John Connors doesn’t have a writing credit on the Oldenburg-bound mental health romance Crazy Love, but the film remains an intimate portrait of the actor-producer’s life.

“I’m very grateful for the childhood I did have, but it’s all led to this film,” the Irishman tells The Hollywood Reporter. He plays Clayton in Dylan Stagno and Kevin Treacy’s movie, co-directed by Treacy and Jason Byrne. Clayton, a bipolar, suicidal man, voluntarily checks into a mental hospital and falls in love with a schizophrenic patient, Anna (Jade Jordan). But as their friendship blossoms into something more serious, Clayton is forced to face the severity of Anna’s health, as well as the reality that she might never be able to leave.

“I’ve been cast mostly as hard men and gangsters my whole career,” says Connors, known for roles in Irish crime drama Love/Hate and Jason Connolly’s Cardboard Gangsters. “And I said, ‘I need to grab this myself and take it a different direction … I’m going to produce a film that I act in, and it’s going to be different. It’s going to be a romantic film of some sort.’ I wanted to do something around mental health.”

He took the idea to Stagno, where the pair discussed Connors’ colorful upbringing in the Irish traveler community. His father, who suffered from depression and schizophrenia and spent time in mental facilities himself, died by suicide when Connors was just eight. “My brothers and I used to go thinking that we were visiting him in a dojo and [that] he was going to get his black belt,” he laughs while recalling turbulent memories of his early life.

Stagno came back — after obeying Connor’s command to watch Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, which the actor says depicts the relationship dynamic he was envisioning — with a first draft of a script that same day. And while Clayton isn’t a direct portrayal of Connors’ late father, the movie became an “inferno of trauma” for the star. “I was confronting a lot of demons,” he admits. “I knew I [had] a lot of unresolved trauma going into it, and I did have a fear about it, actually. But to make matters worse, while we were in pre-production, my mother got ill.”

His mother, the “one consistent light” in Connors’ life, was sick with cancer and later died. Through the shooting of Crazy Love, he relied on the kindness of his friends, castmates and creatives, including “dear friend” Jade Jordan, to prop him up. “I was on the brink of suicide myself when I was 20, so I was dealing with all of that and then my mother was dying. It was really horrific,” he tells THR. “But this film got me through it all in a very dark way,” he adds. “I learned long ago from a director called Jimmy Smallhorne when I was doing theater: ‘You never run away from the emotions you have in that day. When you wake up, you run towards them.’”

Clayton and Anna’s relationship is one of hope, however, and that’s something Connors was adamant about. “One of the things I love about [their] relationship is… There’s an innocence to it. They’re not jumping into bed together and all that,” he says. “They’re just there for each other platonically, as much as they are romantically… And I’m just glad that it has that hope, because if it doesn’t, what are we saying to people with mental health problems? That there’s no hope? That’s not a message I could get on board with.”

Crazy Love is, at the same time, a searing examination of the corporate tendency to dehumanize those suffering from mental health issues (one of the more trenchant scenes in the film shows the facility’s chairman grimly telling staff to “think about the shareholders, too”).

We’re privy to this analysis in Kevin Glynn’s role as the unforgiving onsite psychiatrist Dr. Bracken, battling with patients Benny (Graham Earley) and Patty (Pom Boyd). “Kevin and Jason, they wanted to show the institutional corruption — how people are being churned in and out of the system,” says Connors. “It’s very easy to lose your enthusiasm working in these systems. I myself worked as a support worker for five years in a rehabilitation program. I know how tough it can be.”

At a time where Ireland‘s suicide rates are worsening, he says, attempting to destigmatize mental health has never been so important.

The festival circuit has long-celebrated the best of Irish cinema, but maybe no more so than now following the success of last year’s genre-reinventing Kneecap by Rich Peppiatt, which first landed at Sundance, and Tim Mielants’ Berlinale premiere of Small Things Like These with Cillian Murphy. Robert Lorenz’s 2023 Irish action thriller In the Land of Saints and Sinners with Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Jack Gleeson and Ciarán Hinds, premiered in Venice in 2023 to positive reviews. And in 2023 director Colm Bairéad’s Quiet Girl became the first Irish-language feature to land a best international Oscar nom.

It helps to have global A-listers like Murphy, Neeson, Colin Farrell or Saoirse Ronan on your side, but now there emerges a push for Ireland-set stories, too: Darren Thornton’s comedy Four Mothers got its world premiere at last year’s London Film Festival, and just this week, Toronto premieres Saipan, a sports drama about the Republic of Ireland’s national soccer team.

Perhaps no creative represents this demand like the booked and busy Connors. As it turns out, Crazy Love is not the only Irish film premiering in Oldenburg — and not the only Irish film Connors stars in.

He features in all three films debuting at the German festival: aside from Crazy Love on Sept. 13, he has David Merriman and Jim Sheridan’s mystery thriller Re-creation, a fictional courtroom drama exploring the murder of French producer Sophie Toscan du Plantier in Ireland in 1996, and Edwin Mullane and Adam O’Keeffe’s comedy drama Horseshoe, following four estranged siblings who reunite to settle their late father’s will. “Funny enough, Oldenburg has three John Connors films this year,” he smiles. “It’s kind of crazy, but I’m delighted with that.”

“Irish cinema, I think it’s on the up,” says Connors about the country’s recent run of form. “We hit above our weight for a small island.” Culturally, he says, his country carries a lot of weight on an international scale. But in the film industry? They’re playing as the underdog. Still, he adds, “it’s a bright future for Irish film and creativity.”