NEW YORK — Kerry Condon was in the thick of Oscars season two years ago, bantering and glad-handing from London to Los Angeles, when she took a breather to campaign for a different kind of prize.

Nominated for her first Academy Award for the pitch-black tragicomedy “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Condon had crossed paths with “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski at many an industry event and gleaned that his follow-up feature would be set in the world of Formula One. When the Irish actress realized he still needed a female lead, the high-octane project piqued her curiosity. Realizing this character would go toe-to-toe with Brad Pitt, she became all the more intrigued.

Thus Condon did something she had never done in her two decades in Hollywood: “I literally just sold myself like crazy.”

Sitting down with Kosinski, Condon pragmatically pointed out that her pair of passports would make traveling and working abroad less of a headache for the globe-trotting production. She also noted that the film wouldn’t need to pay for her housing during its England shoot because she had a London apartment. Having worked with frequent Pitt collaborator David Fincher on the scrapped series “Videosynchrazy,” Condon mentioned that the director could vouch for her professionalism. And she posited that playing a jockey in the HBO series “Luck” taught her how to get up to speed on an unfamiliar sport.

“I knew it was a big shot in the dark,” Condon says. “I’d never seen an Irish woman as a female lead in a big, massive Hollywood movie. ‘Banshees’ was quite arty, so there could have been a sense of, ‘Well, you’re not bankable.’ There’s millions of reasons, so I didn’t presume I’d gotten it.”

Kosinski ultimately bought Condon’s pitch. A couple of days after the Oscars, he called to offer her the role. As Condon subsequently strolled the streets of Los Angeles, a stranger clocked her expression and offered an observation: “You must have gotten good news.”

“I must’ve still been beaming,” Condon recalls. “It was the best week of my life. I mean, I’d been at the Oscars and been nominated, and then I got this dream job that really put me off where I wanted to be — which was a leading lady.”

To those who have been paying attention, the big-screen breakthrough that began with “Banshees” is overdue. An icy stare, a warm nod, a spit-fire spiel — Condon has long excelled at delivering whatever a script requires. In playing Caesar Augustus’s naive sister in the HBO epic “Rome,” a hit man’s grieving daughter-in-law on “Better Call Saul” and a secret-harboring teacher in “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew,” she has developed a reputation as a habitual scene stealer. Even when Condon voices Iron Man’s F.R.I.D.A.Y. system in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, her disembodied performance rings with pluck and personality.

Condon moves up to the front seat of another summer spectacle now that “F1” is in theaters. As Kate McKenna, the first female technical director of a Formula One team in Kosinski’s fictional flick, the 42-year-old plays the numbers-crunching aerodynamicist with an incredulous streak, effortless authority and a sharp tongue. When it comes time for her and Pitt’s plucked-from-retirement racer to radiate on-screen, Condon shows she also knows her way around a simmering romance.

“I like that it’s a little new for her,” Kosinski says. “In a big movie, you still want great actors. It’s not about the size of the movie — it’s about who’s the right fit for the role. And she was the perfect person to play Kate McKenna.”

As Condon sits down for lunch at the Four Seasons in Midtown Manhattan on a mid-June afternoon, hours before “F1’s” world premiere at Radio City Music Hall, it’s easy to understand how she won over Kosinski. While Condon points out she has lived in the United States as long as she lived in Ireland (she left home at age 16), her Irish-accented charm, mischievous humor and wholesome essence endure.

Eyeing my recorder on the table, she leans in and raises her eyebrows.

“It’s like we’re in one of those espionage movies,” she whispers with a smirk. After suggesting that we share a couple of appetizers, Condon relishes the meal on a day packed with so much publicity that she otherwise might be running on an empty stomach. “I don’t mind it,” she says, “except my tummy starts making loads of noise, and then I get really embarrassed and I’m red in the interview.”

Raised by an unfussy family in the unfussy county of Tipperary, Condon caught the acting bug at a young age, eschewed one teacher’s suggestion that she go into accounting and in 2001 starred in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and “Hamlet.” Then 18, Condon made history as the youngest to perform the part of Ophelia at the RSC. But it was the former play — penned by Martin McDonagh — that set the stage for her career’s most fruitful artistic partnership.

After Condon reprised her “Inishmore” role for a 2006 off-Broadway run and returned to New York for the 2009 production of McDonagh’s “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” the playwright and filmmaker cast her in a small part in his acclaimed 2017 movie “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” When McDonagh subsequently wrote “Banshees,” he imagined the character of Siobhán — the no-nonsense sister of Colin Farrell’s sad-sack Pádraic — with Condon in mind.

A pair of infinitely memable “Banshees” scenes put the range of Condon’s talents on display. In one, as Siobhán gently declines the advances of Barry Keoghan’s town simpleton, Condon conveys volumes with a smile and a shake of her head. In the other, as Siobhán lashes out at Brendan Gleeson’s character about his petty feud with Pádraic, Condon wields eye rolls and f-bombs with uproarious aplomb.

“I love that the ferocity and danger she had onstage as an 18-year-old is still intact in the movies she now gets to make,” McDonagh says over email. “The only surprise is that it’s taken the world so long to see what we saw onstage 20 years ago.”

