Nora-Jane Noone: 'Living abroad gave me space to grow'

The Hidden Assets star talks to Aoife Barry about her relief at being back in Ireland during Trump's presidency, and learning to trust her instincts

Sat, 08 Nov, 2025 - 01:00

Aoife Barry

One day on the set of RTÉ show Hidden Assets, actor Nora-Jane Noone had a ‘giddy’ moment.

“We were in this room and there was a plastic divider, and whatever way we were filming it, I saw it on the monitor. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m having my Dana Scully moment’,” she laughs, referencing the iconic X-Files character played by Gillian Anderson.

But while FBI special agents Scully and Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) investigated strange occurrences of an extra-terrestrial nature, Noone’s character Detective Sergeant Claire Wallace is squarely on terra firma in Hidden Assets.

DS Wallace is the head of a team at the real-life Criminal Assets Bureau. So instead of aliens, she’s on the hunt for criminals.

It’s Noone’s second season playing DS Wallace, and the third season of the show drops on November 9.

From the beginning of the first episode, the drama is amped up. Very quickly, DS Wallace is faced with a traumatic incident.

Noone, who is from Galway, is a gentle and thoughtful presence in person.

Off-screen, she confesses to being a bit of a nerd. On-screen, she enjoyed getting to play the vulnerable side to DS Wallace this season.

But how did she prepare for the difficult scenes? “You think: how would you feel, and how would you cope? A lot of the thing with Claire is: How would you feel underneath, and then how does she hide it?” she says.

The role involved learning some unusual skills, like handling a gun.

“We always have training beforehand,” she says. “So you always do a run through of things in advance to make sure you’re holding it properly, you’re not flopping it around or pointing it in the wrong place, and to know how to put on the safety, or to know how to go around corners.”

Hidden Assets is a co-production, with Irish company Saffron Moon working alongside Belgium’s Potemkino for RTÉ and Acorn TV.

The action takes place across Europe and Ireland, and the third season kicks off in Bilbao with the murder of investigative journalist Olatz Alzola.

DS Wallace and team are drawn in when the killings are linked to a past CAB raid in Ireland that ended in tragedy.

Noone’s co-stars include screen and stage stalwarts Cathy Belton as Norah Dillon and Aaron Monaghan as DS Sean Prendergast.

Season three welcomes a raft of newcomers, with Inigo Gastesi as Inspector Jon Beitia, Crá star Dónall Ó Héalai as Detective Liam Boylan, Catherine Walker as Niamh Bennett, and Steve Wall as Inspector Martin Dunlop.

They spent six weeks filming in Antwerp, a city which Noone likens to a cross between Berlin and Rome. Her young daughter visited during the shoot, and the pair were recently in Canada visiting her actor husband, Christopher Rodriguez-Marquette, who is filming a new series of Reacher.

Nora-Jane Noone in Hidden Assets, season 3. Picture: Michel Vertongen/AcornTV

It’s fitting, then, that DS Wallace is also juggling a lot. She’s taking the lead career wise, but her husband isn’t happy about it. “It’s really nice that they allow her to not apologise for it,” says Noone of how the show treats DS Wallace’s career ambition.

How does she resonate with DS Wallace as a person? “I think she’s someone who just forges on. In this season, it’s taking responsibility for things and instead of maybe wallowing she’s just, ‘Okay, well, how do I fix it?’” says Noone.

“I’m way softer than her. I’m a sappy creative — I can’t hide anything in my real life, it’s written on my face. So we’re very different in that sense, in how much we show of things. But I do tend to just get on with it, and it’s only after something difficult that I go, ‘Oh, God, that was hard’.”

She envies how unapologetic her character is about her strength. “Definitely something I have struggled with in life is always being too apologetic for existing,” she says with a laugh.

“She inspires me in that sense of just holding true to yourself and what you believe.” But Noone adds she has gotten better over the years at advocating for herself. This was presumably helped by living in America from 2015 to 2023, after a long spell in London.

“I think that’s part of why I wanted to move, because I [thought] that could be good to have that freedom, to be unapologetic, and just think big.

“I think the reason why I liked living in big cities a lot when I was younger is you’re anonymous, and you can do whatever you want and nobody cares,” she says. “It gives you a lot of space to grow and just not worry too much about what anybody else is thinking or doing.”

These days, Noone lives in Galway, having moved back in 2023 with her family. She made her debut at 17 in The Magdalene Sisters (2002), directed by Peter Mullan, but didn’t linger long in the Irish screen industry, moving to London after college.

