Ranking The Characters In The Sally Rooney Universe From Least To Most Insufferable
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Sally Rooney's novels are famous for their matter-of-fact, cool-girl protagonists who have deeply flawed and complicated relationships with themselves and others. And it's hard not to notice just how flawed they really are when they're brought to life on the silver screen. Characters in the cinematic Rooneyverse are prone to long silences, short sentences, bad decisions, and extreme emotional repression. Much like the world's slowest car crash, it's hard to watch but even harder to keep our eyes away. Here is my ranking of all the central characters in Normal People and Conversations With Friends, from least to most insufferable.
Important note: I am ranking these characters purely on how frustrated they make me, and not their morality. There's plenty of villainous behavior to be found, but I'm defining an insufferable person as someone whose actions are difficult to parse, and who, because of this, is incredibly annoying.
Also, I am ranking these characters based on their TV portrayals only. But I recognize that each of these characters has a literary self with their own traits, motivations, behaviors — and I apologize in advance for any discrepancies that arise.
Spoilers below.
21. Lorraine Waldron (Sarah Greene), Normal People
Everyone loves a good TV mom, and Lorraine is one of the best. In a landscape of characters emotionally stunted to the point of incomprehension, Connell's mom stands out as a beacon of sanity. She loves her son fiercely, but isn't afraid to tell him off when he's in the wrong. She extends a warm hand to Marianne when she's treated like an outcast, and is generally just kind, clearheaded, and real as fuck. Three cheers for this perfectly delivered line: "You’re fucking her, and you wouldn’t say hello to her in public? ... I think you’re a disgrace. And I’m ashamed of you.” HELL YES, LORRAINE.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
20. Niall (Desmond Eastwood), Normal People
Connell's college roommate and BFF doesn't get too much screentime, but when he does, he gives off the genuinely good vibes of a dude who's always playing hacky sack. He's a true pal to Connell, and is a genuine relief to watch sometimes, especially during the Italy episode when everybody is being — say it with me — insufferable. He gets a lot of credit for being one of the only people in the series to know Connell well enough to encourage him to seek therapy when he's struggling. We could all use a friend like Niall in our lives.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
19. Paula Flynn (Justine Mitchell), Conversations With Friends
Paula is everything a mom should be: supportive, down to earth, and most of all, nosy. But who wouldn't be, when your daughter is (sort of) dating an actor and also refuses to tell you anything about her personal life? Her complicated relationship with Frances's dad prevents her from being as emotionally open as we would want, but in the end, she's a welcome foil to her tight-lipped daughter, and I love her.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
18. Bobbi Connolly (Sasha Lane), Conversations With Friends
Bobbi is everything that your typical Rooney girl is not. She's confident, has a firm grasp of the world around her, and knows her worth — and everyone else is just jealous.
She's an amazing friend who goes above and beyond to take care of Frances, even as Frances commits one self-centered act after another and fetishizes and dehumanizes her to high heaven. I give her so much credit for taking all the microaggressive barbs directed at her with grace — all the shots like, "Oh, there goes Bobbi again," or, "That's Bobbi!" just because she's not a passive shitbag. And most importantly, she says what we're all thinking when she tells Frances point blank that her silent-girl, I-don't-know-what-I-feel schtick is self-centered bullshit.
Bobbi does have some arguably annoying traits, like performing slam poetry and going on righteous tangents against monogamy; it's pretty standard snooty college student fare. And at least she stands by her insufferableness and isn't just trying to project some image to feel cool and relevant.
