Sharon Horgan on Writing Women Who Are ‘Funny and Strong and F*ck Up Every Day’
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Only Sharon Horgan, the brains behind comedies Catastrophe and Divorce, could make a show that deals with death, domestic abuse, and sexual assault, laugh-out-loud funny.
In season 1 of Apple TV+’s gripping murder mystery, Bad Sisters, we meet the Garvey sisters—Eva (played by Horgan), Grace, Ursula, Bibi, and Becka—and The Prick, otherwise known as Grace’s husband, who each of the sisters has a very good reason to want dead. We learn early-on that The Prick is dead, but we spend the season learning which of the Garvey girls is responsible, while two insurance investigators poke around and risk exposing them all.
The series was co-created by Horgan, along with Dave Finkel and Brett Baer (two of the writers behind New Girl), and is based on a Flemish series called The Clan, created by Malin-Sarah Gozin, an executive producer on Bad Sisters. The first season came to a very satisfying conclusion, but The Clan only has one season, so as much as viewers might have wanted more time in the Garveys’ world, a second season didn’t seem likely. But last month, Apple announced the series had indeed been renewed. “I look forward to getting chilly in the Irish Sea one more time,” Horgan said at the time. We can’t wait to see what she has in store for the Garvey girls.
Here, Horgan discusses “flawed” women and the special relationship between siblings, and gives us a preview of what’s to come.
Do you have siblings yourself?
I’ve got two sisters and two brothers—a family of five like the Garveys, but it’s a slightly different dynamic because it’s two boys, three girls. But it’s the same dynamic in a lot of ways because it’s that sort of instant tribe, or instant party kind of thing, when we’re together. One of my brothers and one of my sisters live just around the corner from me in Hackney, in East London, and my other brother and sister are around the corner from each other in Dublin, and we’re really, really tight. We’d probably kill for each other, I’d say, if we had no choice. It wouldn’t be we first option, but if it came to it.
What do you think is special about the relationship between sisters?
It’s such an intimate thing. It’s such an incredibly close thing because it’s so different from friendship and so different from, well obviously romantic love, but it’s a passionate kind of love. And for the most part you can feel very safe within it because it’s a blood tie, it’s not going anywhere. You’d have to do something pretty bad to lose the connection with a sister.
But more than writing about sisters, I loved writing the dynamic of a large family on screen. I hadn’t planned on doing it. It was literally this thing, The Clan, a Flemish show, landed in my lap. The idea of doing an hour-long drama appealed to me because I hadn’t done that before and it’s a really good idea to push yourself to try something new. And I found that large family, blood tie thing really infectious to watch in the original and I felt like I could do my version of it. I felt like I knew what I was doing when I took it on, having come from a big family. I’ve always been attracted to that on screen, as far back as Little House on the Prairie.
I thought the context of one of the sisters being in a position where she needs to be rescued, I found that just too juicy of a thing to pass up. The idea of a sister needing to be rescued who doesn’t want to be rescued—I thought that’s a situation that I could imagine people being quite frustrated by, riveted by, that sort of thing where you want to shout at the telly. There was so much in there that I thought, I think I could imagine an audience getting behind this. Not just the attempts at the murders, but the actual frustration at Grace seemingly not being able to see what all her sisters can see.
Right. Grace was so diminished by JP, but there was this sense that her sisters saw her light dimming and knew who she really was the whole time.
Yeah, that’s not something I took from my own family, but something I’ve seen. I’ve seen someone’s light go out in way and because of the relationship they’re in, because they’ve been isolated from friends and family. I feel like I’ve seen domestic abuse on TV and in film represented in powerful ways, but I felt like I hadn’t seen that coercive, not-obvious-to-an-outsider slow breakdown in confidence dramatized in that way before.
Oh, absolutely. It seems like domestic violence is often depicted on screen as physical and we have fewer examples on screen of emotional and mental abuse.
That story, that situation, is sadly not an uncommon one. I was kind of destroyed by the number of women who reached out by direct message, Instagram, and even people I know who emailed me, and said, it’s not necessarily just that they were in that situation, but their sister is, or their friend is. It’s kind of hard to describe when someone is abusing you in that way, whether it’s controlling you financially, isolating you from your friends, or those more insidious sorts of moves. But it was horribly revealing, the messages we got as the series was coming to an end.
Something I love about your work is that your shows often feature flawed, imperfect women. Is creating these types of characters intentional for you because you want to see more women like that on screen?
I wouldn’t say it was intentional, but it just came naturally. I didn’t think, I’d better write some flawed women. I’m just like, This is who I am, this is how I think, this is how my friends think. My friends are funny and great and real and they fuck up every day. You know what I mean? As do I.
So writing women that are funny and strong and fuck up every day is just in my DNA because that’s who I am and that’s who I’m surrounded by. And it paid off because there are these interesting things to look at and listen to and those are the lives I’m addicted to watching. And also the women on the street who would come up to me and say they were delighted to see themselves represented.
So I would say it’s quite a thing for me now. I feel like I don't want to let anyone down. But then at the same time, I would find it hard to write anything else. I mean I love watching all manner of different styles of comedy and drama. Some of my favorite shows are completely different from the shows I write. But when I’m writing, whether it’s a horror or a thriller or a comedy, the women that I place at the center of those shows are the women I know and who I am.
