Róisín Gallagher: I grew up in a world where I heard people say, ‘he’s a Protestant but he’s very nice’

Róisín Gallagher comes from a staunchly religious Catholic working class family in a suburb of west Belfast. In the upcoming Sky Atlantic comedy drama The Lovers she plays Janet, a woman from a staunchly Protestant working class family in a suburb of east Belfast. The series, written by David Ireland, was filmed last summer in the middle of the marching season. In one scene, an Orange parade is seen processing down Janet’s road, which is festooned with Union Jack flags.

Gallagher and I are sitting drinking coffee outside Neary’s pub in Dublin as she marvels about the fact that despite living in Belfast all her life, she found herself filming scenes for The Lovers on streets in her city that she’d never visited before. “It was new for me, as a person from west Belfast to be on the Newtownards Road around the 12th of July … we’d normally be in Donegal like everybody else from the west,” she says.

How did it feel being on those unfamiliar streets at that contentious time of the year? She pauses. She clearly wants to be careful with her answer, conscious that for many people the 12th is a cultural celebration. “It felt alarming to me that I found it strange and alien,” she says. “I can’t speak for everybody who was born in 1987 but I grew up thinking the Troubles didn’t affect me and then moving away from Belfast I remember thinking, ‘Oh, actually, I just went into a room full of new people and I’m trying to figure out if they are Protestant or Catholic by their names.’ It’s so ingrained but you don’t realise… I grew up in a world where I heard people say ‘he’s a Protestant but he’s very nice,’ and not knowing anything different.”

Gallagher has dark hair, expressive eyes, a ready smile and the kind of face that looks strangely familiar even though she’s not a household name. Not yet. She is wearing a denim jacket, a red crop top and a beautiful new scarf designed by Irish company Electronic Sheep. The scarf was “a wrap gift” from the night before when she finished making the second series of The Dry, directed by Paddy Breathnach.

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Final scenes completed, she is slowly starting the process of “shedding” Shiv Sheridan, the character she plays in the hilarious and moving RTÉ drama by Nancy Harris. In the first series, described as “an Irish Fleabag” in The Guardian, we met Shiv, newly sober and in recovery having recently moved back to the family home in south Dublin from London. Gallagher is excited for fans of the show to see her character’s trajectory in the second series. “It’s all about how do you live, how do you stay recovered? Nancy’s writing is just brilliant…”

I’m very grateful to Lisa McGee. She’s a hero of mine, for telling stories not just of the conflict, but of the people’s experience of living in a place

—  Róisín Gallagher

That first lead role in a television series was the Belfast actor’s “big break”. With the Sky Atlantic brand behind it, The Lovers is likely to reach an even wider audience. The plot centres on Janet, a sweary supermarket worker who has lost the will to live. One day, in a frankly preposterous turn of events involving a shotgun and a garden wall, she crosses paths with a famous (in Britain at least) political broadcaster from London called Seamus played by Johnny Flynn. Seamus has a celebrity lifestyle, a high-maintenance girlfriend and an ever-higher opinion of himself. Shelf stacker Janet is devoted to reality TV and cursing but knows nothing about politics. They make the oddest of odd couples, but there is immediate chemistry between “these two aliens encountering each other”.

I suggest to Gallagher that the six-part romantic comedy with a stellar supporting cast that includes Conleth Hill and Alice Eve would not have been made if it weren’t for Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls. That televisual juggernaut woke producers up to the fact that Northern Ireland could offer much more than a bleak Troubles narrative. Gallagher does not disagree. “I’m very grateful to Lisa McGee. She’s a hero of mine, for telling stories not just of the conflict, but of the people’s experience of living in a place and I feel that’s what Janet is,” she says. “The Lovers is the story of living in that place but it’s not a story about the Troubles. It’s an exploration of the grit, the humour, the resilience of the people of Northern Ireland and Belfast and I was very proud to be part of that.”

