A young actor in the new RTÉ crime drama Kin had a hairy moment during filming when he was chased by two real gardaí who thought he was fleeing and carrying a weapon.

Actor Clare Dunne who plays the matriarch in the new Irish gangland series peels into laughter as she recalled the incident.

She and co-star Charlie Cox – of Boardwalk Empire and Daredevil – were shooting a scene in a café in Dublin when the real-life drama unfolded.

“They were shooting a young actor Ben (Carolan), and he had to do something where he was getting out of a van, and he was running along with something in his hand, like a weapon.

“But I don’t even think it was a gun.

“But some real guards chased him, and there was a whole thing of ‘No, no, no, this isn’t real’.

“I think it was Ben himself who was the most shook.”

What Clare found most funny about the incident was young Ben’s terrified reaction.

“He is playing this really tough young lad then all of a sudden he is ‘No, no, no’.”

Dunne describes it as “a mistaken moment” and says the guards “very quickly swooped in and sorted out.”

And she said that filming while trying to accommodate Covid restrictions added to the confusion.

“I think everyone going around in masks and then the mix of actor guards and then there would be real guards in hi-viz jackets and all this kind of thing.

“It just turns into a melee of masked people in lots of various hi-viz stuff.

“And when you don’t see a camera, you think there could be something going on.”

Aidan Gillen said incidents like that could happen when filming in public areas but offered a few words of caution.

“Because of the Covid restrictions, we ended up having to shoot in a lot of areas that weren’t as public as they might have been.

“Without giving anything away, we did find we would try and stick to one street for a week or two, and it was quite controlled because it just had to be in order for us to continue shooting.

“But it (filming) does open you out to the city quite a bit, and that stuff is going to happen.

“And you want to be careful.

“If I’m an actor and I’m running down the road carrying any kind of weapon, I’m always really wary of what I might meet in terms of armed police.”