Shane Casey

Shane Casey, an Irish actor and playwright, was born in Cork in 1980 and spent his childhood in Turners Cross, a district of the city. He left school at 16 for an apprenticeship and, at 21, abandoned his training as a painter and decorator to pursue acting. He appeared in The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006). His breakthrough came in 2016, when he played Billy Murphy, a volatile but funny Cork character, in The Young Offenders (2016); when the story was adapted into a television series in 2018, he took up the part again. Casey wrote the play Wet Paint, performed at venues including the Cork Opera House, and acted on stage as the eccentric gossip blogger Osric in Hamlet: Cybermadness. In 2026 he played Mike in the short A Hand to Hold, a British horror film shown at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and Glasgow's FrightFest.