched on a piano.

Everyone has kept their coats on – you have to go next door to buy a drink – and rain is pelting down outside.

The Belfast actor and his father, Ivan, join the Whiskey Fudge team and put their £3 entrance fee in a pint glass.

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“Where are you just back from, James?” asks Esther Henry, pulling up a chair around a table covered with an orange and cream check tablecloth.

“New York and then we did the National Lottery awards in Kildare,” he replies after a hug.

“Not America again,” jokes Esther with a mock eye-roll before speaking of her pride in his achievements.

“In fact, I have more photographs of James Martin in my phone than I have of any of my own family,” she says, “because every time he appeared I just had to save the picture.”

It has been eight months since the 31-year-old actor and barista stood on the Dolby Theatre stage in Los Angeles. He made history by becoming the first person with Down syndrome to become part an Academy Award winning team, after the Northern Ireland short in which he starred, An Irish Goodbye, was awarded best live action short film.

At a packed Oscar homecoming ceremony on the top floor of a five-star Belfast hotel in March, The Irish Times asked Ivan where James would normally be: “Thursday is a special night. James finishes work in Starbucks at 4pm, I pick him up and we drive straight up the Glens to our house and go to a pub quiz. We’ve been going for ages, and the quizzers are big, big supporters of James. They were ringing me last night asking if we were able to go as they wanted to do sandwiches for him.

“We can’t wait to get back. We’ll definitely be there next week. No question of it.”

The Irish Times was last month invited by the Martin family to their “oasis”, the Ballycastle holiday home in Co Antrim, close to Cushendun, where they’ve visited for the past 30 years.

Family photos of James and his younger brother Daniel cover the walls – he was Daniel’s best man in April – and in the corner of the bungalow’s livingroom is a tall mahogany cabinet filled with glass trophies awarded to James over the past year.

“We got that piece of furniture last December and there was nothing in it. Now it’s full,” says Ivan.

An Irish Goodbye, written and directed by Tom Berkeley and Ross White, is the story of two estranged brothers reuniting on the family’s rural farm following their mother’s death, and was shot over five days in lockdown on a budget of £25,000 (€28,600).

It has won a Bafta and Ifta as well as an Oscar.

James, lauded for his comic timing in the black comedy, says he ad-libbed a key scene “to make it even funnier”.

A second short film, Fairview Park, in which he plays the brother of Dublin murder victim Declan Flynn – the 1982 homophobic attack by a teenage gang is often seen as a catalyst for the gay rights movement in Ireland – is now being shown at film festivals.

It was filmed on a housing estate in Leeds, and James shot his scenes for Fairview Park after An Irish Goodbye and describes it as a “very sad story” but one he is proud to be involved in.

“The past eight months have been a rollercoaster; it hasn’t stopped,” he adds.

“I’m the first person with Down syndrome to do the hat-trick with those awards, and it’s in the Guinness World Records.

“People think you might be a big-head but I’m not. I don’t feel any different. I’m my own person. I’m an actor and was lucky to go to America to pick up an Oscar and make history. It’s really lovely how people have responded.

“On the day of the awards, I had the best moment with Colin Farrell. He was great craic.

“I’ve kept in touch with the guys from the film. They treat me as a colleague, a friend and an equal.”

Ross White describes James as the “beating heart of the film”, while Berkeley cut short the allotted time for his Oscar acceptance speech to ask the Hollywood A-list audience to serenade James on his 31st birthday.

Asked where the award is stored – it was shared between the team – Ivan reveals he ended up hiding it as it was “too much to handle”.

“It was sitting on the mantelpiece in Belfast. I was going to bed one night and thought, if someone looked in the window ... It’s just sitting there. I took it upstairs, wrapped it in a towel and stuck it in the hot press. The next day I phoned Ross and said, ‘Right, we’re ready to give it to you’, and I dropped it back.”

Sitting in the sunroom of the Ballycastle house with mugs of coffee and mini Twix bars against the dramatic backdrop of Rathlin Island and Fairhead, the father and son look relaxed as they joke while finishing each other’s sentences.

Since childhood James has accompanied Ivan, a broadcaster and sports journalist, to Irish League soccer matches in Northern Ireland, and is often seen on the sidelines doing post-match interviews.

The previous week the pair travelled to New York for a screening of the Oscar-winning film and Q&A at the Irish Arts Centre; they opened the San Francisco film festival in summer and also took part in the Fastnet Film Festival in Cork in May, where there was standing-room only for a screening and Q&A in Schull.

In between, James has met US president Joe Biden at an event marking the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement – Biden requested a photograph with him for his daughter after they watched An Irish Goodbye in The White House – and received an honorary doctorate from Ulster University for his contribution to the arts.

“I was the 18th person in the queue for Joe Biden. It was like waiting for Santa Claus,” recalls James.

“I shook his hand and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr President’. He then asked for my mum, Suzanne, to come in and get her picture taken. The best thing was that he told me I had an invite to the White House.”

