Best of Dublin - Northside Story - Bad Sisters

Following on from the success of the Wild Atlantic Way, Ancient East, Ring Of Cork and Hidden Highlands, it’s high time that we thought about rebranding our coastline so that locals and visitors alike are fully aware of how magnificent it is. I’m proposing the Irish Riviera for all points south of the city centre – emerging from the Killiney DART tunnel you’d swear you were in France or Italy – and the Costa del Dublin for the Clontarf to Skerries stretch which on a sunny day is a match for anywhere in Spain.

The latter is already famous internationally as the backdrop to Bad Sisters, the pitch-black dramedy from the pen of Sharon Horgan which includes the Forty Foot, Clontarf Bull Wall, Donabate’s Beech Carpark, Sutton, Rush, Leopardstown, Deer Park in Howth, the Fingal County Council building and that finest of drinking emporia, Gibney’s of Malahide, among its locations.
Following the grisly season one demise of the odious John Paul – we didn’t know Grace had it in her! – Bad Sisters returned to Apple TV+ this month with a literal cliffhanger.

“People will think we did it in a studio against a greenscreen but it was a real cliff in Co. Wicklow at three o’clock in the morning.”

“That was outrageous!” laughs Eva Birthistle who plays Ursula in the series. “We were on wires hanging from the side of a cliff. It was a big effort to get us into these harnesses and locked on. There were health and safety lectures beforehand and then, when we walked on set, the heaven’s opened and we had the heaviest rain ever.

“People will think we did it in a studio against a greenscreen but it was a real cliff in Co. Wicklow at three o’clock in the morning.”

“Getting harnessed up was exhilarating,” Sharon Horgan takes over. “We were each assigned a buddy and weren’t allowed to move left, right, front or back without it being signed off but when we did the actual scene it was just us and the cliff.”

Watching these nocturnal (mis)adventures with a mixture of horror and admiration was Dearbhla Walsh, the Bad Sisters director whose CV also includes such mega-hits as The Handmaid’s Tale, Fargo and The Punisher.

“They were actually having so much fun doing their hanging and swinging that I had to say to them, ‘Great take but can you look more scared?’” Dearbhla recalls with a chuckle. “The day we found the cliff, the Director of Photography and I were like, ‘Oh my god, it would be fantastic if we could do the scene here!’ and thankfully everybody went with it.”

“There’s the inevitability of the secret being revealed. It’s great for an actor because you’re showing one thing but you’re full of subtext.”

Being strapped to a sheer rock face aside, the big Season 2 bombshell is that Grace has with indecent haste got remarried to Ian who’s as lovely as John Paul was loathsome.
“An awful lot has happened in between the two series,” notes Anne-Marie Duff, AKA Grace. “We find the ‘grieving widow’ at a point of seeming bliss. She’s full of hope and a sense of future. The brilliance of the dramatic irony is that the audience all know that there’s this little demon just waiting. There’s the inevitability of the secret being revealed. It’s great for an actor because you’re showing one thing but you’re full of subtext.”

Ensuring that Grace’s hope and sense of future soon evaporate are the keeper of her matricidal secret, Roger Muldoon, and his meddlesome sister Angelica who knows something is up and won’t rest until she gets to the bottom of it.

One of several new characters, Angelica is brilliantly played by Cobh actor Fiona Shaw who kids of all ages will recognise as Harry Potter’s Aunt Petunia.

“I’m a bona fide fan and was praying that we’d get Fiona because she’s who was in my head when I was writing Angelica,” Sharon resumes. “It doesn’t always pan out like that but she loves the show and said ‘Yes!’ despite there only being one script and a meeting where Dearbhla and I were like, ‘Please come and play with us!’

