Fra Fee Reflects on Faith, Identity and New Role in ‘Unchosen’

Actor Fra Fee has said his upbringing in Northern Ireland played a significant role in shaping his performance in the upcoming Netflix drama Unchosen, which explores life inside a fictional extreme religious cult.

The series centres on a closed-off community that has deliberately cut itself off from modern life, rejecting technology such as mobile phones. Fee, who plays a key character in the show, said the themes resonated with aspects of his own background.

“Coming from a place where religion has very, very much informed our society, there were those obvious, sort of, comparisons.But this is quite a unique world, it’s so, so insular, it’s so small and it’s separate from modern life, it’s quite an extreme version in Unchosen for sure,” he said while speaking to BBC Radio Ulster in Good Morning Ulster programme.

Fee, who grew up in Dungannon, County Tyrone, described his early years as shaped by deeply rooted religious structures. “Whatever side of the fence you happened to grow up in [Catholic or Protestant], we’re all sort of victims of that old school, traditional religious belief system and going to separate religious-based schools and everything,” he said.

Reflecting on that period, he added: “Sometimes when I look back I feel a bit saddened by that because it kept my world really small and it wasn’t until I left that I met people that were maybe a little bit different or whatever,” before noting that “thankfully times are changing”.

Now based in England, Fee said he still maintains a strong connection to his roots. “Your childhood is your childhood and in your formative years you want to see what’s on the other side of the rainbow and that was how I felt about leaving home. I wanted to see what life was like and just be fully myself and authentic in a place that was so, so unfamiliar, like a different world,” he said.

“I love being from the north of Ireland and most of my mates are from back home. Belfast is just the best city.”

Fee has built a diverse career across stage and screen, with credits including Les Misérables, The Ferryman on Broadway, Cabaret in the West End, and the Marvel series Hawkeye. He has also appeared in films such as Rebel Moon, Boys From The County Hell, and Pixie.

In Unchosen, Fee stars alongside Molly Windsor, Asa Butterfield, and Christopher Eccleston. The story follows Rosie (Windsor), who lives with her husband Adam (Butterfield) and their daughter within a secluded Christian sect. Fee plays Sam, an escaped prisoner whose arrival begins to unravel the hidden dynamics of the community.

The narrative raises questions about power, control, and trust, as Rosie is forced to confront whether the greater threat lies within the cult or with Sam himself.

Fee said he was “over the moon” to land the role, describing the script as layered and compelling. “It’s not very often that something comes through that is just so, so brilliantly written and so beautifully nuanced and complex,” he said.

He also highlighted the depth of his character, noting: “I hadn’t figured him out in the beginning at all. On the surface, he’s our obvious antagonist in this story, the bad guy, but to reduce it to those terms would do him such an injustice because he’s just wonderfully complicated,” he said.

He further added, “It’s so easy to paint him in a particular light, but I found myself really falling in love with him, the more that I stayed with him and sort of created this person in my mind.”

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