Lola Petticrew On 'Say Nothing', The Troubles And Rising Irish Talent
Lola Petticrew had a phase, where if they passed by a bookshop and saw Anna Burns’ Milkman, they had to buy it. ‘I’m a walking cliché,’ the Belfast-born actor says. ‘I grew up consuming so much Irish art. I had an amazing teacher – who’s now one of my closest friends – in my Catholic girls school on the Falls Road. They really wanted people to relate to the novels and poetry that we were reading, and see art and literature as a tool for change.’
Affinity with Irish culture has been pulsating for the last half decade. We’ve careened far past the first of the island’s modern day, pop culture-rallying rebel yell, Derry Girls: the 2019 Netflix show which traced the angsty lives of teenagers through the North’s Troubles conflict for a global audience. And then there was Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which buoyed the stardom of sad, serious Irish schoolboy now-Gladiator Paul Mescal. This year feels like a particular fever-pitch. Irish language rap trio Kneecap star in a provocative biopic that smashed the box office and shortlisted for the Oscars, and the band themselves beat the British government in court for rescinding their funding. Say Nothing, which Petticrew stars in as the Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer Dolours Price, arrives on that same arc.
FIND OUT MORE ON ELLE COLLECTIVE
The series, from FX and Disney+, is based on the sprawling, deeply researched book of the same name by New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe, which traces Dolours’ ascent into the IRA’s inner sanctum during the conflict. We meet a young Dolours and her sister Marian in Seventies West Belfast in the grip of the Troubles, where Northern Ireland is occupied by the British army and paramilitaries are beating back against them, civilians falling between. Irish Catholics in the North experienced discrimination that impacted home-owning, voting, and job prospects. The Price sisters first take up with the civil rights movement, but after a violent attack on the peaceful protests, they promise themselves to the Republican cause and armed struggle. Both became key paramilitary figures, leading the first IRA attack on British soil, the 1973 London Old Bailey bombing, of which they were convicted, imprisoned, and force fed in British prison. The series deftly navigates their commitment to both a free Ireland and an unfurling class struggle, their intense sisterly bond and free-fall of innocence, and later, Dolours’ emotional and mental haunting.
The Falls Road school where Petticrew, 29, was educated sits close to the murals commemorating the real-life people and their motivations depicted in the series. Images of Brendan ‘The Dark’ Hughes (played on the show by Petticrew’s friend and peer Anthony Boyle) and hunger strikers adorn the peace walls – barriers that segregate Nationalist and Loyalist communities, many still erect today. A cut scene had Petticrew dress in the Price sisters’ school uniform – the same one they also wore as a teenager.
‘I grew up hearing their names,’ says Petticrew. ‘"Free Marian Price" was written on the Black Mountain, and it’d be spray-painted on electric boxes. But I realised I hardly, truly, knew anything about them. We’d grown up knowing the 10 men who died on hunger strike in 1981. A lot less people know about the Price sisters’ hunger strike, and how that impacted the war’s trajectory. I’m sure misogyny is a factor.’
When Petticrew first heard of the project, they felt hesitation. There’s a long history of misunderstanding the nuances of The Troubles, and its ongoing impact on Northern Ireland. ‘We’re talking 800 years!’ says Petticrew. ‘I considered that, maybe for an American audience, it’d be difficult to grasp. I put those thoughts on the back burner. My main concern was never to translate it across the world. For me, the people at home were always in the forefront of my mind, and I wanted to do right by them. It had to be a story that made them feel seen.’
When they read the scripts, fear overtook – they knew immediately they wanted in, and the ‘massive responsibility’ it came with. ‘I couldn’t believe that the scripts weren’t written by somebody who’s from West Belfast,’ they say. ‘It encapsulated a spirit I know so well. You’d think, "Oh, Americans fix the Troubles and tie it up in a wee bow, do they?" There’s no intention to try to solve anything, or present a hero or villain. Rather, it allows an audience to face tough questions. It challenges our ideas of morality, rather than imposing them.’
Say Nothing interpolates the harrowing story of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was abducted by the IRA following allegations (never verified) that she was a British informant. She was never seen again. Flash-forwards show older Dolours (played by Maxine Peake) engaging in interviews that were known in real life as the ‘Boston Tapes’, an oral history that former Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries engaged in under the condition they would only be released after their individual deaths. She shares key information on Jean’s disappearing. Dolours’ addiction and mental torment is clear. ‘Our characters are allowed to dance in the grey area,’ Petticrew says. ‘You see the journey to the choices they make.’
It was important for Petticrew, too, to make a distinction between the ‘Dolours of reality, of Keefe’s book, and the show’. They didn’t speak to Dolours family (she died in 2013): ‘I didn’t feel it was respectful. For me, my job as an actor was to play the Dolours on those scripts.’
Their relationship with 23-year-old Irish actor Hazel Doupe, who plays Marian, was most formative. ‘I never did a chemistry read with Hazel, which is actually quite mad!’ Petticrew says. ‘I thought, "what if I hate Marion on the show, and we’re meant to be so close?!" Then when I met Hazel, I felt this sibling chemistry.’ The show’s pivotal moments hinge on their relationship, whether that’s robbing a bank together dressed in nun habits or enduring the horrors of hunger strike.