Janet, like Gallagher, was a product of those cross-community, “hands across the barricades” school trips seen in Derry Girls, “ceasefire babies” as that generation are sometimes known. The reality was more nuanced. “Janet grew up in a restrictive, difficult community that is very hard to get out of with limited resources… when we meet her she’s not in a good place. But for me The Lovers is about moving on. It’s about expansion. It’s about coming out of the role you’ve been stuck in and seeing the rest of the world. I feel like that’s what Seamus helps her to do.”

She says she did a lot of research in preparation for the role of Shiv in The Dry, trying to get inside the head of a young woman who is new to sobriety. She enjoys the psychological interrogation of characters. “They open me up to new worlds,” is how she puts it. There was less research needed for Janet in The Lovers, a Protestant with a bleak backstory. “I didn’t feel like I had to understand a different psyche… for me, tapping into Janet was about finding the similarities with my own life. Working class, small community, limited resources and opportunities. A sense of good enough. You’ve a job, a roof over your head, why would you go looking for anything else? I know who she is.”

Gallagher grew up with four siblings, three older sisters and a younger brother. “All of them have proper jobs with pensions,” she laughs. She was the only member of her family not to go to Queens University, the only one to move away, to enter a creative industry, to be self-employed. Still, it was not off the stones she licked it. There was always storytelling and singing around the dinner table in her house. Does she sing? “I do, yeah.” Playing Eliza Doolittle in a school production of My Fair Lady was a pivotal moment. “Something just clicked, I realised this was my tribe. Now it was scary, at the same time, but there was something about exploring the world through this character that meant I knew I never wanted to do anything else.”

She mentions that she still struggles with ‘Catholic guilt’ but is also keen to point out ‘there was no bigotry in our house’

The Catholic religion was a key part of her childhood. There were often prayer groups held in the house, and always prayers at bedtime. Mass was not just attended on Sundays but on holy days too. How did she feel about religion as she grew up? “Wow. Huge question,” she says. “It was so much a part of our upbringing, it was just normal. I remember meeting someone when I was a child who didn’t believe in God and I couldn’t understand it.” But there was an evolution in her thinking. She recalls a family trip to Rome where she couldn’t get her head around the opulence of the Vatican. When she eventually stopped actively taking part in the rituals that were so integral to her family life there was, she says, “no great fallout from that”.

She does admit to being “a wee bit nervous” telling her dad that the man she wanted to marry, an electrician from Scotland, was an atheist. “But it was never a big deal.” The couple met on a night out in 2012 when she was performing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Scotland. (He’d never been to the theatre before that night but then she didn’t know much about sockets or rewiring houses.) Is Gallagher an atheist herself? “I’d actually describe myself as a very spiritual person,” she says. “I find my peace and my god in nature, standing beside a tree or swimming in the sea.”

She mentions that she still struggles with “Catholic guilt” but is also keen to point out “there was no bigotry in our house”. When it came to discussions of conflict it was always, “why are human beings doing this to each other? It was the kind of house where you were always encouraged to take a different seat at the table and see other people’s perspective.” Her mum was a nurse and her dad, who died six years ago from cancer, was an oil truck driver.

“It was very much a community of forgiveness, a belief in non-violence… I remember daddy saying you just don’t go out, you don’t go to the bars because somebody is going to ask you to do things you don’t want to do. So you keep in your safe space and what happens is your world becomes very small. That helped me understand Janet and her small world. It’s very hard to get out of those communities.”

Gallagher got out, though, to Scotland where she studied drama a the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow, graduating in 2008. On leaving drama school she travelled around the UK doing mostly stage work. It seemed an obvious step to move to London “but I got no work, I was standing outside the sweetie shop not able to get in …” I ask her why she thinks it was so difficult, did she feel at a disadvantage in terms of her working class Belfast background? “I didn’t understand it at the time, but looking back there was something I didn’t have, and putting on a posh English voice wasn’t cutting it.”

With London not working out as she had hoped, there were regular calls from home to work in Belfast venues such as The Lyric. She starred in several plays such as Weddins, Weeins and Wakes by Marie Jones, Dockers by Martin Lynch and Pentecost by Stewart Parker. “I didn’t realise at the time I was honing my craft, finding my artistic integrity in these places.”

