Stanley Morgan on Mickey Flanagan, Electroshock Therapy, and Finding The Westies’ Heart

Mickey Flanagan doesn’t make a quiet entrance into The Westies.

Fresh out of Bellevue after undergoing electroshock therapy, the Vietnam veteran returns to Hell’s Kitchen expecting to reunite with the friends who never stopped believing in him.

Instead, he discovers the neighborhood has changed while he was away, and the rules he once lived by no longer seem to apply.

It’s a layered performance from Stanley Morgan, who somehow makes Mickey volatile, vulnerable, funny, and heartbreaking without ever reducing him to the unstable wildcard he could have easily become.

Ahead of The Westies’ premiere, I spoke with Stanley Morgan about bringing Mickey Flanagan to life.

While the character initially appears to be the series’ most volatile figure, Morgan saw someone returning home after unimaginable trauma, only to discover the family he’d longed to reunite with had quietly changed in his absence.

His insights add incredible value to the series, so please enjoy our full conversation below.

Hello, Stanley. It’s nice to meet you.

Hi, Carissa. Nice to meet you.

Exciting summer, huh? You got the World Cup, a heat wave, and the Westies beginning.

[chuckles] It’s a big summer.

So, okay. I’m so excited to talk to you for a really weird reason.

Okay.

In the first scene, when we meet Mickey, he is undergoing electroshock therapy. I have always found myself wondering, as an actor, how to begin preparing for a scene that’s so physically intense without making it exaggerated? Because it looks to us, who aren’t you, like it’s really happening, but I can’t imagine that’s easy to do.

Yeah, it’s not. [laughs] I mean, you end up down some very strange YouTube rabbit holes, trying to find footage of these real things happening. As gruesome as that sounds, this is something that happens to Mickey in our story.

And so I wanted to look for the details of what that looks like physically, you know. It’s funny you say that. It was a very big physical experience to do that because it’s the entire body, and your body contorts in such a way that feels completely unsustainable for a long take or a long exploration.

And yeah, many a pulled muscle later, I managed to get it done, but it wasn’t pleasant, nor was it pleasant for Mickey. So I don’t think I was expecting it or wanting it to be pleasant. I’m sure it’s much worse if you have to go through it yourself.

So it’s nothing for me.

And Mickey is clearly volatile and damaged, but he’s also one of the most trusted members of the team. What’s your understanding of who he was before we meet him in the series, and what part of his history is the most important to you as you’re bringing him to life?

That’s a great question. His childhood was the most important part to me. Nothing that I would want to share really, but I think it’s very funny what you say about who Mickey was before this story because, as you said, we meet him when he comes back from being away.

And although there were very pivotal moments in his life that I felt really informed what we were doing, I think one of the biggest ones was being away from your friends and your chosen family.

And having even more of an appreciation of how special that thing was, being on your own, having to talk to psychiatrists, exploring your life and wanting to get into why your brain works and all that stuff and not being around your friends, not being able to have a drink.

I think not being able to just be yourself and really feeling like you’re some kind of medical specimen of some kind.

And I think it gave me so much more love and appreciation for being back with my friends, being back with the people who really love and care about me.

I think that’s one of the biggest parts of the story, that now I know what we’ve really got here and how special this is. I will never let anything happen to this, and then, little do I know, I’m walking into a completely changed field of play.

Right. And carrying the weight of Vietnam and institutionalization and all of those things that they do allude to finally early on.

Yeah.

What does it mean to him to come back and not only be reunited with everybody and be welcomed with open arms, but to see how things have changed in his absence and the new direction that this group is taking?

I think it’s very difficult.

From my understanding of reading and exploring things — not that I’ve ever served in any kind of war zone, but an understanding of what the enemy looks like and what threat feels like and looks like — I think it’s very difficult to then come back to an environment that you remember very vividly as one thing and then you come back and things have really changed to the point where the enemy is now amongst us, and you’re being told that, “Hh, no, there’s a new deal now.

