Sharon Horgan (‘Bad Sisters’): ‘We didn’t want to get laughs out of domestic abuse’ [Complete Interview Transcript]
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During a recent Gold Derby video interview, senior editor Daniel Montgomery spoke in-depth with Sharon Horgan (“Bad Sisters”) about her Apple TV Plus show, which is eligible at the 2023 Emmys. Watch the full video above and read the complete interview transcript below.
Adapted from a Belgian series, “Bad Sisters” tells the story of the Garvey siblings: Eva (Horgan), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson). Grace’s husband John Paul (Claes Bang) is emotionally abusive, so the other four sisters hatch a plot to save Grace by killing her dastardly spouse.
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Horgan shares with us, “We didn’t want to get laughs out of domestic abuse. We wanted to represent what it really is to be in a relationship like that, and we were depicting a kind of abuse I hadn’t sort of seen before on that was a kind of coercive control and financial abuse and emotional abuse and isolating someone.”
Daniel Montgomery: Sharon Horgan, you co-created Bad Sisters about the Garvey Sister’s attempts to eliminate their sister’s abusive husband by any means necessary. It’s based on a Belgian series. What did you think about that series when you first saw it?
Sharon Horgan: Oh, I loved it very much. It’s a completely different kind of show, but I loved the premise. I thought it was just inherently, incredibly funny. And I loved the sisters, the five actresses who played the sisters in the original are phenomenal. And, yeah, I was a big fan. I mean, I certainly wasn’t in the market for writing a thriller or even doing an hour-long drama. I’d never done anything like that before. But I watched the pilot episode and I was in, because I just thought I knew how to do my version of that story. I kind of knew immediately what I would like to do.
DM: And what were some of the changes you made to the story and the characters to fit into its new Irish milieu?
SH: Well, I mean, just even setting it in Ireland sort of changed it immediately. I think fundamentally we just made it less broad. We raised the emotional stakes and made it less heightened. In the original, there was all sorts of crazy goings on. There was Chinese Mafia and there was hit men and people ended up in dog canning factories. There was a lot more murders and it was just a lot more bonkers. And, I mean, it was part of its charm, but I felt like I wanted to lower the murder rate and up the emotional damage. What would really happen to a bunch of sisters if they had to do something like this? And how would it impact on them personally and how would it affect their relationships and to sort of … for the collateral damage, to not necessarily be a pile up of bodies, but to their relationships and to themselves. So, that would be the main difference. And then Ireland kind of changed everything really. It just kind of gave it a whole different, I know it’s boring, everyone says it, but a different character. Ireland’s sort of changed a lot over the years and it’s become a politically very progressive country, but religion still plays a factor there and as it does everywhere. But with the John Paul character being conservative and very religious, but also an outsider, it’s very hard to break into Ireland as my husband found out. So, that sort of changed everything as well.
DM: And the John Paul character is one of the most striking things about the show. A portrait of spousal abuse that’s nuanced and subtle, and the way he does it is very insidious. What was it like writing that character and the whole series revolves around both the audience and the characters wanting him dead?
SH: Yeah, I mean, it was kind of the most fun and the scariest because it’s fun to write a villain as it turns out. You can really go for it. But at the same time, it was keeping it sort of as … I mean, being respectful of the situation. We didn’t want to get laughs out of domestic abuse. We wanted to represent what it really is to be in a relationship like that, and we were depicting a kind of abuse I hadn’t sort of seen before on that was a kind of coercive control and financial abuse and emotional abuse and isolating someone. And so all those things felt very nuanced and quite delicate. And yet we had this big kind of character. So, it was in the writing, but also in the playing of it. He’s a skilled comedian, but a really fantastic drama dramatic actor as well. And so it was just walking a bit of a tightrope really. But I feel like we were sort of doing that throughout because we had to balance comedy with drama … like really silly, stupid comedy with really brutal drama. It was the trickiest part of it. And, again, that was just something we had to keep an eye on throughout in the writing and then filming and then in the edit afterwards, just to make sure that we got the balance right.
DM: Was it also a challenge to keep all your story elements straight when you’re going back and forth between so many different characters? And also you have two timelines. Did you maybe write the timeline separately and merge them together, or how did that process work?
SH: Well, actually, Malin, who’s the creator of the original, she did suggest that … actually she kind of wrote them in the order of events sort of thing. But I couldn’t really do that, and I wasn’t able to crib as much from the original as I would’ve liked because we took out so much story and put in so much of our own. So, it was just a real pain. I found it really hard, actually. And in fact, we, a lot of what we wrote … there is multiple characters. It’s a big ensemble, and a lot of what we wrote didn’t always end up making it in because we, you sort of realize in the later stages of writing, but also in the edit how much you want to stay focused on the thriller or how much, you know, you want to just focus on one sister per episode. So, a lot of more, the domestic detail kind of got caught, but it felt okay to do that. We had a device that allowed us to go back and forth in time. That was incredibly helpful. But even so, it was the biggest thing in the writer’s room that someone would suggest a story beat and we’d go, we were like, no, that’s in the past. We were always in the wrong timeline. We were always suggesting situations that could never have happened because someone was either dead or wasn’t around then. So, it kept tripping us up. But it was a very fun device as well. It was nice to be able to inform each of the timelines.
DM: And just in that first episode, The Prick, for which you are nominated for Best Episodic Drama at the Writer’s Guild Awards in addition to the New Series Award, there’s so much going on in that, just that first episode you have to introduce so much. What kind of challenge was that to pack that many details into just one hour?
SH: It was a huge challenge, and it’s the episode that changed the most, and the episode that we spent the most time on. We had a completely different opening originally before we sort of realized that we know these sisters and no one else does. I mean, no one even knows those sisters. When you first come to an episode, first of all, you’re like, who are these people? So, it was that thing of wanting to direct the audience a little whilst not insulting their intelligence. We’re back and forth in the past and the future as well, almost immediately. And I think it was really the first 10 minutes that were the thing, just making sure an audience wasn’t asking too many questions. We really wanted to entertain the audience. We knew that the series was going to be hard going in places, and even in that first episode, there was going to be some pretty brutal stuff. We wanted to make sure that we allowed the audience to figure out what was going on, who were all these women, and then kickstart the story of how they got there, what happened in the past. And, yeah, we probably spent more on that first episode than we did on the next four combined. But it’s tricky.
DM: Well, I want to congratulate you on your work on that episode and being nominated for that, specifically all the work that went into it, your two Writers Guild Award nominations. It’s been a pleasure talking with you about it.
SH: Thank you very much.
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