Actor Anthony Boyle (“Manhunt,” “Masters of the Air”) grew up in West Belfast. On the way to school, he would walk past murals of hunger strikers, of murdered children. He was a child, he said, during “the hangover” of the Troubles, the sectarian conflict between Protestant unionists, who were British loyalists, and Catholic nationalists in Northern Ireland that lasted into the late 1990s.

“The history is so recent,” he said. “You feel the pressure of it always.”

So when director Mike Lennox (“Derry Girls”) reached out to him about starring in the FX limited series “Say Nothing,” Boyle was hesitant. The nine-episode series is adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction book “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland,” which is set primarily in Belfast during and after the Troubles. Radden Keefe is American, as is Joshua Zetumer, the showrunner. FX, which produced the series, is a division of Disney Entertainment.

All of this gave Boyle pause. In a recent interview, he described his thinking at the time: “When brothers have killed each other over which splinter group of the paramilitary they belong to, a show on Disney isn’t going to get this right.”

But reading the scripts convinced Boyle to play Brendan Hughes, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. In “Say Nothing,” which premieres Thursday on Hulu, he stars alongside Lola Petticrew, as Dolours Price; Hazel Doupe, as Marian Price; and Josh Finan, as Gerry Adams.

The actors play young versions of these real-life figures, who engage in or sanction acts of violence in pursuit of a political goal. (Adams has consistently denied his involvement with the IRA, though Hughes, who died in 2008, and Dolours Price, who died in 2013, both disputed this.) The series captures both the youthful excitement that fighting for a cause can kindle and the devastating reverberations that come after.

“It felt like a lot of the questions that were raised were questions that I, as a young adult, have about how we heal and move on from a traumatic recent past,” said Petticrew, who is also from West Belfast.

Boyle likes that the series leaves those questions unanswered. “You can’t say, ‘This is definitive: They’re a baddie; they’re a goody.’ We need to ask the audience, ‘What would you do?’”

The stakes of the project felt highest for Boyle and Petticrew, longtime friends. “The thing I find the hardest is the responsibility toward my people, my community, to pitch this really right,” Petticrew said. But while all of the actors are too young to remember much about the Troubles firsthand — Finan is 31; Boyle, 30; Petticrew, 28; and Doupe, 23 — they understood the seriousness of the subject, which made mutual trust and the occasional visit to the local pub that much more important.

The four actors have since scattered to other projects, but on a Saturday afternoon in late October, they gathered on a video call to discuss history, politics, trauma bonding and why even a Disney-affiliated show can be useful. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Q: Growing up, what did you know about the Troubles? What were you taught?

Boyle: Growing up in Belfast, it’s not something that you’re sat down and taught; it’s everywhere. It’s woven into the fabric of your life. A lot of people haven’t moved on from it. People still have murdered sons, murdered family members.

Doupe: Growing up in the South [the Republic of Ireland] was very different. I remember being a child in the car on the way to another county, and something came on the news about the North and the Troubles. I remember asking what the Troubles were and my parents not really being able to describe it. It was nothing they could sum up in a car ride. That made it sort of feel like it was far from me, on the other side of the world. And that makes me really sad.

Finan: In Liverpool, it wasn’t taught in schools or really talked about, which must be a tricky thing for my Irish friends and colleagues to stomach, given how close we are. The flight from Liverpool to Belfast is less than an hour. When I first got on that plane, it struck home how much I don’t know and how shameful it is that it’s not part of the national conversation in England.

Petticrew: I have a massive problem with it being called the Troubles. It minimizes what was a war, and it makes Britain and the south of Ireland able to distance themselves from something they were instrumental in.

Q: How much did you feel that you need to learn about the real people you play?

Finan: As much as possible. I’ve got no idea why they thought I could play Gerry Adams. He’s a very different person from me. He moves in a different way and speaks in a different way. When I watch interviews of the real fellow, he seems to have a different sense of energy. I went a bit mad prior to starting shooting. I read many, many books. I had a Gerry Adams YouTube playlist on repeat. I wanted to make sure that I knew enough that people weren’t going to be like, “Who’s this English [expletive]?” But I never assumed that I knew everything.

Petticrew: Dolours is a lesser-known person, and that gave me a lot of freedom. I also thought it was really important to make a distinction between the real-life Dolours and the Dolours in the script. At the end of the day, this is a few people’s version of what happened, based on oral history. Out of respect, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to reach out to anybody that knew her, and I didn’t think it was necessary. My job as an actor was to just play what was on the page.

Doupe: Same for me. There wasn’t too much to go on with regards to the real-life Marian. There’s a handful of interviews and maybe one video. As Lola said, that gave me a freedom to totally focus on what the script had to offer.

Boyle: The last 10 years, I’ve been playing Americans and English people and telling other people’s stories. This, I just had it in my bones. I was like, I know this. It’s what Eddie Redmayne or Benedict Cumberbatch probably feel when they’re playing someone that goes to Oxford. This isn’t a huge leap for me. It’s probably the most honest performance I’ve ever given.

Q: Did you have sympathy for these characters?

Boyle: You have all the sympathy in the world, because you have to completely be emboldened in your decisions and your choices, and they have to make sense to you. If you judge them, then you’re doing a pastiche of a performance and there’s too much ego.

Petticrew: If we had gone in making these great moral judgments, the show wouldn’t be able to do what it does really well, which is dance in the gray area. One person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist. You can get bogged down in semantics all you want, but we’re just presenting a thing that happened. I’m a young person who still lives here, and it always felt like, well, if I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, I don’t think anybody at Disney does. But my hope is that it starts really meaningful conversations.

Q: What was filming like?

Doupe: We really all lifted each other up. One of the greatest gifts of this show was to meet and become close with the Belfast people who made up about 90% of our cast. They have the greatest craic known to man.

Q: Has making the show made you think about your own politics, your own beliefs? Are there things that you would fight for in this way?

Petticrew: Everybody has that. Every person has something or someone that they love so much that they would lay down their life for them, whether it’s a cause or a relationship.

Doupe: There are a lot of things I care about in my life — people and causes and animals. It’s really important to stand up and to be selfless. Growing up, I did not know that much about the Troubles. This series has brought something to me that I’ll never forget. It is not “the Troubles of the North of Ireland.” It’s also my trouble and my responsibility.