Stars of the hit show told The Big Issue what causes they’re willing to fight for in this week’s magazine as Nicola Coughlan heads to Westminster to protest Northern Ireland’s abortion laws
By Hannah Westwater
In 2018, TV super smash Derry Girls stopped viewers in their tracks. It showed the joyful mundanity of life that continued even during the Troubles, while telling a timeless tale of friendship between girls. The cast spoke to The Big Issue ahead of the Derry Girls series 2 premiere, and made it clear that their time between filming was certainly not wasted.
Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, who plays Michelle Mallon, told The Big Issue she has “relished” being able to use her voice to raise awareness for issues of social justice. “It is one of the perks of the job,” she said. “I am working with an abortion rights charity and on women’s sexual health rights. Abortion is still illegal in Northern Ireland and that is something we feel quite passionate about.”
Co-star Nicola Coughlan, who appears as Clare Devlin, agreed. The group were really involved with the Repeal the Eight campaign, she said, which was “an important time for Irish women – and it is still a situation in Northern Ireland”. She also felt a responsibility to champion LGBTQ charities after playing a gay character.
Louisa Harland, Orla McCool in the show, backed her up. “It is still illegal in the North to get married if you are gay. It is legal in the UK which they are part of, and it is legal in the Republic, as is abortion now. So we feel strongly about the North being recognised.
She added: “Nicola’s character Clare wouldn’t be able to get married today. That is ridiculous.”
And mental health is close to the hearts of O’Donnell and Dylan Llewellyn (who plays James Maguire). “Dealing with suicide in young people is quite close to home for me,” Llewellyn explained, adding that he wants to encourage people to address it and be made to feel comfortable expressing themselves.
O’Donnell said: “Mental health is a big issue in Derry and Northern Ireland, especially men’s mental health and suicide awareness.
“I grew up in a town where things like that and substance abuse were quite bad and still are. So I am always happy to help out if I can by using my face from acting, lending my voice. It has affected me personally and probably everyone I know in Derry.” [ . . . ]
It is Ulster’s answer to Reservoir Dogs. The stars and creator of the riotous runaway hit reveal how it has changed their lives – and could even end up as a movie
As TV debuts go, last year’s Derry Girls was nothing short of phenomenal. The coming-of-age comedy followed four teenage girls from Northern Ireland and their witless sidekick James as they navigated both minor aggravations and Troubles-inflected dramas in mid-1990s Derry.
It became an instant classic and was picked up for another season before its second episode had aired. The show, which returns to Channel 4 this week, averaged 2.5 million viewers across the UK, including half of all TV watchers in Northern Ireland. Unsurprisingly, it has changed the lives of its titular girls and “that wee English fella”, as Dylan Llewellyn will now for ever be known – much to their various families’ delight.
A recent trip to the garden centre left Nicola Coughlan – who plays nervy Clare, who came out at the end of the first season – wanting to die quietly behind some potted plants. Her mother (“She’s, like, the proudest mother in Ireland”) joked to the cashier about being surprised her daughter was helping her bag their purchases – “cos she’s FAMOUS!” When the cashier didn’t laugh, her mother repeated the joke, only louder. “Oh, kill me now,” thought Coughlan.
On shoots, says the show’s creator Lisa McGee, what seems like the entire population of Derry now gathers around, not so much to point and gawk but to keep guard – and even “tell the dogs off for barking”. Given all this, it isn’t hard to see where the show’s domestic authenticity comes from.
I meet some of the team in London, after a screening for the second season. At the recent premiere in Derry, they tell me, there was a Q&A, but the only people who managed to get any questions in were friends and family. This close-knit environment reminds me of the show’s start, in which one girl reads another’s diary aloud: “Everybody knows everybody, knows everything about everybody, and sometimes all I really want is to be simply left alone.”
Lisa McGee
The political situation of 90s Northern Ireland is largely in the background, with armed soldiers caught in shot as the Steadicam glides past – though sometimes it is a peg on which to hang jokes. When English troops with machine guns board the school bus at a checkpoint, James freaks out. “What’s going on?” he whispers anxiously. “Dunno,” says Michelle, louder, nodding at one of them. “But do you think if I told him I had an incendiary device down my knickers, he’d have a look?”
There are no great quests, for love or even a meaning to life. Instead, the viewer is treated to a litany of abortive journeys and excellent putdowns (“Ach, Fionnula what about ye?” Erin’s Aunt Sarah says, on finding the owner of the chip shop in the living room. “I thought I could smell vinegar.”) Then there are the inconsequential crushes and dismissive nuns. Headmistress Sister Michael, an audience favourite played by Siobhán McSweeney, is a combination of all the teachers McGee had as a pupil.
“I don’t know if they make them like that any more,” she says. “That type of female teacher, who could be just thinking about looking at you and you’d be shaking.” When she announces upcoming GCSEs, Sister Michael says: “I know how daunting resit examinations can be, so if anyone is feeling anxious or worried, or even if you just want to chat, please, please, do not come crying to me.”Crucially, in Derry Girls, no lessons are ever learned.
