One of the perks of this job is occasionally getting a sneak preview of your favourite television programmes. Still, I don’t mind admitting I was nervous clicking on the link for the eagerly awaited second season of Sharon Horgan’s Bad Sisters. The Bafta-winning Apple TV+ production was a global hit two years ago, introducing the world to the five Garvey sisters, a close-knit Dublin family with an awful lot of deadly secrets to hide.
Adapted from Malin-Sarah Gozin’s Belgian series Clan, Horgan’s version featured one of the finest villains ever seen in a TV programme set in Ireland – the misogynistic, abusive husband of Grace Garvey, John Paul (Claes Bang) aka The Prick, who we know is dead, by one of the sister’s hands, from the first episode. I confess to Sharon Horgan that I was worried about how the programme would fare without The Prick, a character viewers loved to hate.
“You were worried?” Horgan exclaims with a loud laugh over video from the attic workspace in her home in London. “I was f**king terrified ... but he wasn’t there so it was something I had to get over very quickly.”
Luckily, Horgan says that as they filmed the first season her mind was already buzzing with ideas for a second and having seen it, I can confirm it’s as compulsively watchable as the first series. “I found myself more interested in the aftermath ... Trying to kill this f**ker – he was so slippery – was great fun but what people really connected to and related to, were the choices the sisters made and of course the darkness.”
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
There aren’t many writers who could handle the stark domestic abuse/coercive control storyline of the first series of Bad Sisters – The Prick terrorises his wife, Grace Garvey, played by Anne-Marie Duff – while also making us laugh at the comic moments contained in even the grimmest human circumstances. Horgan’s challenge was to find a storyline that would give the sisters the opportunity for more wickedly hilarious capers – “that’s the DNA of the show” – while exploring the aftermath of their actions. As Horgan puts it, “You don’t just kill a man and move on.”
The story takes place two years after the last series ends. Grace is preparing for her wedding to a new partner, the supportive, empathetic and funny Ian (Owen McDonnell). We see the other sisters, Bibi (Sarah Greene), Becka (Eve Hewson), Ursula (Eva Birthistle) and Eva (Horgan) organise a hen do for Grace at Leopardstown Racecourse where they win big on a horse called Hurry Styles and moan relatably about five hot dogs costing nearly €50. Things are good in the family post-Prick, as Grace’s backyard wedding twinkles with promise. But the calm does not last long, this is Bad Sisters after all, and the past soon comes back to haunt them.
Conscious of avoiding spoilers, we skirt around what happens to the sisters in the second series. “The terrible thing that happens at the end of episode two,” she says – viewers will be equal parts stunned and saddened – “was a massive choice to make. It was brutal, but life is brutal, and it felt like a choice worth taking, without the audience getting too angry with us.”
Much of the series is preoccupied with the intense grief and loss that follows that narrative choice. Horgan was dealing with her own grief while filming the series. Her father, John, died shortly after Christmas last year. She initially continued shooting, but had to stop. “I just couldn’t do it,” she says. “I couldn’t activate in the way that’s necessary ... so luckily we were able to stop for a while.”
Her dad had a chance to come on set, when series two began filming. “It was a gorgeous thing to have him there, and then so heartbreaking not to share it with him.” She smiles, remembering his reaction to an early cut of the show from the first few weeks of filming, which he watched in hospital. “He was your greatest cheerleader but he was also such a tough critic. He did not mince words.”
Horgan is one of five siblings. The family grew up on a turkey farm in Co Meath, and the run-up to Christmas, she has said, was an anxiety-making time. They are a talented family: the eldest Maria is in television production, another sister Lorraine is an actor, Horgan’s younger brother Shane is a former Ireland rugby player and her youngest brother, Mark, is the co-founder of Second Captains and producer of the award-winning podcast Where Is George Gibney? She has said that much of the family dynamic in Bad Sisters comes from their closeness.
Their work ethic, she says, came from her father. “He didn’t believe in chasing dreams pointlessly, but he certainly let you know that the sky was the limit if you put the work in and got your head down. It was that, rather than luck.”
“He also knew how to write a good, very long text saying why you should be proud of yourself. Even at my old age you need that.” (Horgan is a not very ancient 53). “It’s necessary sometimes to have someone tell you they are proud of you, which he always did.”
When filming resumed on the set of series two, she found work useful while processing her grief. “Having something to do was massive ... it’s when you stop that’s the problem ... so it was good to have something to do and a way to subjugate all those feelings and express them in a way that felt authentic. It’s the comfort-in-numbers thing ... You hope that there’s something about talking about grief and dealing with grief that will impact on people in a positive way.”