“There’s so much great stuff being made here, so that’s exciting,” says Noone of her return home.

She’s open to working in Ireland or abroad, with some caveats. “You never know what’s going to come up,” she says. “The only thing is that with having a kid and her being in school now, the job has to be worth being away and potentially having to take her out of school for a while and all those other complications.”

She’s also working on her own scripts. One project is the “love child of Pan’s Labyrinth meets Stranger Things, but with Irish folklore”.

She’s waiting on news about funding, but says she has to balance her own writing with the demands of work and family life.

At 21, Noone starred in The Descent (2005), which marked its 20th anniversary this summer. The cult horror is about six young women who go caving and get trapped.

“I was just so young. It was my first job that I got when I moved to London,” she says of that time. “I’m still really good friends with the girls in it.”

What appealed to her was that The Descent involved stunts and big sets, plus it was an all-female horror that didn’t overly sexualise its characters. The Descent’s director Neil Marshall even revealed this year that he almost quit over the suggestion of a nude swimming scene in the film.

“It was so different then,” says Noone.

Indeed, there’s been a lot of positive change since 2005 with regards to gender in the film industry, in large part thanks to MeToo. But in an era where gender equality is under pressure, particularly in the US, is she afraid things might go backwards?

“I hope not,” she says with a sigh, referencing how it was “terrifying” to see immediate changes after Trump got into power. “But I don’t see it in the arts… you would hope that [people] would reinforce the progress that’s been made, rather than allowing it to be backtracked.”

Is it a relief to be back in Ireland during Trump’s second presidency?

“100%. I remember the last time I’d just landed when he was first voted in, and you could feel it. It was so tense, and people were so scared and so angry. I can’t imagine what it’s like at the moment… I keep hoping there’s a secret plan going on in the background somewhere — somebody’s doing something about it, we just can’t see it at the moment.”

Now in her early 40s, Noone is at a point where she can reflect on what she’s learned about her craft since those early days as a newcomer in The Magdalene Sisters. “I didn’t know enough to worry, but it was very overwhelming,” she says of that time. Not only was it her first film role, she was young and the subject matter was intense.

Does she have moments even now of realising just how young she was in such a serious film?

“I do. Because I was trying so hard to pretend like I knew what I was doing, and to not be terrified,” she says.

“And I think because everyone else had been in the industry a long time, or for a while, and was just showing up to work and doing a job, I think it was just taken for granted that I would just get on with it. So definitely it wasn’t until many years later where I thought, ‘Oh, wow, that was really intense to do — I’d just turned 17…’.”

In one “vulnerable” scene, she appeared nude, which would be a challenge for an actor of any age, never mind a young teenager.

“There’s definitely a different level of care now, even with intimacy coordinators and everything else. Not that they weren’t mindful, but there’s definitely a different level across the board for all crew members and everyone involved to be mindful and to be appropriate,” she says, adding of the industry in general: “I think it makes me feel very protective of any young people [wanting to act]. Or even thinking of my own daughter, if she ever wanted to get into acting. I wouldn’t want her to be having her first kiss, or her first sexual encounter of a sort, in an unreal and professional situation.”

After The Magdalene Sisters, Noone studied science in Galway, then moved to London to pursue acting. Further challenges awaited her.

“I didn’t know how to audition. I didn’t know how to learn lines. I didn’t know how to figure out the tone of a piece. I didn’t understand beats,” she reflects.

“I was just instinctively reading a story, understanding it, and then doing it… honestly, I wish I’d trusted that part more. But I psyched myself out so much because I didn’t know the technical side of it… it just felt very high stakes that this was the impression I was making on people as I was making all my mistakes. So I tried to do as many workshops and classes and courses as I could afford in between jobs, and then just learned by doing.”

Looking back now, she says: “Honestly, I did have a lot of anxiety in my 20s, and there was a family member who was very ill, and so I feel like there was such a journey of coming back round to that trust in what I inherently had, and then trusting the experience that I earned over time. And I think that’s
always the process, isn’t it, in life. It’s such a balance of learning and unlearning.”

Today, she has more trust in herself and her skills, all of which has led her to the lead role of DS Claire Wallace in Hidden Assets. Looking to the
future, there are still many dream roles Noone would like to play. Hidden Assets is a serious show, but she’d love to try comedy.

“I do love genre stuff, because I think you can push things further in a certain way,” she says with a grin. “And I’d love to play a proper villain, or do some really fun, magical thing. I’m a nerd, so any Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, fantasy-type project… or some really cool sci-fi.” Directors, take note.