As for the show's ending, I'm going to pretend she dumps Frances (a take actor Sasha Lane also shares) and frees herself from the weird white Irish emotional prison. Bobbi is the sole reason I kept pressing the "next episode" button, and I just hope she's happy, wherever she is.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
17. Derek (Tadhg Murphy), Conversations With Friends
Derek earns his place here for simply having no presence in the show at all. He seems like a stand-up guy who cracks jokes and cooks for his friends, and whether or not he's aware of his friends' marital ups and downs, there is thematically no reason for him to show it.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
16. Evelyn (Sallay-Matu Garnett), Conversations With Friends
Same deal here, except she gets bonus points for tagging along on the trip to the market with Nick and Frances, so that we weren't subjected to more unbearable Caucasian silence than there needed to be. Sorry. Is that too harsh? I don't care.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
15. Dennis Flynn (Tommy Tiernan), Conversations With Friends
Frances's alcoholic father is only insufferable at all because his character is so transparently one-dimensional. They love to make him and his sad microwave dinners pop up every other episode to...make Frances even more miserable? Let us know she has real problems? His strained relationship with Frances feels like an important key to understanding her emotional life, and it's too thinly drawn in the show that it kind of detracts from the viewing experience.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
14. Joanna (Eliot Salt), Normal People
Joanna is Marianne's one friend who isn't a pretentious asshole. Not only that, but she seems to be genuinely sweet and caring, a relatively normal person (no pun intended) in a sea of snot-nosed weirdos who all think they're the smartest and coolest person in the room. She's definitely the friend to offer you snacks and to ask follow-up questions when you're cut off during a group conversation. You can tell her anything; she would never judge. And she also sticks it to Peggy and Jamie sometimes, which is very satisfying.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
13. Philip (Alex Murphy), Conversations With Friends
Philip is such a blah character in the show that I genuinely didn't catch on that he was supposed to be a friend of Frances's until like...halfway through? There's that one scene at the pub when he implies that Nick is taking advantage of Marianne, which is a weirdly judgmental leap. But there is no other time in the show when someone offers this perspective, and I kind of appreciate him for being blunt and bringing it up.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
12. Connell Waldron (Paul Mescal), Normal People
Connell Waldron is a complicated person. But all in all, if we're talking insufferableness, he passes, just barely. Is he infuriatingly passive? Yes. Made questionable decisions in high school? Also yes. But his flaws are fleshed out in a very human way. We see him as a real person who is struggling to find his place in a world he thinks is needlessly cruel and confusing. Most redeeming of all is his inability to fit into Trinity College's circle of douchebags and literal Nazi apologists. At his core, he's a down-to-earth Sligo boy who just wants to read books and write stories, and his aversion to Marianne's friends' intellectual circlejerking makes him, to me, a supremely likeable character. The closest he gets to being insufferable is when he struggles to articulate his feelings, often to Marianne's confusion. But when he does manage to get the words, he is passionate and reasonable. Sure, it's a low bar, but here we are. Also, yeah, his chain, et cetera, et cetera.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
11. Eric (Seán Doyle), Normal People
Eric is redeemed slightly for maturing after school and apologizing to Marianne, but unfortunately for him, being the nicer one of Connell's Sligo pals certainly isn't saying much. This is literally all I remember about him.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
10. Marianne Sheridan (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Normal People
I like Marianne. Like with Connell, a lot of her characterization comes from being genuinely misunderstood. Marianne's transformation from county pariah to cunning academic can't be discounted when it comes to her decision-making and overall reticence. Coming from an abusive household and into one's own power is extremely challenging, and she does it with relative grace. She has questionable taste in friends and romantic partners, but it's largely due to her extreme lack of self-esteem. And yes, her self-destructive tendencies can get a tad bit annoying, but by the end of the series, she has definitely evolved in a positive way. The will-they-won't-they between her and Connell still goes on, but she asserts that she's her own person and doesn't need to be co-dependent to be happy. I am fully rooting for her success, and I think she and Connell are fully capable of figuring it out.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
9. Peggy (India Mullen), Normal People
Peggy's definitely the girl who studies abroad for the summer and makes it her entire personality. She propositions her friends to threesomes because she thinks it's cool and edgy. She wears weird headbands that she thinks look great! She defends Jamie's absolutely atrocious behavior at the villa. Peggy is gross, and I'm happy she eventually left the story, never to be seen again.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
8. Melissa Baines (Jemima Kirke), Conversations With Friends
I still don't know what we are supposed to make of Melissa. We get absolutely no insight into her personality until the final confrontation with Frances, which feels stilted as a result. Her anger at Frances making her feel "pathetic and conventional" comes out of absolutely nowhere, as does her extreme contempt toward her. I mean, she's right to feel that way, but it would have been nice to see it coming before. I was constantly waiting to receive some clarity on her and Nick's arrangement, and why she is OK with fashioning some weird love triangle instead of just leaving him. But instead, all we get is a woman throwing a tantrum over lemons. Did I miss something? I think we all did.
