Theater Interview: TOM MORAN (Starring in National Tour of "Tom Moran is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar")

AN HONEST INTERVIEW ABOUT LYING

Tom Moran is many things: a stage and film actor, a writer, a voice-over artist, a budding author, and a podcast host of Personality Bingo. Under the auspices of The Abbey and Culture Ireland, he’s been to Sydney and Melbourne with his one-man comedy show, Tom Moran Is a Big Fat Filthy Disgusting Liar, and is now heading out for a multi-city North American tour, April 15-May 3, 2025, including Off-Broadway’s Irish Rep Theatre from April 15-20, followed by Chicago, Kansas, Portland, and Toronto. And I’ll be at his one-night-only performance at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles on April 30. Even with a busy schedule, he made time to chat with me for Stage and Cinema.

With his popular show, Moran has become a touchstone for the mission of Ireland’s National Theatre: “To bring upon the stage the deeper emotions of Ireland.” Before we get to those deeper emotions, you should know that Moran was recently listed as one of Ireland’s “Rising Stars” in Hot Press magazine. In 2022, he won Best New Writing Award for this play from Fishamble Theatre Company at Dublin Fringe, then played to sold-out crowds at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and, in 2024, at The Abbey, Ireland’s National Theatre. The play’s been optioned for TV.

The charismatic Moran pitches his story as “an honest play about lying,” revealing that he’s been desperate to be loved all his life, becoming a people pleaser at the expense of knowing who he really is. With some help from therapy, he’s reconciled his eating disorders and his lying, and the family relationships at the root of all that.

For Moran, it was a personal (and funny) show about his life, until Abbey’s Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin pointed out to him that his story was bigger. “She was able to see something that I could never see in the show, that it’s a metaphor for Ireland, in our journey from being a very repressed, conservative, very Catholic country into being radically transformed over the last ten years, with the legalization of gay marriage, abortion and our welcoming policies to immigrants and refugees.”

As a young boy, the eldest of three sons, Tom tried to navigate his mother’s struggle with rage and depression, doing everything in his power to be the perfect son: “As kids, we obviously don’t have a nuanced understanding of trauma and mental health, so as a little boy, I developed all these coping mechanisms of being a people pleaser, excelling at school, wanting to be the best little boy.”

But one day he didn’t want to go to school and lied about feeling sick. Mom called his bluff with, “’I’m going to send you to the doctor. And if he says you’re sick, you can stay at home. And if he says there’s nothing wrong with you, you’re going to put the uniform on and we’re going straight into school.’

“I had decided I was going to be a professional actor, and this was no problem. I’m really good at faking it. So I did my best, I wasn’t going to do a sore throat or a sore ear because they had scopes for that kind of thing.”

Instead he said he had a sore tummy, “You know, thinking I was being super smart. And the doctor starts poking and prodding and then he hits this one spot and I say, oh yeah, that’s the pain and he tells me that’s exactly where your appendix is. So the doctor sends me for an ultrasound.” At this point, Tom knew he was in too deep to try to resist but he figured they wouldn’t find anything anyway, and it would all be over.

Unfortunately, a Nurse Ratched type, with zero bedside manners, began prepping him for the ultrasound and told his mother, “‘He’s too fat for the ultrasound, we can’t see through his flap.’ And this was the first time I’d heard anyone call me fat. So I’m struggling with this big wave of shame, for lying and for being fat.”

Then the doctor says, “Since you are here, why don’t we just take it out. And in the end it was about me committing to this crazy lie that spiraled totally out of control.” (Yes, it was removed!)

“And I suppose the question of the show became what kind of child would tell a lie like that and not come clean about it for 20 years after the fact? Because I only told my mom and dad that this happened when I was like 29, just before this show opened. So that was kind of the way into the story.”

What he didn’t know as a child was that his mother was adopted. “It was the 60s and it would have been a very different Ireland back then, Catholicism would have had a proper hold over the country, there certainly wouldn’t have been the kind of access to mental health services, or even just the language around words like trauma, intergenerational trauma, shame, any of these things. And I suppose mom, like loads of people of that generation, just wouldn’t have spoken about it, it was just the way Ireland was.

“She became a mother in the 90s—as her first-born I think it awakened all these feelings of pain, confusion, resentment, abandonment about her own adoption. I imagine she thought, ‘I love this little child so much, how could anyone have given me away, why wasn’t I loved like that.’”

Tom thought he was to blame for her anger and depression but, “It wasn’t me at all, it was this much, much deeper pain she was never taught to process. I just sort of learned if I was really good, mom would be okay, mom would be safe, mom wouldn’t hurt herself. And that gave rise to a feeling about myself that being me wasn’t enough. Lying is a really good defense mechanism for not being true to yourself.”

While this all sounds like a three-hankie weepie, it isn’t. “Thankfully, my story has a happy ending, in that I have really brave parents who were willing deal with this head on. In my twenties, we went into family therapy and got to the truth of what was really going on in the house. It was an incredible kind of exorcism of shame and pain for me. It’s not exactly a Hollywood ending, but my mother went on to become a therapist, working with kids who are adopted themselves.”

Tom says she tracked down her birth mother and met her, and that in part, with this show, he feels his family has really healed. “Before I did the show, the fear for me was that my mom would feel exposed or blamed, because that’s not how I feel. I wanted to acknowledge the bravery of my parents. And I know for a fact, my mom finds it incredibly moving to see how people don’t judge her or blame her for anything but actually relate to and admire her. One woman even said she thought she could never deal with having kids, and now seeing this show, she thinks she can.”

As far as healing himself, Tom’s come all the way round. “After the tour, later this year, I’m getting married!”

Maybe that IS the Hollywood ending after all.