There is no shortage, these days, of shows about schoolchildren and their family lives, but Derry Girls stands out. McGee says she was heavily influenced by My So-Called Life, the series about Pittsburgh teenagers taking on everything from alcoholism to child abuse. The show, which aired in the mid-90s, centred on the character of Angela Chase, played by Claire Danes.
“She had thoughts and opinions that, until I watched the show, I’d assumed were unique to me,” says McGee. There were, however, a few things McGee was not quite so able to connect with, in particular the fact that Chase was effortlessly beautiful and got off with Jared Leto. Such disconnects feed into Derry Girls, giving the show its two big themes: the irrelevance of cool and the unimportance of male validation.
Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, who plays gobby lad-mad Michelle, thinks back to her own all-girl Catholic school. “There wasn’t a cool crowd and a geeky crowd,” she says. “There were different characters, but everyone was on a level playing field.”
Orla, a Renault Clio obsessive who is Derry’s answer to Phoebe from Friends, certainly isn’t one of the cool crowd, but the character is a favourite not only with viewers but also with most of the actors’ parents, which may be just a little disloyal of them. (“It’s so weird that they tell us!” says Coughlan.)
Louisa Harland, who plays Orla, wishes she could be more like the baldly indifferent teenager in real life. “I kind of based my portrayal on Tigger,” she says, referring to Winnie-the-Pooh’s energetic friend. “He’s a flibbertigibbet, a will-o’-the-wisp, a clown.” She seems to thinks that’s a line from AA Milne’s tales but it’s actually from The Sound of Music, a mix-up that makes her more like Orla than she realises.
For all its realism, Derry Girls is played – with impeccable timing – for laughs not tears, which makes the show a young female actor’s dream. Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who portrays Erin, the poetry-writing ringleader with delusions of grandeur, says: “To have the opportunity to do this scale of physical TV comedy – you don’t often see that for young women.”
Coughlan agrees: “You can tell there’s no male gaze, for how ridiculous we look a lot of the time. I love working with women who are not afraid to look … not ugly, but we do contort our faces a lot.”
While naturally circumspect on what’s in store this season, McGee says the political landscape shifts dramatically, but otherwise it’s very much your typical friendship stuff: James tries and fails to stand up for himself, Erin listens a couple of times to Orla, the girls fall out and in, the lot of them still and for ever “the eejits taking on the world”.
In the second episode of series one, they filmed the gang strutting down the street to the Reservoir Dogs soundtrack, lugging a jobs noticeboard they stole from the chip shop. (“Couldn’t you have just removed the ads?” someone asks. “They’re only Blu-tacked on!”) It was at this point that McGee realised she had found the losers she’d been searching for. She turned to Michael Lennox, the director, and gasped: “There they are!” As she says now: “They just looked like such a bunch of lovable dicks. I thought, ‘People might get this.’”
McGee has a particular overarching political timeframe in mind for the show, with the cast remaining around the same age. Which gives Derry Girls something of a narrow window since, even a year from now, theirs will be less of a gang of girls and more a gang of young women (Coughlan is already 32, mind, but still).
McGee is not, however, averse to the idea of a movie, though she does cite the 90-minute length of a typical film as her primary stumbling block. “That terrifies me,” she says. “But I’d love to give it a crack.”
Fresh from stealing the show in Derry Girls as the cynical nun Sister Michael, Siobhan McSweeney is about to take to the stage in Kevin Barry’s ‘Autumn Royal’
When Siobhan McSweeney was growing up, a nun came to her school to put on a Trócaire video. “I remember going home and telling mammy ‘I want to be a nun’. Now, I realise that what I actually wanted was to be on the telly.”
Her fate sealed, she got to do both at once, playing the flinty Sister Michael in the hit TV series Derry Girls, written and directed by Lisa McGee. The Channel 4 series – reportedly the most watched ever in Northern Ireland – centres around a group of bold schoolgirls during the 1990s, but it is their unsparing headmistress, Sister Michael, who steals the show, a creation whose iconic potential lies somewhere between Miss Trunchbull and Mrs Doyle.
In the bar of the Project Arts Centre, out of nun’s armour, McSweeney is decades younger and not so terrifying at all. We are meeting to talk about Kevin Barry’s play Autumn Royal, for which the playwirght and novelist was this week awarded the Stewart Parker Trust Award. It goes on tour next month.
The fiction writer’s first play is a two-hander, about an emotionally-stunted brother and sister caring for their ailing father. McSweeney plays the sister, May, a young woman described in the script as all of “dark”, “dowdy” and “sparkly”. Peter Campion (also fresh from Derry Girls) plays the brother, Timmy.
It’s a dark, black comedy,” says McSweeney, explaining that originally it was a monologue written for May alone.
“May is hardened by life and lack of opportunities,” she says. “It’s really heartbreaking, I think. It’s what I love about comedy. In that Beckettian way, you’re laughing at the abyss.”
