The Saturday Interview: Seamus Finnigan

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The Saturday Interview: Seamus Finnigan
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Not yet a celebrity, and already taking the mickey out of himself. Daniella Northrup has coffee and blarney with Seamus Finnigan, surgeon, part-time model and famous classmate.

One of the unexpected hits to come out of last year's Christmas commercial frenzy was - if you haven't been herding yaks in Tibet - the Warty Dozen, a calendar featuring handsome and eligible old boys from a well known Scottish boarding-school. Nothing wrong in that. Except that the school was Hogwarts' School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and the handsome young men were all wizards - and the buying public couldn't get enough of them. I got three calendars myself for Christmas.

The star attraction on this calendar has since turned out to be Mr. August - a Beckhamesque young fellow with nice abs, angled cheekbones, a shy-guy grin and spiky blonde hair. Oh, and a white undershirt and Levis, which made a nice change from magic robes. Half a million girls made the instant acquaintance of Seamus Finnigan, Year 2001: Healer.

Finnigan himself proved tricky to acquire (for interview purposes). He was constantly at work, and never returned any calls. Eventually, though, government officials procured him for GQ2 as part of a 10-wizard publicity deal - at GQ2 HQ unprofessional comments were made when I drew Finnigan, while my female colleagues had to settle for assorted riff-raff such as Harry Potter, the Minister of Magic, Headmistress of Hogwarts, and Severus Snape (the ex war-hero).

We are supposed to meet at Finnigan's favourite greasy spoon in Soho. He's late - and he's dressed in wizard robes (strangely enough, no one in the place takes any notice. This confirms my impression of the neighbourhood as having no more boundaries at all whatsoever).

In person, and seated opposite me, Seamus Finnigan proves to be a cheerful, wide open Irishman with dark green eyes and artfully tumbled straw-coloured hair. He is not so rangy as pictured in the calendar, and has filled out a little since the photograph was taken. He shakes hands, apologizes, and flops into a chair, crossing his legs to expose biker boots under the navy robes. When the counter-boy recognises him and shouts across the room, Finnigan asks for a black coffee in a charmingly untainted brogue. "Would you like one? I'll go get you another drink." he offers, rising from his seat to collect the coffee.

When he returns, he looks nonplussed when I offer to pay for the drinks. "I thought I invited you out," he explains, dazzlingly.

I have an expense account, I say lamely (a far more flirtatious witticism springs to mind 2 hours later).

"Good for you," he replies, with a cheeky grin.

So. So he must get a lot of fanmail these days. At the mention of the calendar's runaway success Finnigan breaks out into roars of laughter. "Noooo..." he says, when he has breath to speak normally. "I don't. Me and the rest of the lads were shocked at the way it took off in your side of the world. They've been publishing the Warty Dozen for hundreds of years, now, and nobody except little second-year girls at Hogwarts buys em."

Really?

"Yeah. In fact, it was all a bit embarrassing for us." he says, stirring his coffee. "I know Ron [Weasley] was very embarrassed - he got these letters from fifty-year-old women saying they loved his hair and things like that. They would write him two, three times in a row. But I didn't get any. Honest!" he says, seeing my look of disbelief. "I mean, I did get a few, but after my boyfriend wrote back explaining the situation they stopped comin'." (Yes, he is gay. Have you been herding yaks?)

It was in fact his boyfriend - an illustrator for WhizzHard's Comix subsidiary - who set him up for the calendar photo shoot. "They were discussing the Warty Dozen in the office, and he - purely to humiliate me, and totally out of fun - submitted this photo of me doing sunbathing in Ibiza, where we went for a holiday," he explains ingenuously. "He blacked out all the bad bits and they said, can you bring him in on Tuesday?"

Since that shoot, in fact, he has been offered a contract to model Swoosh QuidditchWear, and has appeared in another advertisement for a wizard orphan's charity. Does he fancy being a model? Finnigan shrugs his square shoulders. "I did it for fun. Back then I was a bit wild," he says. "I went out with everybody, tried everything. Fact I used to live around here, somewhere. I've had owls from talent agencies since the calendar. But I couldn't do modelling full-time. No. Too stupid."

