Why Game of Thrones’ Liam Cunningham doesn’t want to be called a movie star

I was born in Dublin. At the end of the main street is the main maternity hospital, called The Rotunda. It’s the only piece of Rococo architec­ture we have in the entire city, and I was born there 55 years ago. I grew up about one mile away. I did my schooling and everything in Dublin.

I was walking home from school when I was about 17 with two friends, and they took a left into an electrical shop. While we were chatting away they grabbed a couple of forms and I was handed one. My mum found it and made me fill it in. I got called for an interview, and that’s how I ended up being an electrician for 11 years. There was no career plan. Still isn’t.

The longest I’d been away from my family was a week – and then when I was 22, I hopped on a plane for the first time and went to live in Africa. It was in 1984, four years after Zimbabwe’s independence. A lot of the whites were leaving the country and, of course, they had stolen all the skilled jobs.

I used to do network electricity, high-voltage stuff – I was covered in rubber to stop me dying. They didn’t have people to run the network: I got invited over, and I went.

I came back from Africa at 25. Having been with 16,000 elephants, looking after the national park, which is the size of Belgium – when you go back to driving a yellow van around Dublin, it just doesn’t have the same glamour.