The musician has opened up about struggling to process his emotions after best friend and bandmate Mark Sheehan died in 2023 from a brief, undisclosed illness
The Script frontman has revealed he was unable to cry at the funeral of his late bandmate Mark Sheehan because he was so numb from grief, and has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The singer, 45, lost his closest friend and co-founder when Mark died in April 2023 at the age of 46, following a brief undisclosed illness. The pair had been best mates since they were 13, growing up together in Dublin, forming the boy band Mytown as teenagers before launching The Script with drummer Glen Power in 2001.
In a new interview, the former Voice UK judge admits he struggled to process his emotions after Mark died.
“I spoke at the funeral, I sang at the funeral. And I didn’t cry,” he said. “It was very unlike me – I’ll cry at a Disney movie. I’m super, hyper emotional. I was like, this is going to go bad.”
The musician, whose dad Shay O’Donoghue had died suddenly from a stomach aneurysm on Valentine’s Day in 2008, at the age of 63, added: “I knew grief. I knew this was going to bottleneck at some point and hit me bad.”
Danny says that after Mark’s death, he spiralled into a “dark hole”, leaning heavily on drink, cigarettes and weed. “I think I carried over some of that COVID energy of like, let’s go mental! Like nothing matters anymore,” he recalled.
“Mark’s [death] was probably the heaviest I’ve had, because when my dad died, I had Mark, but now Mark passed away I didn’t have anybody,” he said.
“I’d love thinking, wait ’til I tell him this lyric that I’ve just thought of. And to not have him around for that is really — I would say bittersweet, but it’s just bitter.”
Speaking on the On The Mend podcast, Danny continued. “I just wanted to not be here. Not kill myself, but I just don’t want to be in this reality. Let me go to another reality, like some other dimension.”
A friend handed him the number of a therapist — a decision he says “changed my life absolutely.” It was there he learned he had post-traumatic stress disorder. “When I start talking about Mark, the room kind of closes in a little… My nervous system clamps down and goes, oh no, here’s that subject,” he explained.
Danny admits he spent a year “half bull****ing the therapist” while still partying, until a drink-soaked Christmas back in Dublin — his first without Mark — forced a reckoning. He quit everything cold turkey on 27 December. “Enough’s enough. My relationships were suffering over my selfishness,” he said.
He added that therapy has transformed his relationship with wife Anais Naing, 30, the French events manager he wed in May 2025. “It’s ten times better than it ever was,” he said. “Because I basically pay this guy to listen to everything I’ve done that week that I feel I bottlenecked a bit.”
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