The show dealt with some very serious issues but wasn’t a downer. I heard you say you thought a lot about the balance between humor and some of the thornier issues the show deals with.
I wouldn’t necessarily be a huge fan of a drama that’s just straight glum, and it’s kind of not true to life. People don’t suddenly stop being funny or lose all their humor, even in the darkest of times. So that’s naturally what I gravitate towards writing. I also feel like moments of terrible brutality, like what happened between Grace and John Paul in that final episode, I think you just feel those moments more when they take you by surprise, when they attack you from behind. And similarly comedy resonates more when it’s placed in between truly dramatic moments. I feel like they both really thrive, they really complement each other. For me, it’s a tricky thing to get the balance of tone when you are going from something that’s almost pure farce to something that’s brutal drama. So yeah, it’s a balancing act, but hopefully it pays off.
It definitely does. I wanted to talk a bit about your character, Eva, in the final episode. I was curious if you’d ever played a survivor of sexual assault before and what you brought to that role?
I knew we had this big reveal coming up and I think for Eva, the thing that helped me to believe that she would have her rapist sitting at her dinner table, is the fact that she felt a bit of blame, even if she shouldn’t. She’s always apologized for being drunk and apologized for being vulnerable. There’s the sense that to speak the truth clearly could ruin her sister’s marriage and that her whole want in life is a happy family table where she can bring her sisters together. And she would rather an abuser at her table than have an empty space where her sister should be.
I believed that she would have to move on, to some extent, because she loves and cares about her family too much. And the fallout of telling her sister what really happened seemed bigger and worse than having to hold the truth of what happened. It happens a lot; many women feel like they have to protect their abusers because quite often they’re close to them.
I’ve also heard you say that the show unintentionally became a metaphor for the current moment and I thought that was so true. Can you expand a bit on that notion?
We have this man at the heart of it, who thinks he has religion on his side, who thinks he’s morally righteous, and looks at the women around him and considers them to be the morally compromised ones. And the only way that these women could get around him was to take him down by coming together.
At the time I started writing, I’m not saying we were living in an ideal situation, but then the overturning of Roe v. Wade happened, and then the protests in Iran, and so on. Across the world, women are having their rights compromised and those choices are being made for them by men in power who are hypocrites. And it just felt like, fucking hell. Sometimes art imitates life, and vice versa. When I went to do press in America, these women were like, “This show was more cathartic to watch than I expected it to be.” You watch a group of women take down this man who’s destroying their lives and yeah, it feels good. The fact that he’s anti-abortion as well was just the extra blow to fuck him off. I wanted him to be one of those men; it felt so apt.
Yeah, almost a little too relatable. Speaking of Roe v. Wade, I know you’re Irish, and in recent years, Ireland has moved in the opposite direction of the U.S. and legalized abortion. I was curious what you make of seeing your home country going forward at the same time as there’s all this regression in the U.S.?
Who would’ve thought it? Ireland has just become this incredibly progressive, forward-thinking country, with the gay marriage referendum as well as the abortion referendum. And it’s an extraordinary sort of turnaround in circumstance and it is something that makes me very proud of my country. It’s been a long, long journey, but at the moment, Ireland is a bit of a shining light.
It must have been nice to showcase your country as well. There’s some really beautiful Irish scenery in the show and I was curious if you could tell me a little bit more about that 40-foot spot where the sisters go swimming.
That was a spot I kind of knew about but hadn’t experienced it. It’s a very, very popular bathing spot. People have been going there for years. It used to be a men’s-only bathing area. And then at a certain point in time women decided, “Yeah, that’s enough of that, we’re going to swim there too.” It’s super historical, written about by James Joyce in Ulysses. But it’s also this place that has become very famous for this Christmas Day swim, to sort wash away the booze from the night before and shock you out of your hangover.
So when I figured out that I wanted the Garvey girls to have this feat that they do that sort of unites them, and it’s something that they would’ve done with their parents before. And also when I figured out that has to be the thing that JP stopped her from doing in that very first episode, which makes them feel like they’re losing her, it just seemed like the perfect spot to film. We weren’t able to close it down; people swim there every day. So we kind of had a mixture of background artists, but a lot of the regular crew who go there to swim, so it was an exercise for the shoot there.
When I was doing the location scouting, there were women jumping into this freezing cold water and just swimming there and having a chat. And I thought, that’s where the girls will plot their murders. I could see it and it just felt so perfect.
The first season felt so complete and was of course based on The Clan. Season 2 seems like it will offer you a chance to write something wholly new—that must be exciting! Can you tell us about what might be in store for the Garvey sisters in the second season?
Apple wanted to do more which was lovely. But I think I would only have attempted to do more if the first season offered up emotional and also fun possibilities for a revisit. And it actually did. The original series and our remake felt very contained in its story telling, but there was such a love for the sisters and the characters in general, that I thought I’d have to least have a think about what could possibly be a next chapter for them. And I think I’ve found something. I hope so anyway. That’s all I can say because these things are moveable feasts. But the chance to spend more time with these girls, just watching them navigate life post killing The Prick is a good jumping off spot.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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