Inside the Improbable Rise of ‘Say Nothing,’ One of the Year’s Best Shows
Every author dreams about getting a call from Hollywood. For Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker in his late forties who investigates hidden histories, that call came almost twenty years ago. Now FX’s stunning new series about the Irish Troubles, Say Nothing—which is based on Keefe’s book—is one of the greatest TV shows of 2024.
Yet according to the creators of the show, it’s a miracle that the series even came to life during our current streaming era of risk-averse television. “It’s about two Catholic sisters in Belfast who join the IRA, and then you follow them on a thirty-year journey. That pitch doesn’t exactly make a studio executive see dollar signs,” says Josh Zetumer, Say Nothing’s first-time showrunner.
But executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson knew they had a thrilling story on their hands, thanks to Keefe. “When you pick up one of his books, you’re not putting it down until you’re done,” says Jacobson, who founded an independent production company called Color Force in 2007 and made Simpson a partner in 2012. Together, they’ve produced the Hunger Games movies, Crazy Rich Asians, and American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.
“Even with all the anxiety in Hollywood, Brad and Nina have this deep understanding that you can’t make good art without risk,” says Zetumer, and the studio behind What We Do in the Shadows, The Bear, Shōgun, and English Teacher—FX Productions—shared these ideals when they greenlit a nine-month shoot in Belfast, Liverpool, London, and Sheffield.
With Say Nothing firmly in the conversation for best show of the year, I spoke with Keefe, Zetumer, Simpson, and Jacobson, as well as cast members Josh Finan (Gerry Adams) and Maxine Peake (Dolours Price), about how they turned a nonfiction masterpiece into an unforgettable TV series.
Making the Pitch
BRAD SIMPSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): I’m a voracious reader of literary nonfiction, and Patrick had written a book about the War on Terror called Shatter back in 2005. I called his literary agent and said I’d love to meet this guy. We struck up a friendship, and I introduced him to Nina.
In 2015, he wrote an article about Jean McConville called “Where the Bodies Are Buried” for The New Yorker. Nina and I called him and said, “This is an amazing piece of journalism. What are you going to do with it?” And he said, “I’m writing a book.”
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE (AUTHOR AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): I had actually resolved not to shop the book in Hollywood, because I thought that most producers and studios would struggle to get any version of the story made—much less one that managed to preserve the tricky tone, which was something I had really laboured to get right.
SIMPSON: As a producer, you’re greedy. You want to get things before anybody else. When Patrick sent us the galleys of Say Nothing, it had the stakes of a thriller but the haunting resonance of the best pieces of fiction and nonfiction about war. Nina and I flew out to New York to meet him at the Smile café and made our pitch for why we were the only people to produce the book and why he shouldn’t show it to anyone else.
KEEFE: When they proposed the idea of developing the book into a limited series for FX, and doing so in genuine collaboration, with me involved at every step, I thought there might be an opportunity to make something really ambitious and potentially great.
SIMPSON: We walked into FX and said, “This is going to sound crazy, but there’s this book about the Troubles and the IRA, and we need to buy it before anybody else sees it.” They stepped up because they’re great partners, and we pivoted toward Josh.
KEEFE: I had been attached to other projects as a producer before, but never with this level of involvement. So I was involved in helping pick Josh Zetumer as a showrunner.
JOSH ZETUMER (CREATOR, SHOWRUNNER, AND EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): I thought the book was brilliant but also that there was no way in hell it would ever get made. Hollywood is so fear-based that the odds of getting a green light on an ambitious period show set in Northern Ireland were maybe 5 per cent, no matter how good the book was.
I was very cautious, but I agreed to do it because of Brad and Nina. They know if you have a great story and you hire great people to tell it, you can make something special. And they’re tenacious. Especially Nina. You do not want to be on the wrong side of Nina Jacobson, as anyone in Hollywood will tell you.
Breaking the Story
ZETUMER: It started with Brad, Nina, Patrick, and I getting in a room together with a whiteboard.
SIMPSON: We were in a shitty office building in Burbank. Patrick’s Uber crashed on the freeway, but he still showed up to the meeting with a huge burn across his chest that would send me to the emergency room, but instead he was like, “We must break the story!”
KEEFE: There was a slight tension between my roles as author and producer, in that as the author you are there to advocate for and protect the integrity of the book, but as a producer I also recognised that in order to succeed, the series needed to deviate from the book in important ways and become a different work of art, sharing some essential DNA with the book but functioning on its own terms.
ZETUMER: After those initial meetings, I went off and did a sixteen-week writers’ room to break the series, and it was really a murderers’ row. It was Joe Murtagh, who created The Woman in the Wall; Clare Barron, an American playwright who’s been nominated for a Pulitzer; Kirsten Sheridan, who was nominated for an Oscar for co-writing In America; and then we had Patrick dropping in to talk about history. The whole thing took place over Zoom during the pandemic. We had two writers in L.A., one writer in New York, and Joe was in Madrid.