The play revolves around duty, in particular the duty expected of an Irish daughter towards her parents.
I think with Sr Michael, her darkness comes from the experience of teaching girls. Nobody starts off like that.
“It’s a very uncool thing to say, isn’t it? But it’s there in us. Duty. It’s associated with potatoes, and staring out the window crying, and the turf fires. There are rooms all over the country with women staring out the window. Lost lives, lost potential, lost opportunities. Which is also fucking hilarious.”
Care-giving has crept up lately in the roles McSweeney has played on stage. In Caroline Byrne’s revival of Katie Roche by Teresa Deevy in the Abbey, McSweeney was a tremendous spinster sister to Katie Roche’s intended. During one tense emotional scene, McSweeney entered the stage with a mound of scones on a plate, announcing, “I made some scones.” It was very funny.
“That broke people’s hearts. People roared with laughter, but you’d hear some women laughing, of a certain age. Maybe laughing for a different reason. The joy of escape, or recognition. A bitter laugh.
“Isn’t there a fear that we’ll all have to go home and mind somebody?” she wonders. “And isn’t there a great joy in being able to go home and mind somebody?”
Cynicism is a “habit” learnt through “dark life experiences”, she says.
“I think with Sr Michael, her darkness comes from the experience of teaching girls. Nobody starts off like that.”
Her own start was “very, very average, happy and wonderful”, growing up in Aherla, Co Cork. Literature was big in her family – her grandfather was the Irish language poet An Suibhneach Meann – but she was an “odd fish” because she wanted to act. She studied science at UCC. “I was an awful scholar,” she says.
She held herself back from acting partly due to a sense you had to be “special” to act.
“I never thought I would be allowed to do it,” she says curiously. “I didn’t think acting was for people like me and I don’t even know what I mean by that. I suppose I mean I thought that you’d have to be more glamorous. I thought you’d to be special.
“I started realising that this bug wasn’t going to go away unless I exorcised it somehow. I couldn’t get rid of it, and it was distracting me.”
She got a place in the top drama school, the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. The year she graduated, her mother fell ill and she returned home to be with her. Soon after that her mother died. “I spent the start of my career mourning. Not being 100pc natural. I don’t think you ever get over the death of your mother. Work helped.”
She has lived in London for the past 13 years, “blind stubbornness” having kept her going in a “precarious” lifestyle that has brought her to the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as TV dramas including The Fall and films Darkest Hour and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
“I think there’s a great difference between the art and the lifestyle,” she says. “I still find incredibly difficult the instability of it. The unfairness of it. The highs, the lows. The financial insecurity. The inability to plan.”
This “unfairness” is felt in representation, a lack of diversity which “comes down to gender”. But this is something that is beginning to change, she believes. “That is the one thing about the play Autumn Royal. It’s placing women at the centre of the story. And I think that the success of Derry Girls is for some of the same reasons. People were longing for those stories. The response has been voracious, there is such an appetite, because we haven’t seen young girls being the heroes in their own lives. That’s new. It sounds like banging a drum that’s very much in vogue at the moment, but it’s true.”
She has worked on many female-led scripts of late, including with Caitríona McLaughlin on Autumn Royal, who she would “follow into battle”, Caroline Byrne on Katie Roche and SJ Clarkson on Collateral for the BBC. This has been good for her. “I’ve recently realised that there’s a correlation between female directors and my voice being heard. There is a shorthand. There is a focus on who’s not being listened to in the room? And historically that has been a woman, of a certain age and class.”
Repealing Ireland’s abortion laws lands with a thud in our interview. “That’s another relic coming up,” says McSweeney, whose vote will be a yes. “My politics come from that utter confusion, that something as arbitrary as gender could stop you from doing anything. And from fairness and kindness and compassion and all these things that we were taught. How can you grow up with these things then be told we don’t value your life more than a clump of cells?”
She is drawn to playing women who are unseen, considered plain – “very ordinary women with complex internal lives. I want to make them visible”.
“What I love is to show our very ordinariness. I hope when you look at me, and my very ordinariness, you identify in a different way than perhaps we have been used to. One part I always wanted to play was Sonya in Uncle Vanya. I had a great idea of how Chekhov wanted Sonya to be played. There were always these beautiful pale wan English actresses, solitary tear down the chiselled face. I was like, no! She is a survivor. She is running the estate. She’s a grand, lovely big normal girl.
“Poetry comes in many different shapes and sizes. There’s a received idea that it can only be in one kind of casing. So I’m delighted I got to stretch out and play her the way I wanted her to be played.
“People have an over-respect for tragedians,” says the nation’s newest comedic treasure with a sparkle. “There’s nothing more rewarding than hearing people laugh. Because if you can make them laugh, you can make them cry.”
Stars of the hit show told The Big Issue what causes they’re willing to fight for in this week’s magazine as Nicola Coughlan heads to Westminster to protest Northern Ireland’s abortion laws
