Kin season 3 gets green light as RTÉ to film hit crime series back-to-back

RTÉ had already announced that series two had been given the go-ahead, but the Sunday World can reveal series two and three will be filmed back-to-back later this month.

Several locations in the Dublin area have been chosen to film scenes based on the fictitious Kinsella criminal family and their gang.

The final episode of series one saw rival cartel boss Eamon Cunningham (Ciarán Hinds) gunned down in a Belgian airport by Michael Kinsella (Charlie Cox), in a move orchestrated by Amanda Kinsella (Clare Dunne).

The drama is Irish TV's biggest crime series since hugely successful Love/Hate, which ran for five seasons from 2010 to 2014.

Kin was created by Peter McKenna and Ciaran Donnelly, who say the drama was inspired by the infamous Kinahan/Hutch feud.

An average of 621,000 viewers watched each of the eight episodes on RTÉ One last year and there have been to date 2.7m streams on RTÉ Player, making Kin the most successful drama in Ireland of 2021.

The drama charted the lives of the Kinsellas, a tight-knit crime family embroiled in a war against a powerful drug kingpin, Eamon Cunningham.

The series has been sold to several foreign TV stations, with AMC+ screening it in north America, Australia, Latin America and the UK.

The upcoming second season will see the Kinsellas as the top dogs in Dublin, but killing Eamon Cunningham has created as many problems as it solved as they incur the wrath of an enemy even more dangerous than him.

But the greatest threat to the family emerges from within - in the shape of a ruthless, bullying agent of chaos.

Viewers will also find out whether Aidan Gillen's character Frank Kinsella survives a cocaine overdose he suffered in the last episode.

Frank was also seen leading a double life as a secretly gay man, which led to his assistant being gunned down in a case of mistaken identity after Frank tried to meet a young man on a gay dating site.

Actress Clare Dunne, who will also perform her self-penned one-woman play at the Beyond The Pale festival in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, next weekend, says she is delighted to be back filming Kin this month.

"I feel so lucky I'm getting to play a really deep and interesting human being on a prime-time TV show and now I'm just getting lovely feedback from the audience - they are actually saying it to me on the street," she tells us.

See Magazine+ for the full Clare Dunne interview.