Saoirse-Monica Jackson holds out her phone in frustration in the pub. “My internet’s not loading!” she cries. She had been intending to show me a Spotify playlist which includes songs from Laura Marling, Radiohead and Sinéad O’Connor, but her phone is refusing to play ball. She created the mix to help her step inside the mind of Natasha, the character she plays in the upcoming adaptation of Three Sisters, which premieres as part of Dublin Theatre Festival next month.
Making a playlist for a character created by Anton Chekhov in 1900 is very on-brand for Jackson. The actor, who burst on to our screens in Derry Girls in 2018 as sparky schoolgirl Erin Quinn, is excellent at reinvigorating history.
In Derry Girls, thanks to creator Lisa McGee’s writing, she and her co-stars reframed the history of Northern Ireland through the lens of funny, ordinary families. In the recent Netflix series The Decameron, Boccaccio and the Black Death got a fizzy, humorous revamp courtesy of Jackson and the cast. And she has recently been featured in Vogue, detailing how she gave her spectacular dress for her August wedding a glow-up – she attached brooches from her mother’s wedding dress, added tartan to reflect her husband’s Scottish heritage, and asked the designer, Annie of Annie’s Ibiza, to make the dress transformable for evening, with a shortened skirt.
If her new husband, Glasgow DJ Denis Sulta, is pretty good at mixing and remixing, Jackson is no slouch either.
READ MORE
We’re sitting in a traditional pub a few steps up the road from the Dublin 6 school building where, an hour earlier, Jackson and the cast from Three Sisters were rehearsing under the direction of Marc Atkinson Borrull. Angled around a long table, there was a good-natured energy and frivolity to the scene being enacted: with every opportunity for wiggling hips, snarky looks and kissy-kissy teasing taken.
This is Chekhov 21st-century style, reframed by Dublin playwright Ciara Elizabeth Smyth, with the emphasis on amplifying the comedy in the tragicomic narrative of the Prozorov siblings, who are stuck in the suburbs and long to return to Moscow. Alongside Jackson, the cast includes Alex Murphy (The Young Offenders), Megan Cusack (Call the Midwife) and Máiréad Tyers (Extraordinary). “A lot of it is about a failure of human connection, of being heard, of setting boundaries or getting what you desire from life,” says Jackson. “Ciara has brought the comedy to the forefront of this story.”
Along with humour, there’s a nervous tension in the rehearsal room – a couple of actors get red-faced when they mess up lines, and there’s a real first-week-of-school energy in the air, a keyed-up caution. Now that we’re out of the rehearsal, there’s a bit of tension in the pub too. “Thank God you got a drink too,” she says when I arrive at the table with two glasses of beer after she’s asked for a half of hops, making me feel like Sr Michael catching Erin with a dead nun and a missing lipstick in detention.
If it takes a while for Jackson to warm up, it’s understandable. There has been enormous media coverage of her wedding to Sulta, whose real name is Hector Barbour, most of it without input from the couple themselves. She’s become wary of the style of articles being written about her, if also resigned. She says she doesn’t google herself and never reads the bottom half of the internet. “I’m not tech-savvy,” she says. “It would never cross my mind to read the comments. Everyone can get weird messages on Instagram. I’m an adult. I understand.”
At a more pragmatic level, it’s 6pm. It’s been a long day of rehearsals and this venue has been suggested because the rehearsal space closes at 6.30. When we arrive the pub is blissfully empty. Twenty minutes later we’re roaring at each other as the babble rises, neighbouring tables swap stories and American tourists explain to their friends that the Guinness in Ireland “tastes different from the Guinness that is exported”. It’s a miracle no one comes over to ask for an autograph.
It’s hard to miss Jackson. She looks virtually the same as she did on Derry Girls playing Erin, the fast-talking, diary-keeping teen. Petite with big blonde hair, today she’s in leggings, white socks, leopard print trainers, a silky jacket and white top. A gold necklace hangs around her neck and her nails are painted a pale pink, with a three-stone engagement ring dominating her left hand.
