How to make a viral star

India Mullen’s breakthrough in ‘Normal People’ was a lockdown hit, now she’s in the Gate in a play set during the 1918 pandemic, says

‘It feels almost like an accident that I’m an actress,” says India Mullen. “I didn’t do much acting growing up. Most of my friends were surprised when I studied drama. They thought I’d do art instead. I was into drawing and painting.” It is a blustery Saturday afternoon and she arrives windswept. We’re in the Gresham Hotel, only a stone’s throw from the Gate Theatre, where Mullen is playing Della Garrett in Emma Donoghue’s adaptation of her novel The Pull of the Stars, directed by Louise Lowe.

Set in a Dublin hospital in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic, Mullen’s character is pregnant and a patient in the public maternity hospital.

“She’s from the southside, from a Protestant family. In the play, a midwife, Julia Power, looks after three women on the ward. They are in quarantine on account of their flu and pregnancy.

“The play follows Julia dealing with these patients under extremely difficult conditions. It’s about fate and destiny and there’s a very unlikely love story at the centre of it. And it’s about women rallying together.”

Emma Donoghue wrote The Pull of the Stars before the pandemic; the book was published just as it began. In many ways the story mirrored what was going on and so, as she said herself, “the book sold like hot cakes”.

“With the Spanish flu, people didn’t want to talk about it for decades afterwards,” says Mullen. “I think we certainly have a similar thing with the pandemic we experienced. But it’s cathartic.”

During the pandemic Mullen became known to large audiences for her role as Peggy, Connell and Marianne’s straight-talking friend, in Normal People.

“I adored Sally Rooney’s writing and we knew that it was going to be a good piece of work but I don’t think anyone knew the reach that it would have.

“We all got on incredibly well and I made some of my best friends for life on it. The cast are a similar age and it was a personality click. We became best friends over that summer of filming.

“The response to it was intense and it was a really strange time in the world and everything was more magnified. Everyone was kind of living online. We were in the middle of a pandemic and I wasn’t really out of the house much at all. But I did notice the online commentary and when you’re in your mid-20s, adjusting to that is incredibly weird.

“It definitely made me have more sympathy for people who are in the public eye. People online think that they are entitled to comment on actors’ bodies and lives. I saw the kind of ownership they thought they had over other people, especially when it came to social media. I thought that it was very strange and it made me more guarded.”

As a people, we probably have a lot of shame around our bodies and sex and I think that’s changing. There’s a new generation discovering what’s safe in terms of consent and health

Was she aware at the time that, with Normal People, they were breaking new ground in Irish TV drama in terms of honesty about sex? That sex and nudity are part of life?

“Oh my character wasn’t involved in any of that,” she says, clamming up.

I tell her that I know that she wasn’t nude but her character does suggest a threesome.

But more than that, with all the objections about it on Joe Duffy’s Liveline, people phoning in shocked and scandalised by it, what did she make of the brouhaha?

“I think we have a bit of a hangover in Ireland from the Catholic Church. As a people, we probably have a lot of shame around our bodies and sex in general and I think that’s changing now. We are moving away from that and there’s a new generation discovering what’s safe in terms of consent and health. That’s really important as a country.”

Mullen tells me she is delighted that she is able to straddle the acting worlds of stage and screen. And as if that isn’t enough, she does a lot of writing herself. Her big aim is to write and direct for the screen, to get a film made.

Mullen – who can also be seen in The Vanishing Triangle on Virgin Media One – has come a long way since her days in the Gaiety School of Acting, from which she graduated in 2014. Straight out of acting school, the Dubliner was lucky to land a role in the TV series Red Rock. She did two seasons of that and then, when she was 22, she left for London.

“The decision to go to London was more like a personal lifestyle choice than a work one,” she says.

“I wanted to experience living somewhere else other than Ireland and it seemed like an organic move and it wasn’t the other side of the world. The industries between Ireland and England are still very connected.”

When she told her parents she was going to do acting they were supportive but, equally, realistic.

“My parents were worried because of the insecure nature of the job and the unpredictability. They told me that if I was going to do it then it was likely that I’d have to do other jobs throughout my life and work on other things. It was good to have that realistic side of it. Because that was the case and has been the case.

“To have the kind of privilege of doing a job as fun and fulfilling as working in theatre and film, you have to counterbalance that by working in whatever job, be it service or retail. I’ve waited tables, I’ve been a barista and worked in shops. Loads of stuff, a very broad spectrum of side jobs.

“And I’ve met a lot of my best friends in those jobs, so I’m grateful for that. I left Dublin when I was 22, so most of my adult life has been in London.”

She tells me she would love if it was the same in Ireland. She still has a healthy perspective about the acting game and the endless hustle for roles.

“The struggle never really goes away. I think for every actor, regardless of what stage you’re at, you’re constantly working for the next job. You’re constantly putting in an enormous amount of work to get any role.”

I tell her the late Alan Rickman once told me he felt that if he kept walking and working that he would finally get to the horizon.

“Exactly. It’s almost delusional, that blind hope that it will work out. I was always happy to do service jobs, a barista in a cafe or a waitress in a restaurant, if it meant that I was going to get some work.

“I’ve been incredibly lucky that pretty much every year since I left drama school I’ve worked on a couple of jobs a year.”

Mullen’s career is on the ascent and she has so many plans of her own. It will be interesting to see her career and how it continues to soar.

She may feel like an accidental actress but she grafts at her craft.

‘The Pull of the Stars’ by Emma Donoghue is running at the Gate Theatre Dublin until May 12, gatetheatre.ie

‘The Vanishing Triangle’, Mondays, 9pm, Virgin Media One