YOU’RE NIKKED
Nikki Grogan is a work-hard play-hard cop on Red Rock. But with baby on the way, actress Valerie O’Connor is getting ready for her most demanding role to date...
IT is a cold spring morning on the broken cobbled streets on the Red Rock set. The 20 or so extras stomp their feet and rub their hands as a combined cloud of exhaled breath rises into the morning sky. At the steps of the local garda station stands actress Valerie O’Connor, swaddled in a puffer jacket and wearing leopard-print slippers, clutching a felt-lined hot water bottle.
Initially this clever off-set wardrobe has been credited to unbelievable clairvoyance as the chilly conditions were far from forecast. But when I catch up with her some six months later she tells me that she was in the early stages of pregnancy and was desperately trying to hide her pre-natal symptoms.
‘I was pregnant and I couldn’t tell anyone,’ she says. ‘I was freezing and kept running to get the heat and the slippers and hot water bottle. I looked such a state and the staple disguise was hot water bottles, North Face jackets and Ugg boots.’
When the time was right to inform her fellow cast members on set of her good news, she says their reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Indeed she had almost forgotten she was pregnant on set until a newspaper reporter called her up to write a story. She received something of a shock when the caller claimed to have figured out her good news from pictures on social media that had been taken before she was pregnant.
‘They hid my pregnancy behind big boxes to be honest. A journalist phoned me up, and I hadn’t told anyone, the costume and makeup in Red Rock knew and that was it. But a journalist rang me and said they knew I was pregnant and I was walking the dog. And I said yes, and I was startled and didn’t know what to say because I was just getting on with it. And then he said he was looking up my Twitter and it is very obvious that you are pregnant.
And in my head I just realised that I wasn’t pregnant in the pictures on Twitter – I’d put nothing up! It did get obvious towards the end of the storyline. And they would have me behind flipping boxes and carrying strategically placed files and there were people on bump watch. And every now and then they would pipe up and say “Val we need a bigger file or box”, and then they had me sitting behind a desk. I am kind of lucky playing Nikki; there is a lot of desk work for her. We just ended up needing a bigger screen.’
O’Connor, 34, is a television actor, theatre actor and singer. She is best known for playing Detective Inspector Nikki Grogan in Red Rock and Miss Jervis in ROY. Due any day now, she went on maternity leave from the show this summer and says that, for the near future anyway, she won’t be returning to the station for the next series.
‘I took the summer off and I never do that and I missed going on set. You think you wouldn’t be happy and I did have time off and I got a lot of rest but after three weeks of resting I realised I was ready to work again. Everyone is telling me that will all change when the baby arrives and it will put a halt to my gallop.
‘Right now I feel like I don’t have a gallop, I can barely walk and I am just ready for the next chapter to begin. I am not going back to Red Rock, I am going to take a bit of time off, see what it is like to be a mum. Because I haven’t a clue, not a clue what is in store? Everyone keeps telling me I will have my hands full but I just don’t know. But I can’t wait to find out. I got the shock of my life when I saw how much childcare was. I am in the wrong business. I just couldn’t get over it. I would say I will have to take the time off unless I get the windfall.’
However, she says the writers and director have left the door open for her and her taciturn character to return when the time is right. For Valerie it is about finding the right time and being able to balance a career and motherhood. ‘I am on maternity leave and they are very good to me and they have said to me that the door is open and whenever I want to come back I can come back,’ Valerie says.
‘And they texted me the other day to tell me that they all missed me and to come back when I was ready and I am really lucky in that way. They are a good gang in there. Kim Revill and Paul Walker, (Red Rock’s writers) they have a good team in there and they do care. You feel like they look after you and the writers are upstairs and you are actually really close to them and you have regular contact with them.’
Initially, back when Red Rock started there was never a part for Nikki Grogan. Valerie auditioned for Claire Hennessy and it came down to a choice between herself and Pandora McCormick who
I know who killed Brian but when I was asked by a couple of viewers I forgot due to my ‘baby brain’
got the part. Red Rock’s originator Peter McKenna phoned Valerie and she was devastated to learn that she hadn’t got it. Valerie says: ‘Then he said there was a part for Nikki Grogan and initially it was this tiny part of Nick Grogan for a man and they said they would write it for me. Then because they were writing it, as they went along I felt they were writing that part with my spirit in mind and you feel like you are really close to them. And you can always nip up to them if you have a problem or a question about the storyline. Which I am told doesn’t happen in other dramas or soaps.’ Even though she has been off set for the bones of four months, Valerie says it is almost impossible to escape the clutches of the show. Series two ended up with the cliff-hanger of who murdered Sgt Brian McGonigle. And Valerie is regularly accosted by fans of the show when she is out and about who are desperate to know. But thanks to ‘baby brain’ she says more often than not she genuinely can’t remember who committed the crime.
