Sharon Horgan is often approached by strange women who want to talk to her about their divorce. Or how much they hate the school run. Or how their marriage has exploded since having kids. Or all three. “It happens a lot. They don’t necessarily want to talk about the shows,” she says, referring to three of her best-loved TV series — Divorce, Motherland and Catastrophe — which dealt with those three subjects and a lot more. “They just want to talk about ‘the thing’.”
That must be a bit annoying, I say. You’re just trying to get on with life and some mad woman starts ranting at you about her divorce. “Oh no, it’s lovely! It really is. I think, whatever my demographic is, they’re very nice people.”
Well, phew. Because not long ago I was one of those mad women, ranting away at Horgan. It was in the spring of 2022, when she was still dealing with the aftershocks of her 2019 divorce from her husband of 14 years, Jeremy Rainbird (as anyone who has been divorced knows, the aftershocks can reverberate for years and, in some cases, are worse than the initial impact). She talked — nervously, carefully — about how the past three years had been, and I responded by dumping all my own midlife malaises in her lap. A bit embarrassing at the time, downright mortifying in retrospect, given that I was there to interview her about her glorious career, not whine about my disastrous life.
Yet it’s hard to avoid this with Horgan, whose shows are so wise about “the human condition and how difficult it can be just to exist day to day. I guess that’s my wheelhouse,” as she puts it. Also, Horgan, 54, comes across — on screen and off — as every woman’s fantasy best friend: a bit frantic, a lot funny. Relatable and aspirational, as branding people would say (likable, as normal people would say). She freely uses her own life in her shows and often stars in them, so some of us struggle to separate fact from fiction and to remember that Horgan isn’t actually gagging to hear the details of our marital woes.
We have followed her life through her shows. She was in her thirties when she made the superlative Pulling (2006-09), about three young women screwing up, and just screwing, in London. Then came Catastrophe (2015-19), about what happens to a marriage after kids are born. This was followed by Motherland (2016-22), about the hellishness of combining motherhood and work, and Divorce (2016-19), about a couple doing exactly what the title suggests, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Thomas Haden Church. Shagging, marriage, kids, divorce: the four ages of woman — and specifically of Horgan.
“Yeah, it’s kinda mental, isn’t it? I do like to use my life in writing, partly to figure myself out, but also because people seem to enjoy watching someone f*** up as much as I do,” she says with an easy, self-deprecating laugh. “But it makes me feel good about what I do, to think people are getting something from it, just as I do when I watch other people’s stories.”
We’re meeting today at a photographer’s studio in east London to talk about the second series of Bad Sisters, her hugely successful black comedy on Apple TV+. She is palpably calmer than the last time I saw her, her rose-gold hair making a halo of happiness around her elegant face. By chance the studio is round the corner from the home Horgan shares with her two daughters, now 16 and 20. She talks about her arrangements with her ex-husband, but waves her hand over my recorder to indicate that the details are off the record, and fair enough.
“It’s tough because it’s just me, but we make it work. It’s a bit of a circus family. My work/life balance had to change, and that’s good. But when I take a job the girls are incredibly encouraging because they know I’d really rather be with them.”
Shagging, marriage, kids, divorce: the four ages of woman — and specifically of Horgan.
What did her daughters make of her pink hair? “Well, they don’t mind now, but the first time I did a really bad job, like it was bright pink. See, I was blonde for the first series of Bad Sisters, and I knew I’d have to go blonde for the second, but I didn’t want to be blonde in the middle, but if you go back to brown and then blonde again it just destroys your hair. So, really, the pink was practical,” she says, sounding a lot like the Sharon character on Catastrophe explaining why she got electrolysis on her nipples (“It was on special offer!”).
Does she normally wear Chanel blouses on her days off? “This?” she asks, casually plucking at the heavily logoed black silk top that she’s wearing over a grey vest and with a pair of dark trousers. “It’s from Bad Sisters. Everything I’m wearing is from Bad Sisters — the blouse, the top, the trousers, the trainers, all of it. I think maybe the socks are mine. I love fashion but I hate shopping. Like my eldest daughter said to me recently, ‘You don’t know how to dress for summer, you need to sort it out,’ because I was slopping about in denim shorts and a T-shirt.”
Isn’t that what we all wear in the summer? “Not if you have any self-respect! She was like, ‘Just get a few dresses.’ I said, ‘You’re right, you’re right.’ But every time I go shopping — I swear to God I try — I go into town, end up buying some perfume, have a quick look around, feel panicky because there are so many people around, and the next thing I realize I’m going home. So I only do shows where I like the wardrobe.”
I didn’t know actors could keep their wardrobe, I say. “They can if it’s their show,” she says, and laughs again.
