Inside Greg Wayne’s Creative Mind: Secrets Behind His Most Captivating Stories Revealed
Greg: I should say first that Irish dance is a young person’s game. It’s not uncommon to see a seventeen or eighteen year old world champion. So, when you’re thirty-five and you’re still beating the dead horse of trying to make a career as an Irish dancer, you’re immediately an underdog. In addition to the fact that when the story begins, Irish dance was practically a dead art, and there was very little money to be made.
So, I chose to start the story with Michael as a child having his grandmother instill this idea in him of who he’s destined to be. She sees him dancing so beautifully and she calls him the king of Ireland – and that sticks in his mind forever. And when he’s 35 years old and digging ditches to get by, he’s still thinking, “Why the hell am I not the king of Ireland?” It’s sort of this difficult realization that many of us come to when the years are passing and we’re starting to realize that when our parents told us all the great things we could achieve in life, they were basically lying. And that can be really hard to come to terms with – but in Michael’s case, he’s refused to come to terms with it. So, when he’s approached to do this dance number at the Eurovision Song Contest, he thinks it’s the fulfillment of his grandmother’s prophecy, and that Eurovision number would evolve into Riverdance the show.
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