“Having someone like her on board really helped us hone Angelica and made her flesh and blood rather than just being a caricature. We had a screening last night and she went down a storm. Especially for an Irish audience, there’s so much to recognise in her. Angelica is from a slightly older generation to the Garveys, loves the obituary page and interferes in everyone’s lives. She’s looking at these noisy, wild, free and sexually active women and wondering, ‘How can they even exist?’ She’s from Northern Ireland as well, so her sensibilities are very different.”

Horgan’s enthusiasm for the new Bad Sisters cast member is shared by Eva Birthistle.

“She makes Angelica such a gorgeous, tasty character that you just want more and more of it,” she proffers. “Fiona is massively playful and gets so much enjoyment out of it, which is wonderful to watch. There was a scene on the beach where she’s letting rip and it was so impressive that we all forgot to respond and say our lines!”
We’ve asked Grace the “How are you, Hun?” question, but how are the other Garveys getting on?

“Eva has made peace with a lot of the stuff that was fucking with her in Season 1,” Sharon proffers. “She’s dealing with physical stuff like the menopause and has given up drinking. She’s happy on her own, which I thought was a good thing to put on screen.

“She’s still the matriarch looking after the sisters – Ursula has half-moved in because she’s split up with Donal – and has her flock around her. As with Grace, though, that contentment doesn’t last long.”
Bibi’s turn…

“She’s less rageful because John Paul is no longer around,” says the Cork thesp who plays her, Sarah Greene. “While Ursula and Grace aren’t really coping with that, Bibi doesn’t give him a second thought until the cops start looking at them again. Her biggest thing is transparency. The only way she can protect everybody is if she has all the information. The audience knew that Roger was involved but the sisters didn’t, so it’s a huge thing for Bibi to learn that Grace has kept a secret and the cracks begin to show.

“Along with all of that we get to see more of her beautiful marriage to Nora. They’re going through IVF and trying for a second baby, so you’ve the struggles and emotions that go with that.”
How’s Ursula doing?

“Not great,” Eva Birthistle admits. “The two years have taken quite a toll on her but she’s not verbalising that. In Ursula fashion, she’s trying to patch things up and keep all the plates spinning at work. She’s broken up with Donal, so there’s a major life change in that respect. She’s not really coping and having to self-medicate to get through. It doesn’t take much for it all to unravel.”

Sadly, the baby of the family, Becka, can’t be with us today because Eve Hewson is in the States shooting an as-yet-untiled Noah Baumbach film with George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Jim Broadbent and Isla Fisher. We’re pleased to report, though, that her Bad Sisters character is as delightfully scatty, endearing and annoying as ever.

Asked to describe the atmosphere when everybody reconvened for Season 2, Dearbhla Walsh shoots back: “Like a school reunion that you want to go to! The producer and I specifically scheduled that the first scene on the first day would be all five sisters back on set. It’s the one where they find out about Roger, which causes serious shockwaves.

“Part of my approach to the series is that you experience the dynamic of all five of them. They interact with each other so brilliantly. When Thaddea Graham, who’s one of the new kids on the block in this series, did her first scene she was met with this wall of sisters, which she found so intimidating.

“I told her, ‘The girls are all mad about you’ and she was like, ‘Yeah, I know, but standing in front of them is scary!’ It took Thaddea a while to get used to this force of energy.”

I’d like to shake the hand of the Apple TV+ executive who said, “Fuck this releasing it all in one go malarkey, we’re going to ration Bad Sisters fans to one episode a week.”

“It’s absolutely brilliant that you’re forced to wait and, instead of inhaling it all in one go, let it sit with you,” says Dearbhla Walsh. “Apple paid attention to the fact that family and friends would get together and watch it on Friday night before the Late Late or Graham Norton. If somebody wasn’t there you’d have to wait.”

“There’s such a whodunnit element to the show that it’s good to eek it out and tease people,” Anne-Marie pitches in.

“I haven’t seen any of the new series,” Sarah reveals. “They sent me five episodes but I was like, ‘No, I’m so proud of this I want to watch it week-to-week.’”

