‘Mattress Mick is my guardian angel’

“I would have nothing without Mick. He’s like a guardian angel,” says Paul Kelly, the man behind Mattress Mick, a character familiar to many Dubliners.

The pair met in a pub five years ago, when Kelly recognised Michael “Mattress Mick” Flynn’s face from his furniture business which at this point was in, “a bit of a turmoil”.

“I was in the doldrums a little bit but I was always determined not to let things get the better of me,” Flynn told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.

“I had put into place a plan to sell mattresses and beds, because that was the biggest part of my business. I knew very little about social media, but I had an idea,” he said.

The furniture business had taken a nosedive during the recession, but Flynn still owned one of his shops in Coolock and decided to open his mattress shop there. To be competitive he knew he had to be, “a little bit different, a bit quirky”.

Burdened with debt and struggling, Paul Kelly had just started a video making business and saw an opportunity. Between the pair of them the idea for Flynn’s alter-ego, the wheeler-dealer Mattress Mick, was born.

“It was my idea to Americanise Mick and put his face out there. I remember him saying, “What, my face? Look at me!” and I said, “Yeah Mick it’ll work, because if I remember you after 20 years, it will work. We just needed to come up with a new name,” recalls Kelly.

He started working with Flynn making viral videos of Mattress Mick advertising the shop. No money changed hands, but for his trouble Kelly could use the Coolock shop as a studio for his other ventures.

Director Colm Quinn’s interest was piqued after Kelly invited him into the studio for a look around. He began filming the pair as they strove to make Mattress Mick an internet sensation. The result is the funny, sometimes heart-breaking documentary, Mattress Men.

Scantily-clad women

Both men admit they need each other for their success but tensions between them are frequently played out on screen. On one occasion Flynn put the kybosh on a scene with Mattress Mick and some scantily clad women.

“I get all sorts of people coming up to me. I get kids asking for a selfie, I get the grannies, I get everybody. That type of thing doesn’t cause me too many problems but it might have caused some offence. I’m appealing to a mass audience – I want everybody to buy a mattress from me,” he said.

Kelly lays his life bare in the documentary, so much so that Flynn worries what his family will think when they see it. But Kelly hopes people will take something positive from his struggle.

“I’m living in me mam’s house. I’m 43 and I can’t live with my kids because it’s overcrowded. The only way I can see for me to get a house one day is fighting for life. I’m hoping when people see this film it will give them some sort of hope,” he said.

For the full conversation with Michael Mattress Mick Flynn, Paul Kelly and Colm Quinn, go to Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher and irishtimes.com.

Mattress Men is in cinemas now.