A large part of what makes Melissa insufferable, too, is that she spends her free time hanging out with college students she met at a slam poetry reading. Huh? They're 21 years old. I just can't get into the mind of a successful adult woman who has let a girl who can't really properly explain why she's a communist infiltrate her life.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
7. Valerie Taylor-Gates (Kerry Fox), Conversations With Friends
As far as pointless characters go, this one did tick me off. She's uptight and demanding, and seems to enjoy being so. And for some reason, she publishes Frances's story, which, from the short snippets that were shown onscreen, was pretty bad.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
6. Rob Hegarty (Éanna Hardwicke), Normal People
Rob stands out as the most oafish of the Sligo squad. He also shows his friends his girlfriend's nudes without her consent, and then calls Connell gay for calling him out on it. Due to his tragic death by suicide and his and Connell's estrangement, we don't get to see whether he evolved as person after high school, so here he remains.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
5. Denise Sheridan (Aislín McGuckin), Normal People
Marianne's mother definitely gets the award for worst mom in the Rooneyverse for enabling Alan's horrible behavior but also completely neglecting her daughter's happiness and well-being. We absolutely hate to see it, but at least Marianne has Lorraine to give her all the bear hugs and emotional support.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
4. Alan Sheridan (Frank Blake), Normal People
Marianne's brother is less insufferable than he is just straight-up abusive. And if this were a ranking of people who deserve jail time, he'd be number one. Alas, it's not, and instead Alan gets the number four spot for crushing Marianne's spirit at every opportunity because he's a complete dickhead.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
3. Jamie (Fionn O'Shea), Normal People
From the moment we meet him, Jamie is a stuck-up bully and mansplainer extraordinaire who can't help but ruin every scene he's in. Jamie is definitely the "free speech warrior" in every college discussion that everyone, including the professor, hates. He is controlling, embarrassingly insecure, and over the course of one scene, manages to express his disdain for improper champagne-drinking receptacles, financial aid, and Asian people in one fell swoop. What a guy! It makes one wonder how he has any friends at all, let alone a girlfriend. I very much wish Connell didn't hold Marianne back from whaling on him at the villa. But for now I'll just have to use my imagination.
Watch Normal People on Hulu.
2. Nick Conway (Joe Alwyn), Conversations With Friends
Is there ANYTHING w/orse in the entire world than a 31-year-man who describes himself as "awkward"? Unlike Connell's and Frances's silent natures, which at the very least give them some air of mystery and allure, Nick's is just...annoying. He reminds me of the guy who feigns helplessness in order to get his way. Even though he barely says anything, he manages to bumble through the world like he's never had a single conversation with a person before — and as a result, the scenes between him and Frances are so full of weird pauses that I thought my computer was buffering on multiple occasions. "I'm Nick and I'm so special because I never know what to say! Now, nobody better yell at me for trying to have a wife and a girlfriend at the same time 👉👈." You are a grown adult and should be capable of texting more than a sentence at a time. (Or, a link to a Joanna Newsom song on YouTube.) Please, for the love of god, sort it out.
Side note, but do emojis just not exist in this cinematic universe? Why do these relatively young people text like they're waiting for death?
Also, the first time I saw that scene, the "I'm high, Frances" scene that first made the Twitter rounds, I actually felt physically ill. Sorry.
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
1. Frances Flynn (Alison Oliver), Conversations With Friends
I want to like Frances. I really do. After all, I think we are meant to relate to her in many ways. But god, she makes it so, so, so, so, so, so, so hard.
First and foremost is the wallowing. In true Rooney fashion, Frances does a lot of it. She wallows in her plainness, in her sadness, in her invented inability to communicate effectively, in her perceived discrepancy between her cool-girl politics and how insecure she feels. Despite claiming to be self-aware and in tune with the world, she never looks inward. Instead, she chooses to blame all her problems on other people so she can be sad and continue to do her favorite thing, which is wallowing. And making college look like the most joyless thing a person could possibly experience.
Most infuriating of all is how she treats Bobbi, who makes her feel insecure about how effortlessly she loves herself and owns her beliefs (and can we think of any other reasons why this might be???). She ditches Bobbi for Nick on multiple occasions, even using her to make him jealous — a scene which made me recoil from secondhand embarrassment — and generally treats her more like a token than a human being. For Pete's sake, her first published piece of writing is a sob-fest exploiting Bobbi, whining about how uninteresting and drab she feels in comparison...after which she makes a non-apology about how it was really an effort to get back at Bobbi for breaking up for her. And it's never stated, but it's implied she just goes through with it and pockets the money, even after Bobbi tells her how hurtful it is. And doesn't that just encapsulate Frances's entire personality? Whining about how she feels uninteresting compared to other people, and then proving how that's exactly the case? Hurting people in the process and taking no accountability?
And then after all that, Frances ditches her one last time for Nick, who has done nothing but literally butt-dial her by accident. Get help, Frances!
Watch Conversations With Friends on Hulu.
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