Alongside the grief, there is some serious fun. Comedy brilliance comes from Thaddea Graham, who is magnificent as eager-beaver 25-year-old Northern Irish-Asian Det Houlihan, a badly dressed sidekick to senior Det Loftus (Barry Ward). Irish acting legend Fiona Shaw plays Anjelica, the sister of Grace’s neighbour and murder accomplice, Roger. Anjelica is such an interfering, God-bothering pain in the hole that you want to cheer when ‘The Wagon’ appears on screen as a description for her character. I tell Horgan I love the idea that non-Irish viewers all over the world will need to google “what is a wagon?” “We had to fight for that, but it was worth it,” she says.
We spend a few minutes talking about Shaw’s incredible performance. “Every single scene: look at her face, look at the way her body moves ... As a physical comedian she’s unsurpassable. I knew she was going to be great, and when we started thinking about Anjelica, she was very much in our heads. She’s one of the greatest actresses of all time but even I didn’t realise how funny she was.” Sometimes at the end of one of Shaw’s scenes, the crew would give a little round of applause.
Horgan’s keenly observed take on modern life is everywhere in the new series. At one point Det Houlihan is dismissed as “probably nonbinary or some bollocks” – “I’m not comfortable with that language” is the reply – while another character is admonished for using the word dwarves: “You say ‘little people.’”
It’s brave of Horgan to go there. “People get nervous about it and you just have to say ‘but these are the attitudes you are up against all the time’, and if you don’t show it then you’re watering it down and pretending it doesn’t exist. Of course there’s going to be the old guard who have zero tolerance or respect for any of that, so then show it. No one is going to get angry ... I really enjoy it but it always feels like walking a tightrope, hoping people get what it is you are trying to do.”
It wouldn’t be a Horgan enterprise without us seeing echoes of her life on screen. She’s never better than when fictionalising autobiographical elements of her own experiences. Her character, Eva, has now taken up running, swapping massive glasses of wine for endless cups of tea and a menopause coach. It’s all very real-life Sharon Horgan, it turns out.
“I have fallen off the wagon a little bit in the last while but I was not really drinking for about three years and trying to balance what was going on in my body,” she says, explaining the multiple shelves of herbal teas in Eva’s house, a mostly successful attempt to lay off “the lady patrol”.
“I started running, and while she wasn’t a menopause coach I did have someone to help me figure out what was going on hormonally. I wanted to talk about that.
“There are an array of ailments that women of a certain age are out there trying to get to the bottom of, and they need to get their hormones balanced. It was such an eye opener for me.”
[ Sharon Horgan: ‘I don’t believe age is just a number. That’s b****cks’Opens in new window ]
She mentions physical things that were bothering her for years, which nobody mentioned could be menopause or perimenopause related. “It really suited Eva because she doesn’t have kids, she has this great job, she’s got money to spend. She’s got to a point in her life where she needs to sort her shit out, to stop drinking to just be like, ‘I need to have a run and work out what is going on inside me’. It felt like the right time to talk about it.” This part of the storyline is never heavy-handed and is done with a Horganesque lightness of touch – at one point Eva is described approvingly as “a smoking-hot mid-century legend”.
Eva is also deeply maternal, the eldest of the sisters who has had to mind the others after their parents died in a car crash. In real life, Horgan, who has two daughters, is well known for looking after younger costars and is something of a mentor figure to actors such as Eve Hewson, who plays the youngest Garvey sister, Becka. Since joining Bad Sisters, Hewson’s career has really taken off – her latest starring role was in The Perfect Couple with Nicole Kidman – to the point where her parentage (she is the daughter of Bono and Ali Hewson) is now mentioned merely as a vaguely interesting footnote.
“She’s the queen,” Horgan says of Hewson. “I feel privileged that these younger Irish actors want to work for me. Watching what has been happening to Eve Hewson is just so exciting. She comes into our WhatsApp group and tells us all the latest and I’m like ‘wah!’. She is a great girl, she works so hard and you’d never know she was surrounded by that privilege. She’s just one of the girls. You can’t help but feel proud. It happens, doesn’t it: you find the right person for the right role. You benefit because they are exactly the right person you were envisaging and they benefit because it’s an opportunity to show what they haven’t done before.”
Horgan clearly inherited her father’s gift for cheerleading as well as his work ethic. When she talks about the other cast members, it’s almost like she’s speaking about a second family. She says she feels lucky to have met them. She sat in the dark while editing series one, “falling in love with them all”. The love has only deepened with the second series. “Everyone was taking a punt the first time”, but second time around “everyone was invested and felt real ownership, which is what you want. You’re working with a cast who care about it so much and bring so much to the project. Most of the team for the first series were back on board.” Acclaimed Irish director Dearbhla Walsh returns to executive produce and direct. “So it felt like home. We are all giddy to hang out with each other again doing promotion for season two.”