Jackson, now 31, was just 24 and barely out of the Arden School of Theatre in Manchester when she was cast in Derry Girls. Fresh and funny, her talent was obvious. Her comic timing was wonderful; she could pull her face in so many different directions she looked elasticated. And the ensemble fizzed with energy; everything worked. “I look on it as such a privilege to cut your teeth in that way,” she says. “I was in ways so naive, so keen and up for it. I didn’t have massive anxieties and worries because I didn’t understand what was to come. I wasn’t consumed with viewing figures or how things were going to turn out or be perceived.”
Derry Girls mattered to Jackson on a deeper level because she and her friend (and recent bridesmaid) Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, who played Michelle Mallon, were from Derry. Jackson recognised the authenticity of the tale writer Lisa McGee was telling, and how different it was from boilerplate templates of the past. “The story of the North has so often been told through the eyes of older men,” she says. “The fact that she’s telling it from a child’s perspective – you get the innocence and the message of how hard it was for people to raise families.”
The show elicited a wider understanding of how audiences around the country viewed the North. “We aren’t taught our own history at school,” she says. “Our parents would teach us. But they still refused to teach children in the north of Ireland what happened during the Civil War and Bloody Sunday.” After the series aired, it wasn’t just fans from abroad who got in touch with Jackson to tell her they had learned a lot. “People from Dublin, Cork, other counties, they said to me, ‘Oh I didn’t know’. For me and Jamie-Lee it was an honour to tell the story of our hometown. I don’t think there will be any job that will ever mean as much to me.”
When Derry Girls concluded with a rousing, emotional finale in 2022, Jackson moved on, netting film roles in the DC superhero flick The Flash, and Upgraded on Amazon Prime, and top billing in Netflix’s bawdy, slapstick take on The Decameron. She felt bolstered by the knowledge she already had a hit under her belt. “To cut your teeth in a show with such unprecedented success, it gave me confidence that I was worth my salt and could handle things and handle the workload,” she says. “It gave me a hunger to continue working.”
That’s not to say it has been easy. She sometimes felt undermined from within. She has struggled with impostor syndrome. The day she got the Derry Girls audition, she had just been sacked from a job selling door-to-door HelloFresh recipe boxes in Manchester. School in St Cecilia’s College in Derry was sometimes a challenge because of her dyslexia. “Looking back now, I can see it sort of shaped me and how I am,” she says. “I had the experience of feeling I was caught behind. There are so many times where I look back at being in school and think: I wish I’d had the capacity to advocate for myself more. But dyslexia has pros and cons to it. It’s a double-edged sword. I just process things in a different way.”
I wonder if it has made her more nimble in her thinking, because she’s had to solve problems that others don’t experience. “I’m always thinking two steps ahead,” she says. “I’m a big problem-solver. My long-term memory is great. A lot of dyslexic people’s experiences: there’s hyper-focus. It’s not craftiness, but it’s trying to find your way around an issue. Which is helpful in adult life when a situation arises.”
Fame is different for everyone. For some actors, it’s a boon and a triumph. For others it’s a necessary evil. For Jackson, you suspect, it’s something to be navigated carefully: fame is helpful and even necessary when it comes to winning roles (producers are known to check actors’ social media stats now before negotiating deals), but it’s also awkward when you just want to be a person who falls in love, marries and has those ordinary and yet profound life moments.
Over the summer, Jackson’s fame level ratcheted up again because of her marriage in August to Hector Barbour, aka DJ Denis Sulta. Well acquainted with the limelight himself, having featured on the covers of industry bibles Mixmag and DJ Mag, the Glasgow-born music producer also comes from a showbiz family: his mother is Muriel Gray, a former presenter of Channel 4’s The Tube and the first female rector of the University of Edinburgh, and his father, Hamish, is a television producer.
The couple first met in the early days of the pandemic. “We met after the first lockdown at a friend’s house. His cousin is one of my best friends and she introduced us, and that was it,” Jackson says. She has travelled often to see him perform. “Going out to Australia and seeing him perform in Asia, I’m so proud of him, he’s such a fantastic entertainer. You can really tell by the atmosphere in the crowd.”
