‘Millennials are more sophisticated than us’

Director Lenny Abrahamson tells Helen Brown why he had to bring Sally Rooney’s hit novel ‘Normal People’ to the screen

‘Ithink we’re at that weird age where life can change a lot from small decisions,” realise the young lovers at the heart of Sally Rooney’s bestselling novel, Normal People (2018). And the electricity of that awkward, selfconscious jeopardy keeps the tension humming through director Lenny Abrahamson’s 12-part adaptation for the BBC.

It’s the tale of skinny, wealthy social outcast Marianne and popular, handsome, working-class Connell, star of the football team. Connell’s mum cleans Marianne’s mum’s house. Their external differences are overridden by mutual attraction and their equal, piercing intelligence. The story follows the power-shifts in their relationship as they move from school in County Sligo to Trinity College, Dublin.

Coming hot on the heels of Rooney’s witty, sexually charged debut, Conversations with Friends, the sleeker, sharper Normal People was longlisted for the Booker Prize before it was even published. Abrahamson read the proofs and could immediately “picture it as a groundbreaking and beautiful series”.

Talking from his family home in Ireland, the 52-year-old says he was drawn in by “the truthfulness of the characters”. He says: “In the popular understanding of what makes drama interesting, plots are meant to be driven by secrets, by what we hide or don’t say. But actually, watching intimate honesty up close, on screen, is just as thrilling and engaging. They find themselves through what they can say to each other.”

While this is definitely one of the thrills of Rooney’s prose, I think it’s also one of the triumphs of her generation.

Millennials may sell false visual images of themselves on social media, but whenever I catch them in conversation I notice they are more frank, self-aware and vulnerable than I was in my late teens and early 20s. They are often better active listeners, asking direct questions with less inhibited curiosity than their parents.

“They’re remarkably sophisticated in comparison to how I remember myself at that age,” agrees Abrahamson. “Watching [Normal People’s lead actors] chat to each other, I clocked an openness and awareness of other people’s emotional needs. I think it’s something we had, but would have been afraid to express. My kids – aged 9 and 11 – find it completely bizarre that anybody would have a problem with another person’s preferred sexual orientation, gender or pronoun.”

On screen, newcomers Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal play the leads with hair-raising acuity and erotic charge. A friend recently told me she was struggling to find a good example of on-screen consent to show her teenage daughters. “I want something properly awkward and emotional and sexy, where the right stuff is said and nothing sounds like it came from a government curriculum or from a Hollywood fantasy,” she told me. I can now tell her that romantic-but-real scene is to be found in Normal People.

“I’m so glad you liked it,” says