‘The first thing the sisters do when they walk into a room is look for each other, and I feel like that came naturally for us,’ says Petticrew. ‘Hazel just played a blinder. She had everything plotted so specifically. It was beautiful to watch.’ It was an eight-month shoot of difficult material. ‘At the end of the day, all we wanted to do was watch Gilmore Girls, eat vegan dumplings, drink zero Prosecco, and hug each other. That relationship helped what people saw on screen.’
The cast worked with intimacy coordinators to film force feeding scenes. In real life, the sisters’ torture sparked mass protest and The International Medical Council ruled it unethical. Most people would usually understand intimacy coordinators in the context of sex scenes, brought into mainstream discourse by shows like Normal People and I May Destroy You.
‘The intimacy coordinators and stunt team were wonderful. They allowed us to lead that process,’ Petticrew says. Scenes were diligently choreographed and safe words were used. The cast and crew had to greet each other with eye contact before and after: ‘You acknowledge each other as people’. They’d do breathing exercises, and shake everything out.
‘Your body and your brain sometimes don't quite match up. It was tough, mentally and physically,’ says Petticrew. ‘It’s important to be honest and dig that bit deeper. To be respectful of these women and what their bodies went through. We can call it what it is: torture. Everything we did was with great detail, care, and respect.’
Petticrew’s roles span complex character studies and impressive double acts. In 2019, they starred in the theatrical adaptation of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls at the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which centres on the lives and loves, brutal and beautiful friendship of two girls in rural 1950s Ireland. ‘Some of the most interesting love interests aren’t lovers – it’s siblings and best friends,’ says Petticrew. ‘The most intense breakup can be a friendship breakup, especially if you’re not a man. We love each other in a way that’s so different and so intense. I think it's just really true life.’
The cast reflects a rake of burgeoning young talent. When we speak, Petticrew has just been with Doupe and Josh Finan in Belfast. Finan plays the now-Sinn Fein politician Gerry Adams (whose denial of his involvement in the IRA is added to Say Nothing’s end credits), and has just wrapped on a new project in Belfast. Petticrew has known Anthony Boyle since they were 11, and describes him as ‘a brother’.
‘I’d see Anto on our massive, intense set and then see us as kids,’ says Petticrew. ‘We did short films with the director Michael Lennox when we were teenagers. It all feels like we’ve gotten away with something! We’re never going to get anything like that again.’
Say Nothing offers something other than the older male lens The Troubles is often prismed through. ‘This was a time of radical youth, and radical women,’ says Petticrew. ‘We always came back to that.’ Dolours and Marian’s innocence is lost in the real grit and supposed glamour of their mission – as the stakes get higher, as a viewer, you’re pulled back into a grim reality. They’re described as ‘teenagers’ by the press during their bombing mission. Marian is 19 in prison. On the brink of death on an infirmary bed, they are shrunken and childlike.
‘We wanted to make sure people saw how young they were, and that youth was a reason people were drawn to such radical violence and politics,’ says Petticrew. ‘What you see in Maxine’s Dolours is her reflections and regrets. I presented the radical nature of youth: being led by emotions, justice, righteousness.’
Petticrew is still sitting with Say Nothing’s most pertinent, timely questions. ‘As someone who is from here and lives here, I’m thinking: how can we move forward? What defines peace and reconciliation?’ Petticrew is part of a generation known as the ‘Ceasefire babes’ – those born just before and after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the violence and established a power-sharing, devolved government. But as Petticrew says, the peace process has been ‘a band aid over a gaping wound’, where paramilitary activity is still pervasive, the government has collapsed and been a barrier to more progressive politics, and more people are dying by suicide than during the conflict.
‘I could talk a lot about intergenerational trauma here, or all the amazing work that journalist Lyra McKee was doing here before she was tragically murdered. Ceasefire babies were promised an entirely different world, and the bargain wasn’t kept up,’ Petticrew says. ‘These are all the questions that I have as a young person here, and I’m sure others in conflict and post-conflict places resonate with that too. There’s a universality to the specificity, I think the show keeps that conversation going.’
They’re working on another project: the adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s novel Trespasses, alongside Gillian Anderson, and which also centres on The Troubles. ‘People can say, "oh another Troubles project? Is that what you really want to do?" How many men do you know that play soldier after soldier in World War Two films? And nobody says anything to those dudes. They win awards for it!’
‘This time is such a rich tapestry to pull from,’ they add. ‘It’s our history, and it’s such a recent history. The more projects about it, the better. My character Cushla couldn’t be any more different from Dolours.’ Petticrew began reading Trespasses at the start of filming Say Nothing. ‘As soon as I finished it, I rang my agent, and I said, "I think that they’re gonna make this into something. I want to play Cushla."’ Six months later, they got the call.
Petticrew credits the aforementioned Irish boom with Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls. ‘People love those characters so much, and it really made people open to hear Irish voices and accents,’ they say. ‘Our culture is a culture that’s steeped in storytelling. It’s who we are, whether it’s drama or poetry or song. As people, we’re great storytellers. Even if we’re not great storytellers, we’ll still tell stories! It’s come serendipitously at a time when people are open to hearing different accents and cultures. People aren’t so afraid of subtitles anymore.’
Petticrew pegs it as an exciting, sustaining era for Irish talent, whether their cast mates or authors they love, like Naoise Dolan, Michael Magee, and Megan Nolan. ‘I’m obsessed! It’s always been there. I think it’s just nice to see it be recognised, where you’re seeing your friends be recognised. My hands are sore from constantly clapping for them all.’
Say Nothing is available to watch on Disney+ now.
ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today HERE.
You Might Also Like
