Will Ferrell says he'd love to spend lockdown drinking whiskey in Cork

In an interview on Today FM, show host and Irish Examiner columnist Alison Curtis mentioned Matt Damon's now-famous stay in Co Dublin in recent months.

Damon and his family stayed in Dalkey between March and May, after the actor arrived in Ireland to shoot a film. He stayed in Dalkey during lockdown and was spotted out and about with a SuperValu bag.

"It’s been like a fairytale,” Damon told Spin 1038 at the time. "This is one of the most beautiful places we’ve ever been."

When asked where he would stay in Ireland during a lockdown, Ferrell turned his thought further south.

"Probably at the Jameson Distillery down in Cork, in Midleton. I'd just have a little room up there in the office," he told Curtis.

He was speaking ahead of the release of his Netflix film, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. He said Netflix was the first organisation he reached out to regarding the movie and they were immediately interested in the story.

"We were just lucky enough to walk into Netflix and sort of explain what [Eurovision] was and they, to their credit, kind of got the whole spectacle of it. We didn't go anywhere else in Hollywood, they just said 'we love this idea, we're gonna take it off the market'. So we got lucky."

A keen follower of the Eurovision, Ferrell said he was eager to represent both the heartwarming side of the contest as well as the wacky.

"There's a lot of humour to be had when you watch the show, there's a lot of kitsch at times, but we just thought at the centre of it, it needs to have an emotional base. We thought, gosh, if we can get people to follow these two characters on this journey in pursuit of their dreams against all odds we could kind of achieve both."

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is streaming now on Netflix.