How To Get To Heaven From Belfast: Sinéad Keenan on the new show from the Derry Girls creator
Sinead Keenan in How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, on Netflix.
became one of Ireland’s most beloved TV series - now everyone wants to see what its creator Lisa McGee does next. All is about to be revealed in the murder mystery and comedy mash up that McGee has always said she’d love to make.
Starring Sinéad Keenan as Robyn, Roísín Gallagher as Saoirse, and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Dara, is a story about friendship, a mystery from the past and present, and how to react if your life goes in a different direction than you’d expected.
For Sinéad Keenan, going on her fourth outing with McGee meant a genre-bending tale which included speed boats, yachts and chase sequences. There were joyful days at the office, she says, and she embraced the opportunity to carry out stunt work, working closely with a team of highly experienced stunt people.
“There was an awful lot of physical comedy which is great,” she says. “There was stunt driving. There was a lot of abseiling out of lighthouses, running across Dublin. There were speed boats and exploding yachts. There were various different floating devices. We worked in an outdoor water tank in Malta, where they just had and It was fun. It was mad.”
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The new Netflix series centres on three women - the glamorous but stressed-out mother of young children, Robyn (Keenan), TV writer Saoirse (Gallagher) and the dependable carer Dara (Dunne). The trio long ago numbered four along with one of their old school friends.
“One of their friends from school, who they were in a quartet with, there was a falling out, has died,” says Keenan. “They decide to go back for the funeral and wake to pay their respects and when they get there, they realise that all is not as it seems. They're pulled into this weird and wonderful, mad kind of odyssey around Ireland and beyond in order to get to the truth of what happened.”
The four of them, it emerges, were once trauma-bonded by an event when they were teenagers. “Part of the reason they go back to the funeral is to hope that that woman kept the secret buried as well. That's initially where we find them, that's our in and then it just takes you all over the shop,” says Keenan.
“It's very different, which is lovely. Usually, by the nature of how programmes are structured and the genres, if you do something, it's either a drama or a comedy. Maybe a dramedy - but you very rarely get a comedy-mystery mash up, which is great, because you get all the brilliant Lisa McGee one liners and comedy. But then you also get the mystery element and the detectivey stuff - albeit they're crap detectives.”
The series is one that’s on the move. As well as Belfast and McGee’s native and beloved Derry, the show shot in Donegal, Dublin, Dundalk, London and Malta, which doubled for Portugal. “The Tourist Board when they see it will be only delighted, because some of the shots are… I mean, it's just showing off Ireland,” says Keenan.
This is Keenan’s fourth time collaborating with McGee, having worked with the writer on the BBC show where she played a werewolf. They did together for Channel Four, while Keenan also had a supporting role in the last series of
“Every time that I've worked with Lisa, and it's actually unusual for a writer, she is on the ground,” says the Irish actress. “There are some productions I've done where I've never met the writer because obviously their job, by the time you're filming it, they're done.
“But Lisa is so present with it all and on set and across all departments. Not in a controlling way or anything, in a very much ‘let's make this as brilliant as we possibly can’ in a very collaborative way. She'll listen to something, and comedy is all about rhythm, it's like a music. If something isn't quite working, she'll rewrite it on the hoof. There were some scenes in this, where there were gaps. She was like: ‘No we need something to fill that gap’. And she'd go away for two or three minutes, on the back of a piece of paper. Constantly just making it better.”
Keenan is one of three actors in her family, a sibling to Rory and Gráinne. “I think when people hear that there's three of us, they think, oh, that must be a very jazz handsy, showbizzy family. Nothing could be further from the truth,” she says, adding that while there were no professional actors in her family, there was an interest in creativity.
“Myself and my sister did Irish dancing, and my brother Rory was always really good at mimicking people. I was perpetually shy. I just went to speech and drama to get a bit of confidence.”
A very early breakthrough came for her when she was cast as Farrah Phelan in the long-running Irish soap, . “It was such a circuitous jammy, lucky way in. I did a screen test for a film that a casting director saw. They needed someone really quickly in Fair City, and they offered me that based on the screen test for something else.”
In the years since, she has starred in several TV series - including a bona fide ratings smash hit for ITV in which detectives attempt to solve a series of cold cases. Just two days after the glamorous premiere of How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, Keenan will be back on set playing DCI Jessica James.
“We're actually filming at the minute. I'm back tomorrow morning. We're doing series seven, it's my third, of That whole show is an institution in and of itself.”
What does she hope audiences will take from Lisa McGee’s new series? “I hope they laugh is the main thing, but also that it gives them a minute to pause to think of their 15,16, year old selves, and touch base with that kid who you probably are. We all are.”
She is glad, she says, that she is still close with two of her best friends, Elaine and Niamh, having first met at school. “If you've still got friends who know you from when you were 12, they know all the shit you've done together. They know the bones of you. If you have those friendships, just hang onto them, keep them going, you’re very lucky if you do.”
- How to Get to Heaven from Belfast is now on Netflix
