Bad Sisters: Sharon Horgan on pressure to get second season right

Actor, writer and producer Sharon Horgan.

If anyone should be sleeping soundly, it’s Sharon Horgan. Since her debut sitcom Pulling in 2006, the actor, writer and producer has created hit after hit, from Catastrophe to Divorce to Motherland.

Bad Sisters, Apple TV+’s dark comedy thriller, released in 2022, was perhaps her crowning achievement, landing a glut of glowing reviews and awards, confirming her as the undisputed queen of honest, edgy and, above all, hilarious television.

The second series of Bad Sisters is due this Friday, and fans of the show will find out what happens to the Garvey clan after their grisly exploits last time around.

Horgan with Ann-Marie Duff in Bad Sisters.

That reaction is what’s been playing on her mind when staring at the ceiling at the crack of dawn over the past few days.

“I’m tired. I woke up at six, which is kind of horrible,” says Sharon, rubbing her eyes as she props herself on the arm of her sofa. “It’s gotten to that stage where people are beginning to see the show, so I’m beginning to carry a lot of nerves and excitement in my body.

“It keeps waking me up. But way, way too early.”

Bad Sisters returns

Her worries are of course baseless. The new series of Bad Sisters doesn’t skip a beat, exploring what happens after we find out how the Garveys dealt with the controlling and abusive John Paul, who made the life of Grace, played by Anne-Marie Duff, and just about everyone else he came into contact with, a misery.

The electrifying reaction among women to Grace’s experience meant Sharon felt a kind of responsibility to her characters.

“A lot of people who had been in those kinds of relationships, but hadn’t seen them on screen, or didn’t even know that they were in a coercive, abusive relationship, they saw it and then reached out,” explains Sharon.

“It wasn’t just people telling me they liked the show, it was people telling me, ‘I’ve lived that’. The responsibility of getting it right was always there.

“But then we work really hard on the scripts to get them to a place where it never feels like this is just one for the money, you know? It’s not about that, it’s about the fact that we created this world and these characters, and they had more to kind of give and, you know, and I’m glad now, I’m really, really glad we did it.

“I loved the end of the first season. It was sort of like a fairy tale end, the abused woman gets her life back, jumps triumphantly into the sea and everything’s going to be okay.

“In actual fact that’s not real life, you know?”

Menopause

In Bad Sisters, Sharon nimbly created characters who weren’t just capable of dark deeds, but also remained relatable. Much of her writing, she happily admits, comes from her own life. She has two children, and was divorced from former husband of 14 years, Jeremy Rainbird, in 2019. Recently she says she’s been “sorting her life out”.

In the first episode of the new series, her character Eva talks about consulting a menopause coach, something Sharon, 52, did herself recently.

“That’s a real deal thing! I mean, there’s a lot of me in Eva this season, with stopping drinking and, you know, taking control of it,” she says. “Eva’s someone who’s single, no kids, she has some disposable income.

“I started trying to figure out what the f**k was wrong with me and found someone online to talk through it.

“They weren’t necessarily a menopause coach, but menopause coaches do exist. It’s like a cross between a trainer and a therapist.”

We talk about the recent trend for women talking more openly about menopause, and the recent advent of places like menopause cafes. “Do they turn the air conditioning on really high?” she quips.

“I wanted to talk about menopause, but I also want to show the difference between how Fiona Shaw, who plays older character Angelica’s generation, would have dealt with that, and how it would have been not talked about, and how you would have just had to suck it up and get on with it, whereas someone like Eva is able to take control and do something about it.

“The show is obviously all about the thriller and the caper and the like. The story is constantly moving forward, but it wouldn’t sort of be the show without the character work. They all have lives, they all feel like full, real people. And you have to make room for that.

“Otherwise, it just becomes about getting from A to Z in terms of the thriller, and I really think the reason why people got on with the show is because of the characters. They felt like they knew them.”

Second series

The decision to return for a second series of Bad Sisters, which many thought was a one-and-done story (it’s based on a one-off Belgian drama called Clan) was surprising. I wonder if Apple executives had to twist her arm to come back.

“Here’s the thing, they sort of talked me into it and didn’t when I was filming the first season,” she adds. “And I can’t remember how many episodes in to it we were, but not too far, and I had this idea [for a second series], and then sort of parked it.

“And then when the show went out and people really responded, Apple said, you know, we’d be mad not to make more.

“And by that point, I’d really enjoyed making it and hanging out with those girls. I loved the world, and it did feel weird to just abandon it.

“It felt like there was an opportunity to show the ongoing effects of trauma. You don’t just go through something like that and then just dust yourself off and get on with life. I thought this was an opportunity to make something that is much more in my ballpark, really, something much more emotional, but still hopefully funny.”

Villains

This time, Sharon had to do that without John Paul, Claes Bang’s dastardly narcissist, whose nickname was The Prick.

“How do you fill that void? The Prick was such a great character, and Claes played him so well,” adds Sharon. “Everyone got behind the sisters because they hated him so much. But we felt everything that happens in this series is a direct result of his actions in the first. Every bad choice the sisters make is because of a terrible choice he made. And so we have the spectre of him there. And then I just thought, we’ll just find our other villains.”

Sharon, who was born in London but grew up in Ireland, worked with Ashley Jensen on Catastrophe, then with James McAvoy on the marriage breakdown comedy drama, Together.

As she’s so observant, I can’t resist but ask: out of the pair of them, who would be better at disposing of a body?

“I would definitely bring James into any sort of altercation,” she says with a laugh. “I feel like he could really handle himself.

“But Ashley has got teeth, you know? She’s a strong woman, and as gorgeous and lovely as she is, I wouldn’t mess with her. She might just win…”

Wagon wheels into view

First there was John Paul, now there’s Angelica.

The difficult task of succeeding Claes Bang’s villainous John Paul fell to Northern Irish actor Fiona Shaw, whose character, The Wagon, is suspicions about the Garvey sisters and fuels the plot of season two of Bad Sisters.

“Fiona is one of the all-time great Irish actresses, one of the all-time great actors, anyway, across the board,” says Sharon. “Even in Harry Potter, her role was kind of small, but she f**king killed me. That woman is funny. Why does she not do more out and out comedic roles? I find her so physically funny as well.

“The Wagon needed to be slightly older than the girls, not quite able to understand that generation, in a way. She felt very close to it, but really far removed, like she’s looking at them going, ‘how have you got that freedom? Why have you got it? Why are you so comfortable in your bodies?’

“She’s from the North (of Ireland), and it’s a different kind of upbringing there. We wanted someone who was very heavily led by their religiosity, but is also something of a hypocrite. She’s the person who wants to be seen to be doing good, and Fiona is so great at performing her morality.

“Fiona is the most positive, fun, creative presence. We couldn’t have gotten luckier.”

Bad Sisters, AppleTV+, from Friday