Saoirse-Monica Jackson in Derry Girls. Like her character on the show, Jackson was born and brought up in Derry. Photo / Netflix
Saoirse-Monica Jackson tells how the unlikely TV hit changed her life.
"Oh my God, it's so nice to be interviewed by someone with the same accent!" exclaims Saoirse-Monica Jackson, on the publicity round for the third and final series of Derry Girls. She's being generous — our accents aren't the same, really. Jackson was born and brought up in Derry, and she sounds just as she does in the show — but with none of her character Erin Quinn's whining and self-aggrandising.
I was born two hours down the road, south of Belfast, where our accents are already a bit softer, and mine has (according to everyone back home, at least) been anglicised by five years away. How did she manage to hold on to hers now she has surfed all the way to Hollywood thanks to the unlikely global success of a comedy about teenagers in the Troubles? "Mine has not been neutralised at all," she says defiantly. "As an actor you have to maintain a strong sense of self."
It's certainly worked for Jackson. Just a few years ago she was going door to door flogging HelloFresh recipe box subscriptions to pensioners in Manchester. Then she got the call for Derry Girls and hasn't looked back. The show, Channel 4's biggest comedy hit since Father Ted, is about a group of Catholic schoolgirls navigating adolescence. Standing in their way are their mothers, the no-nonsense headmistress Sister Michael — oh, and there is also the Troubles.
Series one had 2.5 million viewers on Channel 4, while series two jumped to well over 3 million. After a three-year, Covid-induced wait and a Netflix release that has brought in a global audience, the final series is expected to have even more. Derry now boasts a giant mural of Jackson and her co-stars. Tourists come for walking tours of the show's locations. In Northern Ireland, that's a very big deal.
The show has been credited with educating young people beyond Northern Ireland about the Troubles, but it has also opened up conversations for those who lived through it. Northern Ireland's version of the English stiff upper lip is to laugh off trauma, and we see that play out in Derry Girls — think of Aunt Sarah complaining about missing her sunbeds because of a bomb scare.
This dark humour has allowed survivors of what was really a civil war — which claimed 3,500 lives in a place with the population of Kent — to process what happened to them and their families. "People [who have seen Derry Girls] would tell me a funny story, but it would end up being a sad story, and a poignant turning point in their lives," Jackson says. "As an actor it's a gift to be part of that, to help people to open up in this way."
It is all the more powerful because "ceasefire babies" like Jackson and me (she is 28, I'm 24), who were born near the end of the conflict, grew up largely unaware of the full horrors of the Troubles. "Families protected children from it and gave them a very normal childhood." But, like the Derry Girls, things we accepted as normal really weren't. I remember leaving a shopping centre because of a bomb scare; in Derry there was an army barracks at the bottom of Jackson's street. "The soldiers were patrolling with these huge guns when we were out on the street playing games. Soldiers weren't there to do anything wrong, they were the backdrop, like lampposts," Jackson explains.
This even-handed perspective owes much to her upbringing. Her mother is from Donegal in the Republic, where she ran a pub, and "had different opinions" from her father, who is from Derry. "They wanted us to have our own opinions . . . not to be scared of the world." At one point she refers to "Northern Ireland", the term favoured by unionists. She is a nationalist who considers herself Irish and she quickly corrects herself: "The north of Ireland, sorry."
"I definitely do think that there's a difference being from the north of Ireland — it's an identity in itself, whether you identify as British or Irish. We have our own thing going on," she says. I am inclined to agree — Northern Ireland's culture, our sense of humour, even our boring uncles are distinct.
When we left Derry Girls at the end of series two, the IRA had just announced its 1994 ceasefire and President Clinton had visited the city, calling for change. Will that make the new series calmer? "It's still the same Derry Girls madness," Jackson assures me. "The girls are getting their GCSE results." The Good Friday agreement, which marked the end of the Troubles, is four years away. "Lisa [McGee, the series' writer] wanted it to end with the Good Friday agreement, so yes, we are getting there." If the ceasefire brought people to tears, the moment the conflict ended for good is set to be even more powerful.
The show is obviously written from a nationalist perspective, but it is not overtly partisan. The characters want peace more than anything, and a hilarious cross-community weekend away shows Protestant teenagers dealing with all the same confusions and embarrassments as their Catholic counterparts. But where the show does take a stand is on gay rights, brought to the fore when Clare comes out and most of the cast wear Pride badges.
Jackson was recently in a short film, Liverpool Ferry, about a teenage girl secretly travelling to England for an abortion. Abortion was decriminalised in Northern Ireland in 2019 but the DUP has repeatedly refused to commission abortion services, meaning girls are still forced to travel. Is that an issue close to her heart? "It really is. No one should have to go through an abortion and then carry shame on top of that."
Jackson is less willing to chat party politics. "I don't like it when actors become political figures." Instead, she says, "the main emphasis of Derry Girls is hope for a better life for the kids that come after you, and for the community." Part of that promise, she says, is that young people from Derry, and across Northern Ireland, will watch the show and imagine wider horizons for themselves. When it comes to young women, she says, they should be encouraged not only to think above their station, but to "leave the station!"
Jackson didn't have Derry Girls as inspiration when she decided to be an actress ("at the age of four"), but she did have Pulp Fiction. "The only actor I knew from Derry was Bronagh Gallagher." She watched the film in secret. "I must have been about nine. I was absolutely traumatised. But I loved it, because it was amazing to see a girl from Derry in a huge Hollywood film."
Now she has made it to Hollywood herself, starring in the forthcoming DC film The Flash. "It was so crazy to be in the same film as Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck. But even in that studio, I was stood there going, 'I'll always be a Derry Girl.' " When she starts scratching the sole of her foot with a knife during our interview, apologising that she has an itch, it's hard to disagree.
Seasons one and two of Derry Girls are available to stream on Netflix NZ.
Written by: Laura Hackett
© The Times of London
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