John Connors (actor)

John Connors (born 1990) is an Irish Traveller actor, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker and playwright best known for his role as Patrick Ward in the Irish crime drama series Love/Hate, for which he was nominated for best-supporting actor at the 2016 Irish film and television awards, and for Cardboard Gangsters, for which he won Best Actor at the 2018 Irish film and television awards.

Connors was born in 1990 in London, United Kingdom to an Irish traveller family, and moved to Ireland with his family when he was 11 months old. His father suffered from depression and schizophrenia, and killed himself when Connors was eight years old. Connors took up acting when he was 20 years old after being persuaded by his younger brother Joseph, in a bid to help him with his own battle with depression. Connors began boxing at a young age because he was experiencing bullying. He is a former three-time Irish boxing champion and a four nations boxing gold medalist and was picked by the Herald newspaper for their ‘Future Star’ segment at fifteen years old.

In 2017 he was named in the fifty incredible people who are shaping Ireland by the Irish Independent and he was also named as one of the "twenty twenty-somethings that could influence Ireland and the world" by The Irish Times.

He appeared on an episode of the series Livin' with Lucy (Virgin Media) with Lucy Kennedy, in 2019. Connors won the 2018 IFTA for best actor for his performance in the film Cardboard Gangsters, which Connors also wrote. In his victory speech, Connors criticised the Irish Film Board for not supporting the film, before he talked about his battle with mental health and how acting saved his life. He dedicated the award to his late father. The speech went viral, gaining millions of hits online. Three months later his documentary series, John Connors: The Travellers, won the 2018 IFTA for best documentary series. In the documentary Connors called on the Irish government to formally recognise Travellers as a distinct Irish indigenous ethnic minority, which happened later that year. In his speech, he criticised successive Irish governments for assimilation policies and institutionalised discrimination against Irish Travellers. He also accused the Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council of murder through negligence of the eleven members of the Connors and Lynch Traveller families, eleven of whom died in the Carrickmines fire tragedy in October 2015. Connors's directorial feature documentary debut, Endless Sunshine on a Cloudy Day, won the audience award at the 2020 Dublin International Film Festival.