Dervla Kirwan
Michael Doherty chats to the award-winning actress about life, career and her new Irish drama, Smother
We open on a rugged, rainswept coastline. It’s nighttime and an ominous, percussive soundtrack plays as a bearded man walks along a cliff edge, seemingly lost in thought. Suddenly, a torch-bearing figure emerges from the gloom. A struggle is followed by the bearded man left lying bloodied and lifeless in the wet grass. Cue opening titles. As pre-credit sequences go, we appear to be in classic Scandi Noir territory. But there’s a twist. Those cliffs are Clare’s Cliffs of Moher, that actor (Stuart Graham) is from Belfast, and the entire story revolves around an Irish family in crisis.
Welcome to the world of Smother, a heady slice of Celtic Noir, penned by award-winning novelist and screenwriter Kate O’ Riordan. Directed by Dathaí Keane (An Klondike), the six-part drama features a superb roster of Irish acting talent, including Seána Kerslake, Niamh Walsh and Gemmaleah Devereux. But the person at the heart of it all is Dervla Kirwan as family matriarch, Val. It is Val’s husband we see walking along the clifftop; and it’s around Val that the family and this entire story revolves.
For the Dublin actress, it was a role that proved impossible to resist. “Seriously, I haven’t read anything like this,” she explains. “I mean, of the last five jobs I’ve done, I’d say in three of them my character is killed in the first episode! The great thing about television is that you can really explore, forensically, the psychology of a character. With Smother, Kate O’riordan is really trying to say something extraordinary about the relationship between power and corruption and privilege, not just in Irish society but everywhere. Acting, for me, is all about storytelling. It’s the communication of different worlds and different ideas that hopefully act as some kind of informative catalyst for enriching your life.”
While Smother explores many universal themes concerning power, privilege and family dynamics, there’s no doubt that the story has a strong Irish resonance, particularly as it unfolds through the prism of the mammy. “I loved that about the script,” says Dervla. “Kate has written a deeply thoughtful piece of femininity about what it means to be a matriarch in the family. It’s not Scandi Noir; I call it O’noir! And here’s the thing I really want to get across: I walked into a beautifully written script. But I also walked into a very nurturing environment. I’ve been doing this a very long time and things can be very combative on set and I’m not interested in working in those environments. I am now working with a bunch of extraordinary women in this, and fantastic male actors. It feels like a seismic change that it’s so female dominant and it’s genuinely very exciting, because I went to work each day and learned from really talented younger actors like Seána, Gemma and Niamh. I’m tired not seeing many women together in a show, so it’s really nice to see women rocking this. We also have an extraordinary director in Dathaí Keane and a dynamic director of photography in Cathal Watters. From day one, it was a case of we’re all in this together, let’s try to work as a phenomenal team. And I think that’s what we have achieved with Smother.”
Val Ahern is the latest in a long line of strong roles for the Dublin actress, who has made her mark in TV dramas ranging from Ballykissangel to Goodnight, Sweetheart; from her award-winning turn in The Silence to her recent Netflix hit, The Stranger. And that’s before we get to those memorable stage roles, which over the years have included Pinter (Betrayal), Chekhov (Uncle Vanya), Mcpherson (The Weir) and her recent triumph as Lady Macbeth opposite John Simm as the Thane of Cawdor. But while her CV incorporates stage, movie and television roles, for Dervla, it’s not about the medium, but all about the script.
“All that matters to me is that it’s a good story in which I can say something that reflects society,” she explains. “I mean, I love Chekhov, Shakespeare, Pinter and all that, but really, and I’m going to be controversial here, dead white men’s plays are all fine, but we need to encourage new writers and especially new female writers that reflect our experiences on this planet. Surely that’s what it should be about? That’s why I think Smother is such a blessing. I’ve been waiting a long time to play a role as challenging as this.”
Dervla Kirwan has spent three decades on the trail of such challenging roles. As a teenager with some experience of the Dublin stage under her belt, the Churchtown girl headed off to London with dreams of making it in the acting profession. While it looks like a massive gamble in hindsight, the actress herself doesn’t see it in those terms. “Leaving home in the ’80s and the ’90s to try and get work was an absolute necessity,” she says, “because there wasn’t any work in Ireland. Irish actors were not treated very well really; we got the crumbs from the tables of the casting directors and that’s the truth. I didn’t have a strategy or a plan. My theory was, if you’re in work, you’ll get more work; you just have to keep going. I don’t want it to sound like ‘poor me’, but I didn’t come from some trustafarian family. And maybe that was the making of me. I also think that failure is one of the greatest teachers. You know, it really teaches you about your limitations. I’ve had a lot of failures and I think I’m more grateful for my failures than for my successes because when you have a success, it’s often a case of, holy sh*t, where am I going to go from here?!”
With Smother shaping up to be a success, Dervla may yet be left wondering where she goes from here, but, as ever, there will be no let-up in her pursuit of strong roles, whether on stage or screen. If anything, her determination to succeed is stronger than ever. “I’ve said it many times to my husband [fellow actor, Rupert Penry-jones], that I’m never going to retire,” she says. “I’m not the type of person who is going to give up. You know, I’m going to be 50 in October, but everything has changed so dramatically for women. I mean, ten years ago when I hit 40, I was at rock bottom, because I just thought, ‘What am I going to do now? I’ve put so many eggs into one basket and there’s no work for me’. It really was very tough to find anything of substance. Whereas, I feel now that if I knuckle down and focus, and hopefully get to work with some great new writers, I might go off and do something within the industry that’s very fulfilling again.”
As a final question, I wonder what Dervla would say now to that teenager who left Dublin behind and hopped on the ferry to London to make her name in the world? Images of a young girl carrying a long stick with a hanky tied to the end spring to mind…
“I know what you mean!” laughs Dervla, “like the Fool figure in Tarot cards! So what would I tell that teenage me? Well, I would tell her that she is incredibly brave, that she is very naïve, but she has to learn the hard way. I’m very, very proud of her because she has been through one hell of a lot. For example, I had to go through my relationships in public when most kids were in university getting drunk and getting laid and making all their mistakes the way everyone should be doing. I’m intensely grateful to her, but I’m also very grateful to my mother and father who didn’t say, ‘Oh no, you’ve got to do your Leaving Cert’. They said, ‘Yes, let’s buck the trend
“
It feels like a seismic change that it’s so female dominant and it’s genuinely very exciting
here’. They had faith in me and that demands an awful lot of courage. It’s an important point, because we have this vast array of people in their 20s and 30s now with chronic mental health issues. There is too much pressure because they’re caught up in this awful bloody, capitalist machine where you’ve got to tick this box, you’ve got to look like this, and you’ve got to have achieved this by a certain age. That’s bullsh*t. Life is a massive journey. I really feel it’s only now that I know what it means to be a grownup; and I’m about to turn 50!”