Mairéad Tyers: Cork-born actor on leaving for London, and The Walsh Sisters

Máiréad Tyers was 18 when she moved from Ballinhassig to London to study at one of the world’s most prestigious drama schools. Now, with a BAFTA nomination under her belt, she talks about the best decision of her life

Máiréad Tyers: starring in two RTÉ shows and a run of Chekhov's Three Sisters

Máiréad Tyers has a Paul Mescal story. “On the first day, Ridley asked him ‘are you nervous?’ Paul said, ‘yeah’, and Ridley said, ‘your nerves are no good to me here. You need to just do the job’.”

The My Lady Jane star pauses just long enough to allow the Gladiator II director’s take-no-prisoners reprimand sink in before continuing.

“He’s bang on. If you’re nervous and insecure — and we all are, without a doubt — you’ve got to try your best to put those feelings aside and do the job. I definitely had to do that with Vivienne.”

Vivienne is Vivienne Birch, the “unapologetic” and “completely mad” newspaper editor Tyers plays in the soon-to-drop second season of black-comedy crime drama Obituary.

Possibly best known to date for her BAFTA-nominated performance as Jen in the Disney+ series Extraordinary, 26-year-old Tyers is currently winning legions more fans for her turn as Helen Walsh in The Walsh Sisters, a six-part drama loosely based on two of Marian Keyes’s novels featuring the eponymous siblings.

“Things like Obituary and The Walsh Sisters, they were such no-brainers,” says Tyers on not having to think twice about agreeing to the undeniably meaty roles of Birch (“as soon as I read the character description, I was like, ‘oh my God, yes, I want to do this’”) and Walsh.

Being fully invested in a character and a storyline is important to the Corkonian, and before greenlighting her participation in a project she weighs up whether she’s saying yes to work just “for the sake of it” or because she’s “genuinely passionate” about a part. 

To date, the latter has always been the case, something the actor acknowledges “is a lucky thing to be able to say” in a profession that typically has long stretches of unemployment baked in.

That’s not to say Tyers hasn’t experienced fallow periods. There was an 18-month stint when she didn’t work, which she found “really tough”. She “hates not being busy” and is “always anxious in between jobs to do something else”, even if it’s walking a neighbour’s dog or minding someone’s kids.

Mairead Tyers as Jen in Extraordinary.

She says she’s “sensible” when it comes to money, though, and when earning opportunities arise — Extraordinary paid well, she says — drama school has drilled it into her to “try and be smart about it”.

Voiceover work has, she says, been “a godsend” in those daunting periods where she has no clue when she’s next going to get to sink her teeth into something. 

“It keeps you ticking over massively; some jobs can be very well paid, which is such security in times when you don’t know what’s ahead. It’s been fantastic thing to come with the last year.”

Tyers was “18, about to turn 19” when she moved from her Co Cork village of Ballinhassig to study at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) whose starry alumni includes Cynthia Erivo, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Fiona Shaw and a multitude more.

While the distinguished drama school was where she felt “most at home” when auditioning for a place — she also applied to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and Trinty College’s Lir Academy — settling in took a while, and for her first year, she admits feeling out of her depth.

“It took the whole span of the three years for me to feel like I belonged there,” she says. 

“So I guess I’m incorrect saying it felt like home. I think it was maybe more the promise of what it would be when auditioning, and of course, it has such a prestige. I was thinking of all the actors who had gone there and that I wanted to work like them. It took a while to feel like I fitted in.” 

Fit in she did, though, with her found family of fellow acting students helping to facilitate a sense of belonging and forming a support group she still relies on today, further boosted by the London-based Irish coterie of actors “a good crew of us” whose lives regularly intermingle in the UK’s capital city.

“Everyone knows each other in the industry anyway, not to mind when someone’s Irish… And in London specifically, there’s a good gang of us and we go to all the Irish things. We go to Fontaines, we go to Kneecap, we go to Ye Vagabonds. We bump into each other at these things because we’re all weak for the Irish bands and wanting to support them over here.”