And Finnigan is far, far too clever to be just a pretty-boy. A fully-qualified wizard healer, he practises at London's St. Mungo's Institute (no, you won't even find it on a map). And that's Dr. Finnigan to you and me - "I've done one of your surgical degrees. For the exposure. It was very interesting." He does emergency ward regularly, and specializes in wildlife-related injuries. "Bites, burns, maulings, predatory attacks," he explains. "I spent a year in South Africa working on a game reserve. Then another six months in Romania in a - uh - lizard park."

But in London? "Oh, there's animals that you don't get on your side," he explains airily. "All sorts of non-Muggle creatures - you should be glad you don't get them! Just running wild around London, even in the metropolitan areas."

He leans forward to elaborate. "There's a reason I wouldn't go to Regent's Park after sundown - and it isn't anything to do with muggers," he tells me earnestly. "Whereas //you// would be perfectly safe except you might need Mace or things like that." It is unclear whether he is pulling a fast one on the clueless Muggle.

So where would he be after sundown in London, then? "Er - Hampstead Heath?" he says, laughing immoderately at both himself and the expression on my face. "No, how about Stringfellow's? Every now and then when I can afford it. And there's a nice bar near here, called the Dungeon and Dragon - a wizard bar, y'know, and it's like Stringfellow's, except it's for men."

Stringfellow's for men? It sounds like fun, I say. Finnigan blinks. "It is," he says, poker-faced. "The food's //great//."

He has a nearly encyclopaediac knowledge of gay bars and haunts in London, Cape Town and Bucharest. But not of bars in his native Cork. "There's too many. The whole of Ireland is a gay bar," he says, fulsomely, waving his arms around to emphasize the point. "Total. Even the churches. The communion rail," he pursues the thought on a tangent. "Is a form of gay bar."

"But I don't have anything against the church," he says, quickly. "I grew up in it and I have to say it hasn't done me anything but good. If I had children, I'd want them brought up with some kind of religion, and that's a good place to start, wizard or no wizard."

Wizard or no wizard is a phrase that sums up Seamus Finnigan nearly perfectly. His mother was a witch, and his father a Muggle - "she didn't tell him till after the wedding; bit naughty, wasn't it?" - and Finnigan grew up in a quirky mixed household featuring cars and flying broomsticks, cellphone and owl-post. "We had a Muggle tv and a wizard version, so I'd watch the rugby internationals with me dad, and the Quidditch cup with my mum. Fantastic fun." is how he describes it.

The unconventional upbringing was not without pain. "This kind of thing is difficult for you [Muggles] to accept. I mean, look at Harry's relatives and what they did to him for the first 12 years of his life. It was very hard for my dad, and harder for his family. And there were a lot of people from the wizard side who criticized my mum for her choices, and that got reflected on me. Even now there are certain places I wouldn't be able to go because of what my parentage is," he says, more sombrely. "Over here there's a bit of a premium on having 'all-wizard' parentage, and that's difficult for Dean and me, 'cos we're both 'mixed', in fact Dean's family is completely Muggle. So, yeh, it's harder for us."

There is also the fact that Dean Thomas is black, and Seamus Finnigan is white. "Actually this part is universal," Finnigan says, with a bitingly ironic grin. "It gets both wizards and Muggles right up the arse to see us kissing. I really love him, but a lot of people won't accept that."

In one farcical incident, a black man started spitting on Thomas, while a white wizard threw hexes at Finnigan for being a racial pervert. "At that moment, they were united in the brotherhood of hate," Finnigan pronounces solemnly. "Isn't it wonderful?" Right on cue, he breaks into an uncertain but flawless smile, as if to show that he's actually a normal guy, not really funny. But I'm laughing.

"Dean and I had some differences over what it meant to be an interracial couple," he says, earnestly. He ticks off on his blunt, chiseled fingers: "To be an interracial couple, first. To be an interracial male couple, second. To be an interracial male wizard couple... To be a //successful// interracial male wizard couple... You could go on and on. It's enough to make anyone crazy. Dean was more... more concerned than me, because he knows about racism in the Muggle world, whereas I had some pretty naive ideas about our colour issues. But we got over it. It doesn't bother us now."

To this unusual couple, the "colour issues" may be resolved, but they are not underestimated. "I like Dean black, and I know he likes me white," Finnigan tells me, green eyes fixed on me mesmerizingly, trying to gauge my reaction to his statement. "We agreed, that that was part of what we were, and we shouldn't try to change it."