Asked what he appreciates about Condon, Farrell writes: “Too much to admire about Kerry to share it all, but I suppose it’s a close finish between her fearlessness and honesty. But honesty has to always win out. So that. She’s just a truth teller.”

In the wake of “Banshees,” Condon at last exited the audition circuit and skipped straight to fielding offers. But even when she used to vie for a dozen roles without booking one, Condon says she mostly didn’t mind the audition grind, crediting the repetitive process with honing her craft. It was only when she regularly got down to the last two or three for a coveted part and fell short that the letdown left her questioning her place in show business.

“That’s when it started to get a bit like, ‘F--- this s---,’” Condon says. “I kind of didn’t know how I could change that. I’m not going to go out and try and make myself famous just to make it easier because it’s not really my style to do something like that.”

As those dream parts failed to materialize, Condon accepted a few gigs in the name of financing her passions — specifically, her love of horses. After filming “Luck” a decade ago reignited that youthful infatuation, Condon adopted a pair of horses, including one she rode on the show.

“Some people have children, and they’re allowed to have children,” she remembers thinking. “Well, I’m having horses because that’s what I deserve and that’s what I want.”

When Condon subsequently bought a farm in Washington state, where she now oversees a slew of rescue horses and other animals, she says her lender changed the down payment from 20% to 30% at the 11th hour — prompting her to rapidly find a project to replenish her drained savings. But as Condon says, “There’s no shame in working for money.” If “Banshees” and “F1” hadn’t changed the equation, she would’ve been perfectly content working when she needed to work and spending the rest of her days tending to her animals.

“Even though I wasn’t getting these big, massive roles, I was really content in my life,” Condon says. “Also, I kind of always knew that I was good [as an actress]. I didn’t need a lot of confirmation from other people.”

Kosinski, who shaped “F1’s” story with screenwriter Ehren Kruger, says the character of Kate was inspired by Susie Wolff, the Scottish ex-racer who is now the managing director of the all-female F1 Academy. Undergoing a crash course in Formula One, Condon read Adrian Newey’s “How to Build a Car” and picked the brain of Bernadette Collins, a Northern Ireland native who became one of the circuit’s first strategy engineers.

An ability to rattle off Kate’s labyrinthine lingo with conviction was one of Condon’s top assets. As the production filmed during tight windows in real-life race weekends — attended by hundreds of thousands of fans in Hungary, Belgium, Italy, Japan and more — Condon also took being low maintenance to new heights.

“I couldn’t be asking for makeup checks or stuff,” she explains. “But that’s easy for me because I grew up in the country.”

That mindset informed how Condon played the romance between her character and Pitt’s Sonny Hayes. Although Condon has seen many a film with a “sexually confident” female love interest, those characters never rang true to her.

“I don’t really know a lot of girls that are like that,” she says. “I really wanted to play this as someone who’s super confident in her job, but when it comes to romance, there’s still a quite sweet — jeez, how can I describe it? — kind of a girly aspect to her.”

That approach is most evident during a scene toward the end of the film, in which Kate plays peacemaker between her team’s at-odds drivers — Pitt’s convention-bucking vet and Damson Idris’ cocksure rookie —- over a game of Texas hold ’em. While Kate lets her hair down at a Las Vegas hot spot and deals flirtatious glances, Condon also rules the table with the same put-the-boys-in-their-place command she summoned in “Banshees.”

“She has the strong personality of a woman who can exist in a man’s world,” Kosinski says, “and have that grit and that toughness and the smarts to embody this character.”

When Kate utters, “Plenty of people think I don’t belong here,” it may as well have been Condon addressing her own winding path to mainstream success. But the actress has no plans to forget her modest roots. Case in point: Audiences can next see her in a brief but impactful appearance as a forestry services worker in the meditative drama “Train Dreams,” which was acquired by Netflix out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is set for a November release.

“It feels very natural for her to be able to bridge these worlds between doing something very small and very intimate and then going to a big summer blockbuster,” says Clint Bentley, the director and co-writer of “Train Dreams.” “People who come into contact with her, whether they be the audience or filmmakers, they just want to be in her presence.”

With all due respect to her admirers, the feeling might not always be mutual. Although Los Angeles gets knocked for its isolating sprawl, Condon finds herself oddly at home there.

“I like being alone,” she says, “and I think that city allows me to be alone.”

For all of the pulse-pounding thrills of shooting “F1,” one of her most cherished memories from the production is the night she returned to her Abu Dhabi hotel and quietly watched a shooting star from her balcony.

Asked toward the end of our conversation if there’s anything she’d like to add that we didn’t touch on, Condon flashes a playful grin.

“God no,” she blurts out. “Are you joking? If it’s not coming up, I’m grand about it.” After all this time, Condon remains sheepish in the spotlight. But following years of stops and starts in an unforgiving industry, she’s still prepared to forge ahead at full throttle.

“There’s a lot to be said for things coming later in life,” Condon says. “I think if this had come to me a long time ago, I would have pulled it off, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much or slept as good every night. Coming now, I felt like, ‘Yeah, I can act opposite Brad Pitt. I can totally do this. I can totally handle all this pressure.’ It just came at the right moment for me.”