Bad Sisters is very much Horgan’s show. As well as starring in it as Eva, the eldest of the Garvey sisters, she co-developed it, co-produced it and co-wrote it. Based on the Belgian show Clan, the first series — set in and around Dublin — focused on the five sisters, one of whom, Grace (played by Anne-Marie Duff), is married to the horribly abusive John Paul (Claes Bang), whom the four other Garvey sisters repeatedly try (and spectacularly fail) to kill.
It’s a delicate mix of comedy, horror and familial love that only Horgan could pull off, and everyone loved it — including, to Horgan’s astonishment, American audiences. “It’s super-Irish, so we were a bit nervous about how people would cope with the accents, but everyone watches with subtitles now, don’t they? But the biggest thing was that Irish people loved it, because that’s what I was really nervous about.” As well as winning a clutch of British and Irish prizes, Bad Sisters was nominated for four Emmys and won a prestigious American broadcasting prize, the Peabody award.
Horgan herself was walloped by grief in the middle of filming when her father John, a turkey farmer, died from cancer. Nine months on, the loss still makes her cry. “I was lucky to be filming at the time, because it’s when things are quiet,” she stops, trying to push the tears back from her eyes. “When you have time to think, that’s when it f***s you up.”
She’s silent for a few seconds and inhales deeply, trying to catch her breath. “Also, the fact we were filming in Ireland was a mad blessing because I was around my brothers and sisters. Before, I was being so annoying about filming because I hate leaving my girls, ‘Can we not shoot more in London?’ But then I was so grateful to be there.”
Two of Horgan’s siblings — including the former professional rugby player Shane — live near her in London and two others live in Ireland, where Horgan grew up. She was born in London, but when she was four her parents bought a turkey farm in Co Meath and moved there. Bad Sisters is ostensibly the least autobiographical of her shows, given that she and her siblings haven’t tried to kill anyone (“well, not yet …”), but it’s the one most soaked in her background, with its Irish setting and the focus on the five siblings.
“That was the main thing that drew me to the Belgian original — I recognized the dynamic between the sisters. My brothers and sisters and I are like an instant party and we forget everyone else when we’re together. So I wanted to see if I could capture that joy and the mad, deep love you feel if you’re lucky enough to be close to your siblings. And I got very lucky with the girls who play the sisters because that now feels like bringing a family together.”
In the new series Eva struggles to find a date on Hinge. Surely that detail isn’t from Horgan’s life? “Nope — I’ve never done internet dating. But I’m ravenous for stories from friends who are doing it.”
Is she seeing anyone? “Mmm, yes,” she begins, and again waves her hand about, the Horgan signal for “off the record”.
But she’s happy? “Yes,” she says quietly, with a small smile.
And there’s life after divorce? “Definitely,” she practically whispers, but with a bigger smile.
Horgan’s shows don’t only reflect her life, they anticipate it. Just as she couldn’t have predicted her father’s death when she was writing the second series of Bad Sisters, she had “no plans at all” to get divorced when she started writing Divorce. And yet that’s what happened in the middle of the shoot. I say that this feels less like her being psychic and more the inevitable result of making shows about women her age. “It really is. It’s true what people say about aging — there’s a freedom that comes from giving less of a f***, and you’re smarter. But I don’t think any of us are prepared for the things that come at you in your fifties. It’s just wild.”
Last time we spoke, she said she was sketching out an idea for a show on her phone about a woman in her fifties. Some of the general ideas for that made it into the new Bad Sisters, but “the main thing I was telling you about, that’s now becoming a show, going back to the realm of half-hour episodes in a broadly sitcom kind of way. But I can’t say anything about it yet, which is so annoying! Oh, and should we talk about Amanda?” she asks, referring to Hulu’s forthcoming true crime series about Amanda Knox, who, in 2007, was wrongfully convicted in Italy of the murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher. Horgan plays Amanda’s mother.
We should, but I can’t get over how much energy Horgan has to do so much. Where does it come from? “I think it’s the menopause. I’m on HRT and have got so many hormones racing through me, and so much energy. I can’t seem to not work, I get so much joy from it and relief. If I don’t have something to do I feel like I’ll literally chew my fingers off.”
Maybe it’s because she’s working so much that she seems so … “Peaceful? Yeah,” she says. “I do feel peaceful at the moment.”
And maybe also joyful from the post-divorce romance, a love affair that’s not for the sake of the family but just for her? “Mmm, I guess,” she whispers again, grinning.
Would she use her post-divorce experience in a show? Not whispering now: “Oh, definitely!”
The second season of Bad Sisters premieres November 13 on Apple TV+
Hadley Freeman is a writer for The Sunday Times of London and the author of Good Girls: The Story and Study of Anorexia