“It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay in the end,” but it doesn’t feel okay, and it can only end one way, I think, for Mickey. We see in the story that it really doesn’t feel good, and it doesn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make any sense because, in Mickey’s head, it can only end one way, and that’s badly.

And for someone like him, everything else has changed while he’s been away. So it would almost seem like that pivotal moment he experienced himself in some way changed his view of things as they continue.

Definitely. And if you’ve been living away for so long with memories of a certain time — the story alludes to the fact that many of them didn’t get to visit Mickey while he was away, and I don’t think Mickey wanted anyone to see him there.

But all you have are your memories and all, and those memories are changing every day, and they’re building every day, just getting back and getting back to see these people.

And then when you get back there, and everything seems to have changed, did those memories even exist at all?

You know, it didn’t feel like a secure psychological framework to be able to come back into an environment that has changed so much to the point where we’re now making deals and working alongside the people that we used to be at war with.

That felt very, very uncomfortable.

This world feels so immersive from the accents, which all of you just knocked those out of the park…

Oh, thank you.

… to the music, and the neighborhood itself; it really has a lot of flavor. How much work went into finding Mickey’s voice, and the Westies in general, to make them feel like they truly belonged in Hell’s Kitchen in that period?

Yeah, a lot, a lot of work went into that. We spent a lot of time exploring different voices because, I think, the thing you touched on is that accent is one thing, but a person’s voice is like another, extra detail.

You just don’t want everyone to be sounding like they’ve all learned how to do an accent.

It’s like, but how does this specific person express themselves compared to how this specific person expresses themselves? Our voices are so personal to ourselves and who we are as people, you know?

I think I spent a lot of time just listening and trying to absorb as much as possible the sounds of the time, but then also looking out for those details of ways that certain people express themselves that I felt aligned with what we were exploring in this story.

Whenever we talk about the Mafia, we almost always go to the Italians.

We do.

They’re a part of this story, but we don’t get to see a lot about the Irish, who work alongside them.

Yeah.

What’s it like bringing that aspect to the forefront, and what’s on your mind that you’re excited for everybody to see?

I’m really excited because I’d heard and seen certain stories about the Westies, but I haven’t seen them represented properly in this period of history.

But it really feels, like you said, that they have been underexplored and underexamined because many law enforcement at the time described them as the most violent, reckless street crew in the history of New York. Like, that’s really saying something.

So I think if we’re going to explore these lives and these periods of history, we’ve got to explore it properly, and we’ve got to explore everyone that was there at the time. I am very glad that we’re examining this group of people.

And yet, you can’t help but root for these guys. They are violent. They are, but they’re just so damn scrappy.

And I’m like, “Okay, we know who the Italian Mafia is, so go get them guys!”

Rise above. That’s it. And I think the reason I love it is that there are so many things you could call them from the outside.

You could say, “Oh, they’re violent, they’re reckless, they’re hell raisers, they’re whatever.” But those are all judgments and you can only judge something that you don’t really understand.

What this show makes you do is really understand why people do the things they do.

I would caution any audience to say, don’t be so quick to judge because who knows what you would do in that certain situation if your best friend was being put in this position, if every morning you were waking up and your life was on the line and it was that level of danger.

Who are we to say that we wouldn’t operate in maybe not exactly the same way? But it’s no easy life. The thing I love about the writing of this story is there’s very few unmotivated acts of reckless abandon.

It’s all coming from a place. Characters are operating from things that they deeply care about and things they deeply need. And I think that’s great.

That’s great drama.

Yeah, heart, history, and camaraderie.

And where you’re from, where you are from.

Absolutely.

I think that’s so central to all of us. And even if you don’t really have an understanding or a feeling of where you’re from, that’s a central part of who you are.

But if you are from somewhere, and someone wants to try and take that away from you, that’s a big driving force in action.

Don’t miss our premiere review of The Westies Season 1 Episode 1, and come back every week after the show drops on MGM+ Sunday nights at 9/8c for more exploration of this volatile and scrappy world.