Kerr Logan is a television star but his mother is a famous traitor

Family comes first for Kerr Logan. As the parent of two boys, aged two and four, the actor has to be practical about his work decisions, especially since his wife, Sara Vickers, acts too. “Any time either of us gets a contract, one of us stays at home and the other flies off,” he says. “We can’t be on opposite ends of the planet because of our children.”
In recent months he took care of parental duties at their home in Edinburgh while Vickers was filming a prequel to the Prime Video series Outlander. Last year it was his turn to leave the nest to film The Boy That Never Was for RTE in Morocco.
The Boy That Never Was follows the story of an Irish couple, played by Colin Morgan and Toni O’Rourke, whose three-year-old boy disappears during an earthquake. A few years later the father sees a child at a train station in Dublin and is convinced the boy is his missing son. Logan plays Oliver, the brother of O’Rourke’s character.
“Trauma can be the making of a person: a call to arms to do the right thing,” Logan says. “Oliver has to put his emotions to one side to support his sister and his brother-in-law. He’s a bit of a waster at the beginning but he ends up being a dependable character.”
A few weeks before filming began in Casablanca and Essaouira, an earthquake hit killing nearly 3,000 and injuring more than 5,000. An earthquake sequence is a part of the script and the producers considered abandoning the project. However, the Moroccan team insisted they continue and tell the story of how a natural disaster can impact people. “A lot of the Moroccan cast and crew were pulling people out of rubble for real a few weeks before filming,” Logan says.
The Boy That Never Was is also set in Ireland. Logan was 11 years old when he left Northern Ireland with his mother, sister and brother, and moved to Lancashire in northwest England. In 2007, seven years later, he was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in London, where he met Vickers in his first acting class. Work started as soon as he left drama school with a role as Matthos Seaworth in Game of Thrones. “That’s the show people ask me about the most,” he says.
After that he was cast in Irish films and TV shows, including Good Vibrations (2012), My Mother and Other Strangers (2016), and RTE dramas such as Dead Still (2020) and North Sea Connection (2022). When he was making North Sea Connection in Connemara, his father, who lives in Northern Ireland, brought his camper van and minded Logan’s boys while the actor was on set.
“When I go back to Ireland, whether it be north or the south, I feel I’m going back home. My sense of home is odd because I haven’t lived anywhere for more than seven or eight years at a time. Edinburgh feels most like my home at the minute, but nothing’s for ever. I feel very lucky to be able to tell Irish stories and I hope it continues.”
The Boy That Never Was is adapted from a book by Karen Perry (the pen name of Dublin-based writers Paul Perry and Karen Gillece). Last year Logan appeared in The Killing Kind, which was based on a novel by the Irish crime writer Jane Casey, and before that he played a controlling boyfriend in Strike, an adaptation of a book series by JK Rowling. “JK told me, ‘You’ve annoyed me and I disliked you so much that I had to write you back into my next book.’ I had to take that as a compliment,” he says.
Logan worked with Margaret Atwood on the TV adaptation of her book Alias Grace. “Margaret came to set a few times and had a cameo. If there’s anyone who’s intellectually intimidating, it would be her,” he says. Next year he will be seen alongside Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman in the second series of The Night Manager, a thriller based on a novel by John le Carré. But despite such esteemed company and literary connections, the actor was upstaged by his family this year.
It started in January when Logan and his wife were sent a picture of the contestants for an upcoming series of The Traitors, a game show in the UK in which 22 strangers compete for a £120,000 prize. His mother, Diane, a retired teacher, and his brother, Ross, were in the picture alongside the host Claudia Winkleman.
“I stared at the picture for so long. I thought it was a joke, that they had been Photoshopped in,” he says. “My wife and I stared at each other and I started to sweat. I was so confused. I didn’t know how my mum had kept it a secret. I didn’t need that kind of madness in January — I was doing my accounts.”
Diane and Ross, who hid the fact they were mother and son from the other contestants, were such a hit on the show that they made the newspapers in Bangor and a local councillor even called for the town’s Queen’s Parade to be renamed after her.
Logan recently met up with his mother in a pub. “Within an hour three sets of people came up, completely bypassed me and went straight to my mother and asked me to take a picture of them with her.
It was wonderfully humbling,” he says. Logan is beginning to excel in humility. His two boys “haven’t a clue” about his or his wife’s professions. “They are desperately underwhelmed when they see us on TV,” he says. But that’s family for you — and Logan would not have it any other way.
The Boy That Never Was is on RTE1, 9.30pm, Sunday