Orla Brady The award-winning actress talks to Darragh McManus about her major new Irish TV drama, The South Westerlies
In her new drama, The South Westerlies, Dubliner Orla Brady’s character arrives in a West Cork town at the heart of a climate- change story. It’s something she experiences first- hand in her Californian home, she tells Darragh McManus
Sometimes, life does imitate art. Orla Brady is talking to me from her home of 20 years, in the Santa Monica
Hills of southern California. It’s a “gorgeous” part of a “glorious” state, she affirms; yet right now, because of raging wildfires, the view is closer to hell than heaven.
“I’m sitting here, looking out,” the Dublin-born actor says, “and if you didn’t know better, you’d think there was a mist in from the sea. There’s smoke everywhere, drifting down from northern California. Last night there was a crescent moon, and it looked like some kind of evil portent through the smoke: a vibrant orange sliver, like a Hallowe’en moon. Why do people talk about climate change as if it’s in the future? We’re living in it.”
That’s the life part. The art comes in the form of The South Westerlies, a new six-part show which begins this weekend on RTÉ One. In the best tradition of Sunday night television, it’s breezy, funny and filled with heart – and one of the main themes is the climate emergency.
Orla’s character, Kate, is a fixer for a Norwegian energy conglomerate hoping to build offshore wind turbines in rural Ireland. She’s sent to the fictional west Cork town of Carrigeen, undercover, to try and sway public opinion before a crucial planning vote.
Orla explains, “Catherine Maher (creator and co-writer) had a lovely idea for The South Westerlies, to marry two things: first, this theme of there being a certain sacrifice in taking on the climate crisis. You have a beautiful coastal town, and in order to move towards cleaner energy, you partly destroy the view. You’re altering something that’s natural and creating a landscape that seems quite futuristic. So what do you do? There are passionate arguments on both sides. As a background theme, that is very pertinent and timely.”
The second theme Orla ascribes to The South Westerlies is more personal: a “dilemma for a middle-aged woman who has to reckon with her past and the mistakes she made.” Kate has regrets – both with old flame Baz (Steve Wall) and her old friend in the town, Breege (Eileen Walsh). Soon after Kate arrives in town, issues and unresolved emotions bubble up, demanding disentanglement. “Everyone hits a point where they look back and would love another go at something,” Orla explains. “‘I wish I’d stayed in touch with someone, I wish I hadn’t done this, I wish I’d handled that better…’ The lost friendship with Breege is especially central, and one of the things that most attracted me to the show. Two close friends, who clearly had a meaningful friendship, but there was a misstep of some kind and now there’s regret about that. It’s very fertile ground to explore, for men or women.
“The absence of sex or romance means that friendship often gets overlooked in dramas, it’s much more important than we realise. A Martian would think, from reading or watching, that life was all about romantic love, but our relationships with friends are essential. Family is important, but there’s something special about friendship: you truly see and appreciate someone. You’re not sharing your lives as such, but you care for each other and hand that back and forth.”
The South Westerlies gets that tricky balance between comedic lightness and more serious moments right. It’s amusing but it’s not a comedy as such, as Orla discovered when she signed up.
“I’m not great at comedy,” she says, “and when I first read this script, I thought they wanted something lighter than my usual thing. I straight-up said to Simon (Gibney, co-director), ‘I think you’ve got the wrong girl.’ He said, ‘No we really don’t want comedy – we want drama but in a lighter vein. There are touches of comedy, but we’re mainly telling a story about a village and life and love and regrets and all that.’ So you guys at home will judge if we’ve managed that…
“It’s a rare talent that can easily straddle serious drama and lighter comedy. Eileen Walsh is extraordinary: she can make you laugh and cry in one shot. She has that funny, awkward vulnerability which is both amusing and moving.
“Last year, I did a guest part on [ Star Trek spin-off] Picard, and Patrick Stewart is great at moving from serious to light in one moment. He can bring both things out. It was lovely to play with that myself; it felt freeing to just say, ‘Okay, let’s see what happens.’ I enjoyed myself, and thought I’d love a bit more of that.”
As well as Patrick Stewart, Orla has worked with the likes of Jackie Chan and Tom Selleck – is it surreal to play opposite such stars? Orla laughs, “Well, working with Tom Selleck was an odd one, because my Mum fancied him! Of
course, you feel it on one level, but on another level, they’re doing the same job as me. They’re more successful and have crossed over into that place where they’re icons, but they are also actors and I know how vulnerable that can be. If I’m doing a scene with someone, we need to have an equality between us and zone out the knowledge that this is a huge star.”
She gets recognised “occasionally, but not much.” She jokes, “When people ask for selfies, you always have no make-up on and haven’t washed your hair for a week. Aw, great! No, you’d more get recognised when you’re out at some event, dressed up; fiddling around in SuperValu, nobody notices you.” Orla studied theatre in Dublin, then left for the UK because she found Ireland of the 1980s “oppressive and dreadful, especially for a woman.” Stage appearances in London led to TV and film spots.
In the late 1990s, she recalls, “I had a yen to give America a go. I was about 35, and several people said, ‘You’re too old, you can’t do that now, you’ll never break into LA at 35.’ But I did a few pilots and finally was offered a show (the legal drama Family Law) about 20 years ago. I did that for a season, strutting around in preposterous clothes, and was due to come home by Christmas. Then at Thanksgiving I met Nick (Brandt, her English photographer husband), and that was it. He lived in California and made a case for staying, and here we are.”
She’s had a successful US career, but is Orla Brady the most unheralded Irish actor, with great achievements but less audience recognition? With credits including A Love Divided, 32A, The Foreigner, Hustle, Nip/Tuck, Proof, Jesse Stone, Shark, Wallander, Mistresses, Fringe, Poirot, Doctor Who and American Horror Story, why don’t we all know her the moment she appears on screen?
She also, in the 1980s, posed for a series of photographic figure studies
“Friendship often gets overlooked in dramas, but it’s much more important than we realise “
for The Illustrator’s Figure Reference Manual. One image was immortalised by artist Jack Vettriano in The Singing Butler: the most expensive Scottish painting ever and still the best-selling art print in the UK.
These days, Orla enjoys a quiet life when not busy working: walks in the forest, bringing the dogs to the beach, those spectacular views. She also comes home regularly to visit her mother.
One thing she doesn’t do any more is theatre: before her last play, she says she got “very bad stage-fright and could barely go on. I regret that. I adored the stage, but right now I can’t see myself going back. There’s great satisfaction to screen acting too – same job, different techniques. It’s all an elaboration of sitting by the fire, telling a story.”