There have also been countless charity functions and dinners; earlier that morning James was appointed as an ambassador to Corrymeela, the North’s oldest peace and reconciliation charity, where he attended art workshops as a 10-year-old.

Sport remains a passion – he still plays tag rugby – and the family’s campaigning work for Mencap, the North’s leading charity providing support to people with learning disabilities, continues.

“Someone said to me recently ‘It’s been a whirlwind” and I said, ‘No, it hasn’t. It’s been a tsunami’,” says Ivan.

“I understood fully the frenzy that would be around the Oscars – it’s the Rolls-Royce of awards and I knew there would a kick-on. But I thought, a month, six weeks and it would be history. It’s as intense as ever.”

Demands for selfies are constant. Starbucks offered to put security on the door of its Castle Lane cafe in Belfast, where fans queued to get post-Oscar photos.

On Ballycastle beach earlier that day, where our photographer is taking pictures of James, a woman begins filming a video on her mobile before Ivan asks her to stop.

Is the constant attention annoying?

“Not really; it’s work,” says James, adding that he asks people not to put selfies on social media.

“I think after winning an award, it’s all down to what you can give back. People with Down syndrome and other disabilities have come up to me and asked me what advice I would give them about acting. I tell them to talk to their parents and find a drama group that suits them. I always say to try it out and give it a go.

“When I was growing up I was bullied. Big time. But I always say to people, you never judge a book by its cover.”

The actor’s attributes his big break to a Belfast drama group, Babosh, which he has attended for more than 20 years. “My friend told me about a drama group up the road when I was 10. I went to a special needs school and there was no money for a group so I my asked my parents could I go.

“School for Scandal was my first production and I did well. The next thing the director from [BBC drama] Ups and Downs came along and he wanted me to play a main part.

“I had another call for Marcella [ITV and Netflix drama starring Anna Friel]. Then Covid and lockdown hit and An Irish Goodbye came along.”

Reflecting on his son’s meteoric rise, Ivan recalls the day he was told by a doctor that their first child would probably never speak.

He becomes emotional when he remembers asking a nurse in the hospital delivery room if their son had Down syndrome.

“She told me the doctor would be along in a minute. I’d never been that close to a newborn before so I didn’t know.

“But what I would like to say is that there were many joyful things around James being born. He was our first child. I’m not trying to say it wasn’t a shock, because it was.

“We had this one incident with a doctor, who said to me: ‘Look Mr Martin, you’re just going to have to accept that James will probably never speak.’

“The bottom line is that when we went home with James we very quickly learned that the fact he had Down syndrome was secondary. What we had was a few-days-old baby who needed fed, bathed and looked after, just like any other baby of that age.

“We were delighted with him and we brought him up so that if he wanted to get involved in something, we allowed him to do that. He liked acting, football, tag rugby, swimming ... all of those things worked.

“I subsequently realised that whenever I looked at him, I didn’t see someone with Down syndrome; I looked at him and saw James.”

The father and son agree that there is one particular moment that touched them over the past year: “It was letter from a wee girl in Ballina,” says Ivan, tears running down his face.

“She wrote that she watched the Oscars with her mum and dad and when James came on to get his award, she pointed at the screen and said: ‘Look at that, there’s a guy just won an Oscar and he looks the same as me.’ She was 12 years old.”

A few hours later in Cushendun the pair separate as Whiskey Fudge has too many people in its team, with James joining another group who name themselves Dr James’s Gang.

Quizmaster Paul McSparran thanks everyone for coming out on a wild night and tells them that 83-year-old Pearl McQuillan has set the questions “from her books, not the internet”.

During round three he asks: “How many baseball gloves can be made from a cow?”

James quips “depends on the size of the cow”, and his team-mates roar with laughter.

For Pearl, the actor’s achievements have been joyous for the village quiz she started in 1986 and has been running in the old Cushendun Hotel (its rooms closed to guests decades ago) since the mid-1990s.

“This is where we all get together and have a good old chat, and we’re just thrilled with James’s success, thrilled,” she says.

“We’ve been following him all along. He’s added so much, and it’s lovely to see him come in. He’s so humble and good.”

After seven rounds, Dr James’s Gang wins the quiz outright by two points but there’s a tie-break for the £5 second prize between Whiskey Fudge and Fintan’s Fans (Fintan is Pearl’s 20-year-old grandson, who drives her to Cushendun each Thursday).

“Pearl herself went out and got a very ornate piece of what my mother would have called ‘cut glass’ and presented it to James on behalf of the quizzers the first night he appeared post-Oscar,” says Ivan.

“It’s in the trophy cabinet in Ballycastle with all the Royal Television Society awards and all the Oscar stuff.”

Asked what he would say to the doctor who forecast such a bleak outlook for his baby son, he pauses and replies:

“We can all make mistakes ... but any questions that doctor had over James have been answered by James.”