‘Game of Thrones’ actor remembers witnessing Belfast gay nightclub shooting
Actor Kristian Nairn, known for playing Hodor in HBO’s Game of Thrones, has opened up for the first time on the time he witnessed the fatal shooting of a police officer in a gay nightclub in Belfast. Darren Bradshaw was shot down at the Parliament club in the Northern Irish capital in May 1997. At the time, it was the only gay venue in the city.
“It was an amazing place; there was nowhere else like it,” Nairn told BBC of Parliament. “We were there every Saturday. You’d walk into the bar downstairs, and it’d be absolutely rammed. These are people who’ve been repressed their entire lives. All of a sudden, you have a safe space where everyone’s into the same stuff. It was immensely important.”
Of the fatal night in 1997, he noted, “We hadn’t been there long; we’d probably had our first drink. We were sat down just having a bit of a laugh.” Nairn and his friends noticed the shooter, who had a strange air about him. “Me and my friends were just like, ‘Look at the state of him’,” he said. “He was nervous-looking; he was definitely looking for someone.”
“The music carried on for a second before it came down – I remember a girl stood at the bar covered in blood,” Nairn continued, “This guy just legged it out, sort of kicked the doors open. I made eye contact with him; I think we all made eye contact with him as he was coming out. It happened so fast. It was just like stunned silence, just like a bomb had gone off.”
The fact that Nairn was there that night had a big impact on his personal life too. He said, “I went home, and my mum knew I was gay, and that was fine – my mum’s always been amazing. I told my grandfather I’d been in a shooting, and he was like, ‘I’m glad you’re okay’ and all that. But he was quite a gossipy man in his time, and he was around telling his old farmer friends. One of them had obviously been watching the news, and he was like, ‘That was a gay bar’. And that was how my grandfather found out I was gay, and he threw me out of the house.”
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