The comedian, actor and author Ardal O’Hanlon was born in Carrickmacross in County Monaghan, Ireland and in 1994 won the Hackney Empire new act of the year before starring as Father Dougal in the Bafta-winning Channel 4 comedy Father Ted from 1995 to 1998. On TV he has been in My Hero, Death in Paradise and, earlier this year, played quirky hotel owner Seamus in Lisa McGee’s Netflix series How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. He has written three books, including A Plot to Die For, the first in a new mystery series, which came out earlier this month. Next he stars alongside Stephen Mangan, Sarah Hadland and Janie Dee in a new production of The Truth, Florian Zeller’s comedy about infidelity, directed by Lindsay Posner, at the Apollo theatre, London W1, from 9 June to 12 September.

I love a good doc. I've made some myself and I'm really interested in the medium. I watched this one around the time that the US and Israel started bombing Iran, to get a bit of context. It's a very thorough investigation into the 1953 coup that overthrew the first democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, which was clearly engineered by the CIA and MI6. It's extraordinary – really well made. The prime minister was very well educated. He wasn't a communist. He had the temerity, I suppose, to nationalise Iran’s oil industry, which prompted the coup. It's totally scandalous, the commercial interests and imperial interests that were at play. You feel very powerless and appalled by the double standards of American and European powers preaching democracy and yet blatantly overthrowing democratically elected governments – which is ongoing. There's nothing you can do about it but you can watch documentaries and inform yourself.

I published my first detective novel recently and over the last few years, while working on it, I immersed myself in detective fiction, which can be underestimated – but a good thriller can be as revealing as any other novel. Abir Mukherjee is a highly respected crime writer and this novel starts with a big terrorist incident in LA and you immediately assume it's Islamic terrorism, but that's not necessarily the case. There are some suspects on the run – young people who have been radicalised – and their parents join the hunt for them before they get into even bigger trouble. It is thrilling, your heart is pulsing while you're reading it. But also like any good novel, you're looking for something a bit deeper, and in this case you get a good sense of the dystopia that America has become.

I first came across Marc Chagall’s stained-glass windows when I was in Chicago at the Art Institute, where there's a whole room devoted to what's called the American windows. They're stunning. So I've been keeping my eye out for any other Chagall windows and I was just thrilled to stumble upon information about this little church in the middle of nowhere outside Tunbridge Wells in Kent, which, I would go as far to say, has one of the great art treasures of Europe: 12 windows by Chagall. I took a detour there when I was travelling around the UK on my standup tour, a kind of pilgrimage. The colours are incredible – milky blues with the occasional splash of red and purple, and they’re very dreamy and ethereal. You get a shiver when you go into an environment like that, it’s food for the soul.

I watched these films back to back – it was a great day! Nouvelle Vague is a homage to French new wave cinema which I loved in my 20s. It's so impossibly cool. Specifically it’s director Richard Linklaker’s homage to Godard, who made Breathless in 1960. It’s shot in glorious black and white and namechecks all the key players in that movement and just looks gorgeous. Then The Stranger, directed by François Ozon, is a kind of homage to Camus's book [L’Étranger]. It's also in black and white but has much darker themes. It's almost like the flipside of Nouvelle Vague: it's about alienation, disillusionment, ennui. All those things the French seem to do quite well. I watched it in one of my favourite places in the world: the Curzon in the Brunswick Centre in London.

You know how every week you're promised [by the TV platforms], “This is really amazing! This is special!”? Well, I bought into that, I believed that Untamed was gonna change my life, and it didn’t – but it was enjoyable and is a good example of the kind of thing I'm watching. It starts with a bang: it looks brilliant, has charismatic actors, it’s set in Yosemite national park, there's a macho lead detective and a mystery to be solved. It’s slow-moving in places but it keeps you interested with one or two spectacular set pieces. I watch all the thrillers. I think people are drawn to them because we all feel so powerless and puny most of the time and we want things to be wrapped up. In real life there’s very little resolution, but with these shows you get a sense of justice prevailing.

Interview by Imogen Carter