ONWARDS AND UPWARDS!
AISLING BEA WRITES AND STARS IN A BRAND-NEW COMEDY-DRAMA…
After a “teeny-weeny nervous breakdown”, Aine (Aisling Bea) is fresh out of rehab and trying to get her life back on track in this new six-part comedy, while worried older sister Shona (Sharon Horgan) keeps a vigilant eye on her. Aine is determined to put her best face on, but the road to recovery isn’t going to be
a smooth one for either of them. We chatted to creator and star Aisling about what inspired the show, the struggles of writing her own scripts, and the blurring of the lines between her on-screen sister and her real one…
Can you tell us a little bit about
This Way Up?
It starts off with someone being broken, so it’s not about falling apart, but about getting yourself back together. It’s also about the journey of the co-dependent in that situation – it can be very difficult for the people who are watching someone be unwell – and how scary it is to let go of that person and allow them to be an adult; how you can sometimes wrap someone up in cotton wool too much.
You created and wrote the show yourself – was that a challenging experience?
Frantically writing a series is a big old undertaking, but writing it on your own is a real pain. Sometimes you open up the laptop and you’re like, “Ooh, I wonder what Yesterday’s Me did? NOTHING! Damn you, Yesterday’s Me!” It’s like when you live alone and your house isn’t tidy and you’re like, “Who made this mess?”
You wrote the role of Shona specifically for Sharon – how was it playing sisters?
Sharon and I have been trying and failing to work together for almost a decade! A lot of this was a vehicle for our relationship – she’s like a big
sister to me, so it’s very much what you see on screen in real life as well. That was the easiest part of the show. We had to do all of Sharon’s stuff, for scheduling reasons, in the first two weeks, and after that I missed her so much. At one point I said, “It feels as if I’ve lost my sister,” and Sinéad, who’s the costume designer on the show and is my actual sister, was like, “I’m right here!”