KEEFE: Josh made a wise choice very early on to build this story chiefly around Dolours Price, which meant that we had to strip away a lot of other material that is essential in the book but would have made the show feel too diffuse. We don’t touch Brendan Hughes’s hunger strike, for instance, or his prison break.
SIMPSON: The most heated debate we had internally was when to switch out our actors. Should the younger actors suddenly be the older actors the moment Dolours gets out of prison? Should it happen at the end of episode seven or at the beginning? We felt like it was something that could make or break the production because the handoff to the older actors was so important.
KEEFE: Ultimately, we split the difference and did it in the middle.
SIMPSON: There was a moment in preproduction when we were in Belfast for the first time doing a black-cab Troubles tour. The cabbie was driving around quoting Patrick’s book to us, and Patrick said, “Excuse me, where are you getting these quotes?” The driver said, “It’s the best book about the Troubles, Say Nothing.” I got to have my Marshall McClellan moment and say, “This is Patrick Keefe, the author of the book,” and I realised we had this really authentic text.
A Nine-Month-Long Shoot
ZETUMER: It was a 135-day shoot with 215 speaking parts.
SIMPSON: Josh really understood the dark humour of people in Northern Ireland.
ZETUMER: The cast was so funny.
MAXINE PEAKE (ACTOR, OLDER DOLOURS PRICE): I grew up in Manchester, so I remember the Manchester bombing. These things hit really close to home for me. But you can’t do a job with actors from Ireland and not laugh 90 per cent of the time.
ZETUMER: Lola [Petticrew] and Anthony [Boyle] have been friends since childhood, and there were moments when it seemed like they actually had too much chemistry. There’s a scene in episode 2 where Dolours and Brendan are outside the pub talking about violence and having a moral centre, and Anthony was so charming and dashing that it looked like Brendan was gonna put the moves on Dolours. I remember running to the video village and whispering to our director Mike Lennox, “Tell Anthony, ‘Too much smoulder!’ ”
JOSH FINAN (ACTOR, YOUNG GERRY ADAMS): We filmed the scene where they’re making the car bombs in Oxfordshire, and a bunch of the cast hopped in a minivan together and just laughed for two hours all the way to London.
PEAKE: We were allowed to let some scenes run and improvise. Everyone was so locked into it, especially the Irish actors. This is their history, and you could really feel that duty of care in the room.
FINAN: It was interesting to play a character based on a real person, when you know the real person doesn’t want anything to do with the show. But in a way, that became liberating. Had I been sitting down with him, I might have had this fixed interpretation of him as a real person. I read a lot about him and watched hours and hours of footage of him, but on set, you throw all of that out the window and look your fellow actors in the eye.
NINA JACOBSON (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): One challenge was the fact that Belfast doesn’t look like it used to. Any place that’s been torn apart by violence has been completely remade, so blending actual Belfast with Liverpool, where we shot the bulk of the show, was a real challenge because we couldn’t get that wrong. The sense of place was so essential to the characters.
ZETUMER: The biggest challenge was reconciling our outsized ambition for the series with our budget, because believe it or not, we did not have a ton of money to make this show. It looks great, and so much of the credit goes to our production designer, Caroline Story, who built this backlot north of London that was the size of a city block. It recaptured Belfast so well that when older people came there who had lived in Belfast during the Troubles, they had a real sense memory of being on those streets.
Our costume designer, Jane Petrie, had to build this wardrobe that spanned fifty years, and she would create an individual story for each piece of clothing. Did they get it from their grandmother? Did they buy it at the shop?
Releasing a Hit
JACOBSON: The day it dropped on Hulu, someone sent a picture of their television screen in our group chat. I said, “Well, I guess I can’t give you any more notes,” and Josh said, “I’m sure you’ll find a way.” No project is ever finished, only abandoned.
FINAN: I just watched three episodes a night with my mom, my dad, and my sister, and it took a while before my mom recognised me. You hear Gerry doling out instructions and then it pans to me, and a good ten seconds went by before my mom said, “Oh my God, is that you?!?”
KEEFE: In a way that is more true now than when the book was published in 2018, this story feels quite contemporary to me, and resonant with this moment. I’m not trying to draw any cheap analogies, and every situation is different, but this is a story about a divided society, about young people driven to extreme measures in their efforts to change an existing order that they feel is unjust, about how we should think both about colonialism and armed resistance and the reaction and overreaction of the state. [If] on a deeper level the series can help people think about our present moment, and help spark conversations about all these themes, that would be enormously gratifying.
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