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She was keen to get more meaty television roles – she was in a couple of episodes of Doctors and later played a detective in the BBC’s The Fall – but often found herself consumed with self-doubt: “Imposter syndrome can be debilitating.” In response, she began working with “a mindset coach”. She doesn’t think it was a coincidence that she was doing an online course with that coach, a woman who is also an actor, when the request for a self-tape for The Dry came in at the start of the pandemic. She’d never done a south Dublin accent before, it felt daunting to even try. “I was working really hard to actively challenge my ‘I can’t do this’ mentality. My coach helped me, just for the craic, to try the complete opposite approach.” As a result, Gallagher made the decision to invest in a dialect coach to prepare for the online auditions. “I asked for the help and I got the help,” she says simply.

She’ll never forget the call to say she’d got the part. “I was sitting in the back garden, it was sunny. I just remember thinking, if I don’t get to play Shiv I’m really not sure what I will do. I was so invested.” Her own joy at getting the call was nothing compared to the delight of “my husband, my mummy who cried, my sisters. It was gorgeous. That all made it so special.” But then she was left “crapping myself”. The fear was real. The Dry was her first major television role, “a huge learning curve. But I had this village of people behind me, I had a coach saying ‘do we want to go down that road?’ when I questioned myself. I was learning to rely on myself, I was learning a toolbox of things.”

Along with all her natural talent, she clearly took that toolbox into The Lovers. Gallagher is compulsively watchable, a natural comedian bursting with star quality. She embodies a kind of fierceness and vulnerability, whether laughing in awkward sex scenes or pensively observing a retreating Orange parade. What does her mother think of the fact that she is playing a foul-mouthed loyalist from east Belfast in her latest job? Amazingly, Gallagher hasn’t got around to telling her yet. We both laugh at this. Why not? “Just didn’t mention it, funnily enough. It didn’t occur to me to tell her.”

There’s something about staying in Belfast for me as an artist. We’ve lost a lot of people, a lot of really brilliant people… I want to be able to stay

—  Róisín Gallagher

Belfast polishes up beautifully in the series. There are scenes in the fancy Merchant Hotel and around the very cool Cathedral Quarter that will no doubt see people who’ve never been to the city making urgent plans to visit. Gallagher couldn’t be more thrilled about this. “Belfast is vibrant, creative, warm, poetic. It’s a city that wears its heart on its sleeve. I’m delighted with how all of that looks and sounds and feels.

“I’m interested to see how it lands with the Northern Ireland audience, the Irish audience, the British audience and in America. I know that each of those communities will hear and see it in different ways, so it will be fascinating. I hope I’ve done the city and the character proud.”

For now, though, she’s itching to get back up the road to Belfast. To cook dinner for her sons, aged six and three, and hang out with her husband. She can’t wait to catch up with her sisters and go for early-morning, head-clearing walks with friends. She’s not sure what her next acting job will be – “you always worry, will there be another one” – but she still works occasionally in her old school, St Genevieve’s High School in west Belfast, directing student A-level productions. And she’d like to do more writing. When her father was diagnosed with cancer she began recording his voice and his stories as a way to process her grief and honour his memory. “It was therapy,” she says of the resulting play, Natural Disaster, which she performed to critical acclaim at the MAC in Belfast.

Whatever happens next, Gallagher has no intention of leaving the town she loves so well. She often gets asked about her choice to put down roots in Belfast given her peripatetic choice of profession. People find it unusual, she says. “You live in Belfast? And you’re an actress? And you do that job in Belfast? And you don’t live in London or America?” Her priorities for herself and her young family are clear, even though she is slightly mortified to admit she now lives so close to her childhood home that “I could be at my mummy’s door in less than one minute…”

“Family means a lot to me and I feel very lucky… there’s something about staying in Belfast for me as an artist. We’ve lost a lot of people, a lot of really brilliant people… I want to be able to stay.”

The Lovers starts on Sky Atlantic on September 7th.