Barbour proposed on a trip to Donegal with a custom-made ring from Blair and Sheridan jewellers in Glasgow. As lavishly displayed in Vogue, the wedding was a three-day affair at Dromquinna Manor near Kenmare in Co Kerry. Around 160 guests watched Jackson walk down the aisle with her father to a cover of Dreams by The Cranberries, the Derry Girls theme song, performed by the all-female trad supergroup Biird, with Jamie-Lee O’Donnell as one of her six bridesmaids and show creator Lisa McGee also in attendance.
The spectacular wedding dress – or to be more accurate, the sequence of wedding dresses that she showed off over three days – meant a great deal to Jackson. Clothing is emotional for her, a route into great memories; she still has pieces from when she was 17. I mention how Siobhán McSweeney, who played Sr Michael in Derry Girls, is currently wowing audiences with her sartorial choices on The Traitors. Between the two of them, not to mention Derry Girls costar Nicola Coughlan gracing the covers of fashion mags like Elle and Marie-Claire, Ireland has been captivated by the cast’s edgy, unexpected take on style.
“I love being able to express myself through clothes,” says Jackson. “I have some fantastic memories of my mom and her best friends getting ready for nights out and me sat on the bed watching them try on different outfits.” Jackson wanted to incorporate an element of her mother’s wedding dress into her own design. “My mom got married in Irish silk. I thought she looked so beautiful on her wedding day. I took the idea of that time and the shape of that dress. I took the brooches off her dress and put them on my dress... I worked with the designer and changed a lot about it. So it felt more Irish and more suited to me. Plus I wanted to feel sexy.”
Already Jackson’s life as a married woman is changing her, at least in terms of the stories she wants to tell. In Three Sisters, Natasha is not one of the siblings, but the fire-starter who marries into the family. “I’m excited to play Natasha,” she says. “The older I get the more my curiosity deepens for heavier stories. If you get to tell stories that run in parallel with your life and the prospect of having children and how you make the world work around you, it’s exciting.” Foregrounding women’s stories is important to her. “There are times when I’m scrolling on Netflix and, if it doesn’t have a female lead in it, I’m probably not going to watch it. It doesn’t mean the male story isn’t good. It’s just that I’m sick of hearing about it. I’ve heard it a million times before.”
It’s not Jackson’s first time tackling the play: in 2018, she took on the role of Irina in Three Sisters for a reading at the Foyle Arts Centre in Derry, and she has worked with the writer Ciara Elizabeth Smyth earlier this year, on the off-Broadway comedy Irishtown. Speaking of which, Jackson is happy to report that good theatre etiquette has largely been preserved, with only a few notable exceptions. “I have seen people look on their phones. I have seen people eat tuna sandwiches. That’s been the height of weird behaviour, a Tesco meal deal in the front row.”
Once the curtain falls on Three Sisters in Dublin, it’s onwards to the next project: returning to film the second season of BBC 1 drama This City Is Ours, a Sopranos-style drama set in Liverpool. Currently in lodgings on the northside of Dublin city for Three Sisters, Jackson is already anticipating the rare pleasure of getting to work in the city where she lives with Barbour. “We are shooting for a few weeks in Spain and then back to Liverpool, so it’s great. It’s such a luxury to get into your own bed.” She has also recently wrapped on a film set in west Cork called The Body Is Water, co-starring Allen Leech, Aidan Quinn, Fionnuala Flanagan and Eva Birthistle. “It’s written by Vicky Wight, who moved to the US at 12,” she says. “It’s a really moving story. It’s sort of her love letter to Ireland.”
There will eventually be time for a honeymoon, too. In the meantime, does she have a game plan for seeking new roles with her agent? “I want to tell stories that are enriching, whether that’s getting more educated on the period or building relationships with people I respect. The further I go into this industry the more I see it’s important to have your tribe and work with people you value.”
And when misfortune comes, as it sometimes may, Jackson tries to remember what her parents told her in the early days, when she was scouting for work and hearing a chorus of rejections. “They instilled it in me,” she says, flashing a grin. “You just need one yes.”
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Ciara Elizabeth Smyth, runs from October 8th-12th at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. dublintheatrefestival.ie