Siobhán Cullen and Máiréad Tyers, Obituary, RTÉ One and RTÉ Player

THE LIST

While she doesn’t have a career plan per se, there is an aspirational course-direction plotted in her mind and on her phone, where she has curated a list of people with whom she’d like to work. 

One of those people is Siobhán Cullen, her co-star in Obituary who plays the lead role of murderous hack Elvira Clancy.

“The main thing that attracted me to the job, to be honest, was Siobhán. She’s a stellar actor. Getting to work with her was a complete dream — and one ticked off of the list of people I wanted to work with.”

Bigging up the talents of others is Tyers all over — she also gives kudos to co-directors Gary Shore and Rachel Curran: “they encourage and nurture you to make those bold choices” — but when it comes to herself, she’s more self-effacing, despite last year’s notable industry nod by way of a BAFTA nomination. 

She acknowledges the boost awards can give a career “but it’s categorically not why we do it, because I think if you’re going to be chasing that forever, you’ll just never be happy or satisfied.” 

What she does tend to chase, however, is perfection, a tendency she acknowledges as “a battle”.

When we speak, a run of Chekov’s Three Sisters is looming, and with it the hothouse pressures of rehearsals and character development. 

It’s a ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’ scenario for Tyers in which “you literally have to fail every single day. And while that terrifies me,” she says, “I think it’s an experience I need to have.” 

Her mention of failing isn’t accidental. Tyers first encountered Beckett’s famous quote on failure (‘Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better’) in youth theatre and it has served as something of a north star for her since.

“I’m constantly thinking of that Samuel Beckett quote,” she says, explaining that it pushes her to delve deeper, be the best she can be. She likes directors to challenge her when she’s trying to nail a rehearsal performance: “… just because we found that thing that feels right, doesn’t mean that that’s it. Let’s try and find something else now”.

From left, Helen (Mairead Tyers), Claire (Danielle Galligan), Maggie (Stefanie Preissner), Rachel (Caroline Menton) and Anna (Louisa Harland) in The Walsh Sisters

Finding something else was key when it came to Helen Walsh. Keyes first wrote about the Walshes in 1995’s Watermelon, so an update — Tyers is reluctant to call it a modernisation as she feels Keyes’s characters are “still so modern” — made sense for the TV Walshes. 

Along with Keyes and co-writer Stefanie Preissner (who also plays Maggie Walsh), Tyers helped create Helen 2.0; the same, but different. “We’ve changed her… she’s not the Helen that I imagined when I read the books in preparation. I love the Helen we’ve created.” 

Tyers also loves the idea that the series is introducing a new generation to Keyes’s writing and will likely prompt them to delve into the novelist’s extensive back catalogue (of which eight are about the Walshes). “I feel excited by that.”

The actor has her own writing goals, but there’s a sense that her perfectionism is holding her back. Asked where she’d like to be in five years’ time, her answer is threefold: along with “getting the chance to carry on working” (a certainty), “working a diverse range of jobs” (also a sure thing), she would “love to have written a script by then”.

“I’m slowly becoming more confident in my ideas. Not confident enough to put pen to paper, but the Notes app is bulging with the amount of ideas that I have.” Why don’t you just do it then?

“It’s an element of the perfectionism; I hate the idea of creating anything bad.” I tell her about a would-be writer who was given permission by a colleague to write a ‘bad book’ which, when written, turned out to be rather good..

“You’re right,” is her enthusiastic reply. “It’s a part of me I need to sort out, because perfectionism doesn’t belong in art. The whole idea of wanting to create something that’s always great is never going to allow you to reach the full potential of your artistic ability or your full creative ability. In five years, I hope that I’ll have copped on and done it.”

• The Walsh Sisters is currently showing on RTÉ One on Sundays with ‘Obituary’ returning on Tuesday, October 14. 
• ‘Three Sisters’ by Anton Chekov is running at the Gaiety Theatre as part of Dublin Theatre Festival until October 12.