‘Derry Girls’ Lead Reveals The Two Film Stars Who Inspired Her Face-Contorting Performance

Caroline Frost
·2 min read
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At least one of the stars of Derry Girls would sign up for a reprise of the hit comedy.

Saoirse-Monica Jackson, who played lead Derry Girl Erin in the award-winning show based on the lives of four Northern Irish teenage girls (and an English male cousin), told The Belfast Telegraph she hopes she hasn’t said goodbye to her character for ever, following the show’s triumphant finale in 2022.

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She said: “It felt bizarre when the show ended, because I was done with Erin, but Lisa (McGee, writer) is continuing her life.

“It would be interesting to revisit Erin down the line and see what she’s up to because your twenties are so chaotic. But that would really be down to Lisa. I’d love to work with her again.”

Derry Girls became one of Channel 4’s biggest ever comedies on its debut in 2018, and then a global hit on the Netflix platform.

Jackson also told The Guardian newspaper that her performance was inspired by Jim Carrey and Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean: “I’d basically auditioned and I just thought that Erin was very physical and that the madness of the world and all the characters around her would lend itself to a physical comedy performance.”

But the result – a masterclass of gurns and extreme physical contortions – made the actress worry she’d never work again.

She said: “When it first came out and it was commented on a lot, I felt extremely vulnerable and really anxious,” she goes on. “And felt scared that I would never get cast in anything else again. And I was terrified that I was just… bad.”

“I was so absorbed in the anxiety of it that I forgot it was working.”

In fact, Jackson has a lot on her slate, with a role in this summer’s DC superhero movie The Flash, and a lead role in the Paramount+ period thriller The Doll Factory, plus Netflix series The Decameron.

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