Sharon Horgan does ‘Divorce’
Girls on the pull, unplanned pregnancy — it was only a matter of time before Sharon Horgan tackled divorce, writes Anne Marie Scanlon
WHEN the former Carrie Bradshaw, Sarah Jessica Parker, decided it was time to return to series TV, for the first time since the end of mega-hit Sex and the City, she called Sharon Horgan.
It’s hard to believe that it’s only a decade since Horgan’s breakout Pulling, which established her as an actor, comic and writer. In that decade Horgan has gone from struggling wannabe to a force with whom to be reckoned within the entertainment industry.
Horgan is lying on a green velvet couch. She has a severe headache. I’ve given her some super-strong tablets but she still appears to be suffering. I’m worried that the tape recorder won’t pick up her voice, as she’s speaking quite softly.
In person, Sharon Horgan looks exactly like Sharon from Catastrophe. That might sound like stating the obvious, but it’s rare. Faces that we know well from film and TV always look different in real life. Not Horgan — she looks like herself, but she doesn’t sound like herself. I certainly wasn’t expecting somebody so reserved. But she does have a bad headache.
“I went to New York to meet her,” she tells me about SJP. “She’d read a couple of my scripts. The story she was interested in making was about a long-term relationship and the breakdown of a long-term relationship. We talked about those sort of themes and then I went off and had to come up with something.
“What I was interested in,” Horgan continues, “was the kind of dark industry that springs up around two people who are having the worst time of their lives but really it’s all about the dollar. I didn’t know anything about divorce, and the reason why is that people don’t really talk about it. I don’t know why, whether it’s because there’s a kind of shame attached … Also,” she says, “if someone is having the worst time of their life, you’re not going to ask them questions. So unless you’ve been through it, most people don’t know and I thought it was something more people would like to know about.”
The result, Divorce, stars Sarah Jessica Parker as Frances, a career woman married to Robert (Thomas Haden Church), and mother of two. Watching the pilot and first episode, I was struck by the total lack of common ground between the two characters. Later, in a phone call with Paul Simms, the New York-based writer who collaborated with Horgan on some episodes, he reveals this was entirely deliberate.
As the story evolves, Simms tells me, the nature of the relationship will become clear. “Eventually, you see that when it worked between them, it worked really well.”
Simms has been married “seven or eight years, it still feels like a brand new thing,” he says and then adds laughing, “I wish my wife was here to hear me say that!”
He has never been divorced and argues that while the show centres on a divorce, and the process of divorce, that it’s really about relationships and conflicts in relationships.
“We hate the people we love at times,” the former Girls writer tells me. “Anyone who’s been in a relationship will see that. Anger and difficulty go hand in hand with love.”
Horgan, who has previously mined her own life and experiences for material, has never been divorced either. The hit show Catastrophe was in part inspired by the fact that she