‘I find it hard when I know things about Red Rock,’ she says. ‘I find myself trying not to give away the secret. I know who killed Brian. One of the times I forgot completely because I had baby brain and everybody wants to know. I was in a hotel in Waterford and this couple were there eyeing me up. And you know when you are away from the show you don’t really think about your job. They cornered me straight away and asked me: “Come on, who did it”? I just froze and I stood there and asked them: “Who did what?”
‘And they were just having none of it and asked who killed Brian and I genuinely had forgotten because of the baby. But it is amazing how many times that sort of thing has happened and the thing is you won’t guess and it is a very good twist.’
During the week she lives in Dublin city centre just a short walk from the set for the TV3 hit drama series.
Off screen, her partner, who is eagerly awaiting the birth, is also an actor, (I’m told a very familiar voiceover artist) but I have been told she prefers not to talk about that side of her life.
What is certain is that she is the polar opposite of the curt and coldly unemotional detective she plays on Red Rock and is warm, chatty and brimming with vim. But Valerie has a strange sympathy for her character Nikki and believes that in upcoming scenes, which she filmed before the show went on its annual hiatus, you will see different side to the cold fish.
‘Ah she does get called a bitch all the time. And I am always wondering if that is me or Nikki. We see her in the start of the new season and I am right up in it for a while and I think we will get to see a lot more of her because she has changed a lot. In the beginning she had a lot more craic and she was going out with Seán and then she got landed this job after McKay was killed. And I think that in order for her to survive, she put her head down and everything kept going wrong, what with the missing drugs, and it is all under her watch, ‘She is highly stressed and she needs some outlet and that has her going out and partying hard at the weekends. She starts to work hard and play hard. She is steely and she is cold but that is her way of coping. She is transitioning and she has been promoted and she has gone from being one of the lads to being in charge of the lads. It is a tricky place to be when you suddenly become your mate’s boss.’ Valerie also believes that members of the force are trained to be dispassionate and removed when it comes to their working lives. She has taken this advice from the on-set garda liaison and perhaps that is why Detective Grogan appears so closed on screen. ‘She is so closed and I think that gardaí are trained to be like that and I think that there is a loneliness creeping into her but you do see her letting her hair down. ‘As actors we are open books, I have to stop myself from saying things. I let stuff out of the bag so many times and we were chatting to this guy Ian who comes in and he was a detective and I said to him, I would be just crying if they came in and told me that they had just murdered someone. I would be all over the place and he just told me that you can’t be like that. They compartmentalise their lives. Nikki does that and has to do that.
‘This garda station does have a lot to answer for, though. We are under investigation all the time, we would have so many black marks with missing evidence, Angela with the missing drugs, your man McKay not letting us know stuff. We would be shut down. But it is good drama.’
For now though, the rough and tumble life of the television is the last thing on Valerie’s mind. As she awaits her new arrival, she says she is going to try to learn Irish. She had plans to take up knitting, yoga and Pilates during her summer off but didn’t manage a single session. But she won’t be taking her eye off the ball when Red Rock returns tomorrow night. And with the news that the show is moving post-watershed, she believes that things will only go from strength to strength in the fictional north Dublin seaside town.
‘I don’t particularly enjoy watching myself,’ she says. ‘I think most actors are like that. It is very hard to forget about yourself but I can’t wait to watch it. I have said to all the lads that I think series three is going to be much better, it will be bigger and better and because we are at the later time-slot we are going to see a much more psychological drama.
‘I think Kim Revill and Paul Walker have hit their stride and you can be the best actors in the world but if you don’t have a great script then you are on a hiding to nothing. The scripts we were getting into our hands, they just know how to write and they are at the top of their game. It is going to be a sexier show in the sense that it will be a gritty drama rather than overly sexy.
‘You are kind of hemmed in to not doing or saying things by that watershed which is only right, kids are up and there is a time and place for these things.
‘But I am dying to see how dark they go with the new timeslot and I am going in, I am going to come in and watch some of the new scenes, I have been with them for two years and I can’t wait to see what they do with it.’ Red Rock, Mondays 9.30, TV3 from this week