Not to be outdone by Eve Hewson, Sarah will soon be seen starring alongside Matt Smith, Robert Glenister and Lindsey Duncan in Sky’s six-part adaptation of Nick Cave’s The Death Of Bunny Munro novel. Did she get to meet the great man?

“He came to set on my birthday but I didn’t want to go down and hound him because he was already getting a lot of that. I spoke to him on the phone, though, and met his beautiful wife, Susie, who designed the dresses I wear in it. Nick’s doing all the music for the series so, yeah, it’s going to be great.”

Like Father Ted, Derry Girls and The Young Offenders before it, Bad Sisters revels in its Irishness and doesn’t feel a need to explain itself to overseas viewers.

“You have to stick to your guns a little bit,” Sharon reflects. “Often the more specific you make something, the more it travels. If it’s too general and homogenised it loses something. I love watching Scandi stuff which has nothing to do with my life whatsoever. It’s pure escapism.

“Meryl Streep declared herself a fan, Steven Spielberg as well. We’ve had some incredibly impressive people say they love the show.

“People do worry about whether the accents will be fully understood and if the jokes will travel but as with Catastrophe, there were always going to be references in there that maybe Americans don’t get but, you know, look it up!”

The aforementioned Derry Girls’ fan club includes Martin Scorsese who left series creator Lisa McGee dumbstruck when he tweeted his approval. Is Sharon aware of Bad Sisters having Hollywood admirers?

“Meryl Streep declared herself a fan, Steven Spielberg as well,” she beams. “We’ve had some incredibly impressive people say they love the show. I’m always pinching myself. It’s just great that it’s out there and still being discovered. I love that Apple focused on the first season again in the run up to the second series going out because we’ll likely get a whole new audience.”

Saying their ‘goodbyes’ at the end of series one, Sharon and her fellow Bad Sisters had no idea whether or not there’d be a second season. Did she write one regardless?

“No, I’m way too much of a scaredy cat to have done that,” Sharon smiles. “I actually needed assurance that if I didn’t come up with something, the onus wasn’t on us to make it. I had the idea for one of the new storylines while we were shooting the first season, but it was when Apple eventually asked for more that we decided to do a writers’ room and other stuff started coming out.”

As raucously funny as it is – scenes routinely have to be reshot because of cast members corpsing, Horgan being the worst offender – Bad Sisters Season 1’s dominant theme was the horrific abuse John Paul subjected Grace and Eva to. Those scenes can’t have been easy to shoot.

“Yeah, it was hard,” Anne-Marie nods. “It was a real acting challenge to play someone who is a ghost of a person. It was a nine month shoot, so I had to hang on to that for a long old time. There’s a sense of osmosis about it – bits of the character do leak into you. You can’t help but carry it a wee bit.

“I got emails from people I’d met somewhere saying, ‘Hi Anne-Marie, I don’t know if you remember me but I wanted to tell you my mum’s story’. It wasn’t just women – I had a lot of men come up to me on the street and talk about their friends’ behaviour. You never ever know the ripple effect of what you do. It can be very, very potent.

“We addressed a lot of things, including rape, in Season 1 of this drama/comedy which hopefully started conversations.”

In an inspired bit of scheduling, Apple TV+ has decided to drop the Bad Sisters Season 2 finale on Christmas Day, which takes care of what to watch after the President’s speech.

“I know, what a turn up for the books?” a delighted Sharon Horgan concludes. “I hadn’t expected that at all. It’s a lot of pressure though! I come from a generation when your Christmas Day viewing was everything and you’d go through the TV Times circling programmes with a biro. It’s a bit like being at Glastonbury and going, ‘Which bands on what stage am I going to catch?’ There’s going to be so much good stuff on, I hope we manage to stand out from the crowd.”

Take it from me, they will!

• New episodes of Bad Sisters can be seen every Wednesday on Apple TV+ with the Season 2 finale debuting on Christmas Day.

• Featured in Hot Press "Best of Dublin 2024" available down below