Hilary Rose on The Young Offenders and the extraordinary ride it has brought her on
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The Young Offenders series brought humour and warmth to our lives and seemed for a time to have the entire nation singing The Frank and Walters and talking about awkward kisses and melted faces.
Now its star, Hilary Rose and her husband, writer/director Peter Foott, are working on another exciting production, one which will lead to a new arrival in their Cork home at the end of this year.
“It’s a one-woman show! Though he did have some input in the early days,” laughed Hilary of her pregnancy. They are excited at the prospect of welcoming a sibling for their toddler Jake.
“Becoming a mum is just such a massive journey in itself. It was really profound, actually, so it’s really nice to be able to do it all over again.” It could well mean that — depending on when filming begins — Hilary could find herself pregnant on set, playing straight-talking mum and hardworking fishmonger Mairead, just as she did in the original film. “I think that’s going to happen again. I think I’m going to be pregnant while we’re filming.”
The actress and writer is currently developing a number of new TV and film projects and a play called China Doll, set around a young couple who move into an old house in Cork. “I’ve got a couple of projects that I kind of had to put on the back burner when we were doing The Young Offenders. I’ve been excited about getting stuck into those projects again. When you’re on set it’s hectic and there’s only a certain amount of work you can do.”
It’s been an extraordinary time for the young Cork couple, who moved back to the city from Dublin a number of years ago with dreams and ambitions of being able to work at home. If The Young Offenders was a riot of fun and a love letter to Cork, the TV series was even better, adding substance and story to the characters we’d met in the movie, and adding some new personalities along the way. A second series has already been commissioned by the BBC.
Even now, the ripple effect continues. “Every week there’s a message through friends, people saying: ‘We went to a wedding this weekend and everybody in the church wore Billy Murphy masks’, or ‘we went on a bus trip and we broke into song’. It’s just so funny.
“When we did the film, which feels like a long time ago now, we always felt it would make a great series. It just felt like every character had such depth to them, such backstory, that they would nearly need a series to delve into the whole lot.
“Our agents in the UK thought the same thing. They connected us with the BBC and the rest is history.
“I think Peter got the email on a Thursday evening at eight o’clock, and it just said: ‘Right — shoot and deliver as soon as possible!’”
It was an exciting development, but Hilary and the team felt pressure to follow through. “Yes it’s stressful. Now this is an even bigger market and it’s a massive step up. BBC were really really good, they were really hands off, but you just want to deliver the best TV show possible.
For me, in my own performance, I felt I really had to step up. I felt I wanted to raise the bar and really push myself. When I start getting scared about something that’s when I know I’m stretching myself beyond my safety zone.
While the show has us guffawing at the antics of Jock and Conor, it also frequently got us in the feels. One episode that ended in tribute to mammies everywhere was especially moving. “That’s just kind of the way Peter writes,” observes Hilary. “Without being morally preachy, even though there might be hilarious comedy moments, he really anchors it with a lot of heart. People were really hit emotionally by it.
“Before we went to shoot the series, I said to Peter: ‘A lot of my stuff is really heavy in it’ and he said: ‘Yeah, she’s the one who anchors it all, keeps the boys together, keeps the family together’. I kind of joked that the lads spent the whole summer laughing and I spent the whole summer crying!” Interestingly, two mutual friends had told her she and Peter would make a good couple before they even met.
Though they didn’t know each other from Cork, they moved in similar social circles in Dublin and by the time Hilary was introduced to him, she was intrigued.
“I didn’t know him at this point, but my best friend who knew him would say: ‘You know what? I think you’d like him’. Separately there was another girl who knew Peter and she was like: ‘I think you you’d really like him’. There was a couple of different people trying to set us up! It went on actually for a few months. We kept on missing each other, we went on group nights out and I wouldn’t be there or maybe he wouldn’t be there. Eventually, at Christmas 2007, we were on the same night out. We met, and we had a chat, and that was it. Straight away — they were absolutely right.”
Hilary dithered a little before finding her calling as an actress and writer. For many years, she travelled the country performing as a DJ under the name DJ HER. She adored it, playing mainly hip-hop and house, but once she started a family she felt for practical reasons it was time to hang up the headphones.
“I DJ’d probably for about 18 years. I still have my record collection. I loved it, all over the country, gigs and big music festivals. I had a residency in The Savoy as well. It was really great fun, but in a sense it kind of supported me when I was starting out as an actor. That was how I did it. But then my acting career started to take off, and then I became pregnant. And I thought: ‘You know what? It’s not the scene for me anymore’. Once you’re pregnant nightclubs aren’t really a good idea! So I called it a day a couple of years ago. I loved it, it was a really massive part of my life, but it’s over.”
She says she knew she was never going to be a “nine-to-fiver” but it took her until her mid-twenties to seriously consider acting as a career. Theatre work and comedy roles in The Republic of Telly and The Fear followed.
“I studied for a little bit in Cork and then a little bit in Dublin, and then I kind of faffed around for a few years. I graduated and I kind of had no idea what was next or how to go about it. That was a tricky couple of years in Dublin but it was a lot of fun.
“Then slowly but surely I got a couple of little breaks. It’s funny, there’s no blueprint for acting. If you go to law school, if you study to be a doctor or an electrician, there’s a blueprint of what to do. For acting there’s not really that. You graduate from drama school and you effectively have nothing to go to.” A number of years ago, they decided to move back to Cork and see if they could develop work indigenously. “It’s really been a dream come true. That was always our plan, and one of the gambles for us, to leave Dublin and come back to Cork.
“We came back with very little, with nothing really, just an idea of what we wanted to do. It’s been amazing being able to do it. We now get to live here and work here for most of the year. Because it’s now opened doors on an international level and we need to go away to work, that’s ok, because Cork is still our home and always will be.”
As the city prepares to welcome back The Young Offenders for a new series, Hilary said there was another unexpected plus to its success that she loves. “You know how people are watching TV shows in their rooms on different platforms? Our generation growing up, you’d watch something together because you only had one station, one TV. People have come back to me and said, whether they’re housemates living together, whether they’re families, they would all wait and watch it together. I just felt that that was a really unifying thing."
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