I feel way more comfortable writing. It suits me more. I’m at home. I find acting a lot more challenging and harder on home life
We talk about music, which is a significant part of the storytelling in any Horgan production but never more than in Bad Sisters. In a deeply affecting karaoke scene – yes, naysayers, it is possible to be moved by karaoke – the sisters sing When You’re Gone by The Cranberries. “I wanted to pay homage to Sinéad [O’Connor]. There was always going to be one of hers in there ... and I love The Cranberries and Dolores. I also wanted to have Kate Bush.” A devoted Kate Bush fan, Horgan was initially refused permission to use one of her songs, Hounds of Love, in the show. Horgan reckons after Running Up that Hill appeared in Stranger Things and went viral, Bush probably thought, “Nobody needs my music for a bit”.
“So I wrote to her, to tell her how important she was to me, and not just to me but to my girls, who I introduced her to. I’ve been playing Kate Bush from when I was 13 until, well, yesterday.” On receiving her letter, Kate Bush overruled the publishing house’s decision, writing back to tell Horgan saying: “Please use it and the show is great”.
How did it feel to get a letter from Kate Bush? “I mean I cried. I really did. All those women [Sinéad O’Connor, Dolores O’Riordan, Kate Bush] are such an inspiration to me and not just through their art, but in terms of how they stuck to their guns and the power they had and what they gave out to the world. I knew I wanted all those women in there. It was all inspiration. What you surround yourself with before you start writing is really important. It elevates it.”
Horgan’s company Merman – cofounded with her ex-husband, Jeremey Rainbird; and Clelia Mountford – produces Bad Sisters with 20th Century Television, but she is almost as well known as an actor as she is a writer or producer. Her acting credits include roles in her own works such as Catastrophe and Pulling but also in movies such as Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, opposite Nicolas Cage.
So which does she prefer: acting or writing? “It’s a weird one because I feel way more comfortable writing. It suits me more. I’m at home. I find acting a lot more challenging and harder on home life.
“But there’s something addictive about being someone else for a while. And I don’t know if that will leave me. Also, I hate shopping, and every time I am a character I get to keep the clothes, so for that alone, I will keep doing it.” She laughs and says the clothes she’s wearing right now were purloined from the highly covetable Bad Sisters wardrobe.
As usual, the prodigious multitasker has several projects on the go. Merman is shooting Amandaland for the BBC, an offshoot of the much-loved London-based school-gate comedy Motherland. She is also preparing for a role in Hulu’s eight-part Amanda Knox series, playing Knox’s mother, Edda Mellas. “It’s an incredible script” and a different kind of acting challenge than she’s had with other roles, where her characters are often recognisably Sharon Horgan. How does she feel about the challenge?
“You kind of have to take yourself out of your comfort zone regularly, you know?” she says. “And I mean, yeah, it absolutely makes you poop your pants, but if you can work it out, if you can make it happen then, then I think it’s a good thing to do. It’s a good thing to mix it up.”
She is also in the middle of creating a new show. She won’t say much about it – “I can’t” – but it’s autobiographical “or in that zone, yes”.
She has achieved so much, I’m curious how hungry she still is for more? “Oh yeah,” she says without hesitation. “Especially for Merman and for working with talent and helping to get other shows and films off the ground. But also for myself, completely. It drives me, and excites me. I’m even more hyper now. That could be the hormones. I mean, I’m on a lot of testosterone,” she says with a smile, “but I’m very hungry and driven. And maybe there’ll come a point when I’ll want to kick back, but certainly not yet.”
Before our time is up, I ask her about camogie, which has a central role in the new series. Horgan has such enthusiasm and skill for showcasing the best of our culture, landmarks and landscape that she should be on Tourism Ireland’s payroll. The global response to scenes at the south Dublin swimming spot the Forty Foot was “gorgeous, it was huge”. In this season, there’s more action from the Forty Foot, as well as the Gravediggers pub, the stunning Slieve League cliffs and beach side sauna facilities. I was also delighted to note that one of Eva’s 50th birthday presents is wrapped in a copy of The Irish Times.
But why camogie? “I really wanted to create new visuals that were very specific to Ireland, ones that I could connect to my youth.” Some gritty scenes on the local GAA field and the gruesome use of a camán towards the end of the series, might well do for camogie what Paul Mescal’s shorts in Normal People did for O’Neill’s. And attendance figures over Christmas, when the final episode of season two is revealed, are sure to get a boost from those champagne-fuelled scenes at Leopardstown Racecourse.
While Horgan wrote the series, Bad Sisters also benefits from a small writer’s room that includes Paul Howard of this parish. On that note, I ask her which genius came up with Hurry Styles, the name for the sister’s winning horse at Leopardstown. “Yeah, that was me,” she says. Of course it was, the smoking hot, mid-century legend.
The new series of Bad Sisters airs on Apple TV on November 13th
