NEW LIFE:Becoming too recognisable on-screen prompted actor Sabina Brennan to become a neuroscientist, writes Claire O'Connell
'I KNOW YOU from somewhere, don't I?" was one of the first things I said to Sabina Brennan when we met at Dublin's Science Gallery. I was taking part in experiments on attention and the brain, and as she fitted electrodes to my head she explained she had been in the long-running RTÉ soap Fair City.
It suddenly dawned that she played Tess Halpin, a central character who was killed in a headline-grabbing storyline that highlighted domestic abuse. But the high-profile role that made her face so familiar was what eventually led her into neuroscience research.
The acting bug struck Brennan early, she recalls. "I started doing speech and drama lessons in school at about eight years of age, and it was like a light went on."
The buzz of drama competitions and recitals prompted her to train with the Guildhall School in London and, growing up in Clontarf in Dublin, she harboured secret aspirations to become an actor someday.
"But it wasn't one of those things you said out loud," she says. "And I didn't even know there was a way you could do it."
So after she left school, Brennan took a day job in insurance. "I wasn't riveted by it. I just went to work and took my pay cheque at the end of the month," she says.
But when she got married and had two sons, she realised she needed to lead by example and follow her real dream. "I remember saying when the boys were babies that I was going to encourage my kids to find something they love doing and earn a living by doing what their passion is," she recalls.
"Then I realised I wasn't doing that myself, and we know that everybody learns by example. That was the epiphany for me. I threw in the day job and started to try to have a career as an actor."
She set up a small speech and drama school locally and worked on low-budget films and theatre productions to hone her craft.
And eventually the breaks came. All at once. Not only did she land the part in Fair City, but she was also commissioned to produce and write a documentary for TG4 on artist Elizabeth O'Reilly.
It was a whirlwind, shooting several episodes of Fair City each week while also working on the documentary, but Brennan thrived on it.
"I loved it, and the nicest part was being able to work. I'm not very good at doing nothing," she says.
But eventually Brennan's time in the soap came to an end. "My character was killed and a lot of Irish actors think if you get a high-profile role then more work will come in, but the reverse seems to happen," she explains.
"So, immediately after the show I had a lot of press coverage but apart from a small role in The Clinic, I didn't get any work in the following 12 months."
A casting agent said the soap success meant Brennan would probably not even get any further auditions for the next three years. "That's when I said I'm going to college," she recalls.
She admits to being daunted by the prospect of studying psychology with a bunch of school-leavers who had scored high points in their Leaving Certs, but when she got to NUI Maynooth she loved every minute of it. "I became a complete and utter nerd, I ate the books," she laughs.
Studying psychology plugged into the same interest in human behaviour that fuels her acting, says Brennan, and she initially wanted to go into clinical work.
"I did some volunteer counselling and I discovered that what helped with my acting would go against me in the clinical side. It was far too easy for me to access my own emotions and I found it very difficult to switch off and have a clinical detachment. I learned that I probably wasn't best equipped to do that," she says.
"But I still wanted to help, which is why I went into research. You can still have an impact on people's lives but you do it at a very different level."
So after her final exams, she started a PhD on attention and cognitive decline in Trinity College Dublin with Prof Ian Robertson.
"A lot of research tends to look at things like average performance or the speed of performance. But I am looking at the variability of performance, and we seem to see that older people are more variable than younger people, and people with Alzheimer's disease are more variable," she explains.
"I am looking at [response variability] as a possible marker of cognitive decline and something that may be indirectly manipulated so that we can have some impact."
Doing a PhD is of itself a challenge, she notes. "You think somebody is going to teach you. You say how do you do this, and you are told you'd better go and find out. And you put loads of work in but it can still be one step forward and 50 steps back, which is frustrating and soul destroying."
But she is spurred on by learning how the brain can continue to learn and rewire into older age.
"I think it's incredibly exciting for us to know that you can constantly be regenerating," says Brennan, who would ideally combine her acting and academic talents to improve general understanding of neuroscience.
"I'd love to make a documentary that would make science more accessible to people, and particularly the relationship between the brain and behaviour."
In the meantime, her advice is to constantly challenge the brain in new ways to keep it sharp as you age. "Learn how to knit for a week, next week learn a new song, read four signs backwards on the way into town on the bus. The brain has to be stretched."