Finnigan himself realised what he was a long time ago. "I was a bit different. I was the joker at school, fat little kid with hair sticking up every which way. Bloody wand never worked - every term I blew up something new. So I guess when it came to growing up and coming to terms with meself, I was just different again. I've never questioned it, though," he says. "Never. It was just the way I had to go."

Finnigan avoids eye contact with me, ogles men passing in the street outside. "It's hard, really, to be different. To be gay, to be a wizard, or a half-blood, to be the joker, to be the white fella. You get so stereotyped. There was a time in my life I'd have given everything to just be ordinary - an accountant or something." He bites a smooth lip. "That was when I was at my worst. Before I met up with Dean again - we'd lost touch after school, see. So I lived around here, did my healing apprenticeship, my qualifying, partied a hell of a lot. Very notorious, I was. But in the end it did nothing for me. I was... I don't know... very lonely in the end. And then I met Dean," he finishes, in a relieved-sounding rush.

He looks a little nervous, twiddling with a lock of blonde hair. "Was it too confessional?" he asks, hesitantly. Then - perhaps panicking - he switches on the brilliant playboy smile again. "There's an excuse," he offers. "I've just seen Harry and his wife, and it's making me twitchy. I mean - to be settled down. I think."

At 30, Finnigan may, in fact, have already settled down. He and his boyfriend have come into something of a winning streak lately - Dean Thomas was responsible for a new comic superhero named Swifthelve who has sold well among teenage wizards. "He actually earned money for that." With the loot, Finnigan and Thomas bought themselves a slightly rundown 50s-style house on the outskirts of Wimbledon. He proudly exhibits a photo of the living room. It looks - bachelorized. But generally clean. "We actually do it ourselves, the cleaning. Looks great, huh?"

He and Thomas have been together for three years now. In fact, they met at a wedding for one of their former classmates - Ron Weasley. "I got seated next to Dean at the dinner table, and it was just instant crush revival," he explains, grinning shyly. "Had a thing for him in my last year, y'see, but after we left school, it didn't happen. I went straight into healing training and he started working. We didn't meet up for nearly ten years."

Is he happy now, though? He lights up, those green eyes twinkling away. "Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah... Really happy. Fantastic." He shoots a glance at the neighbouring table, and then leans across and hisses, "But he beats me every night... I really need help..."

Not even a real celebrity and already taking the mickey out of himself. Typical Seamus Finnigan.

In the middle of a rattling discourse on Muggle perceptions of magic ("you kept making fairy tales out of it, which is why you won't allow yourselves to believe in it - so why d'you think you've lost the knack of making it?"), he suddenly notices the cigarettes in my handbag. "D'you smoke? Can I get you a lighter? Yeah, I tried it once, nearly got hooked - they're a very sexy invention, these fags... I like em. I like em all. The Marlboro men are best."

I still don't know what he was referring to. Your guess is as good as mine.

Returning to earth, he has an appointment at three o'clock with the resident healer at St. Mungo's, and he would like to end the interview on a more serious note. "I'm a godfather," he explains. "Ron's boy. I didn't deliver him, no, but I'm his godfather. Dean's really quite jealous."

"I'm scared. I really know - " (and here a smile) "- and you know now - that I'm not really mature enough for this," he says, pushing his hands into the pockets of his robes. "But life goes forward. You just have to keep taking it as it comes."

He smiles brilliantly, sexily, and stands up to kiss my cheek. "It's quite funny, though, sometimes? Like today. Really exhilarating. -Not too fulsome, am I?"

No, not at all. Exhilarating.

"Oh. God I'm embarrassed," he mutters, grinning again. "Thanks a lot. Can I call you sometime?"

And he is gone, half-trotting across the market square, checking his watch (he's ten minutes late), robes billowing over his atheletic frame. Biker boots ringing on the cobblestones.

Back in the office, I notice my copy of the Warty Dozen sitting on the PC. In light of Finnigan's inside information on the calendar, I hastily, if regretfully, decide to consign a copy of the schoolgirl calendar to the dustbin.

But I keep the August page.

== end ==

Thanks for reading, and I hope Seamus wasn't too odd. As with all my fics, please review (if you wish to) for other readers, rather than me.

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