Sarah Bolger: Irish actress on her part in Nervous, the new Korean thriller
Sarah Bolger in Nervous, set in Korea.
Throughout her career Irish actress Sarah Bolger has mixed up her roles, delving into drama as a child actress in Jim Sheridan’s powerful before going on to work in period storytelling ( ), fantasy ( ) and crime (the hugely successful spin-off ).
Now she’s bringing Korean horror and psychological thriller into the mix. sees Bolger play Sarah, an Irish woman who moves with her Korean husband (Sungsoo Yune) to a home in the Korean countryside. After discovering a silent vinyl record in their new home, she begins losing the ability to hear her husband’s voice in a story that spirals into a disorientating nightmare.
The film sees Bolger reunited with British director Abner Pastoll, who she previously worked with on the Irish-set thriller had its world premiere recently at Frightfest in London, as the well-regarded horror fantasy festival’s opening film. Her sibling Emma — who co-starred with her when they played sisters in — and mum flew in for the premiere.
Having worked with Pastoll previously, Bolger embraced the opportunity to collaborate with the filmmaker from the movie’s very earliest stages. “I was involved in this movie from conception, pre-script, pre anything written ever,” she says.
“We had many a Zoom call where I was sitting in my living room in LA, and he was in Korea, pitching back and forth ideas. This was an incarnation in slow motion. I got to see it in every format, and since Abner and I worked together on it was about time that we got to work together again.”
The filmmaker says that in making the psychological thriller he was drawn to the idea of silence not as an absence but as a presence. It was a premise that Bolger got on board with, learning to speak Korean for the film in which she plays an Irish woman who moves to the countryside outside Seoul with her Korean husband, only to find she’s beginning to lose the ability to hear his voice and other men’s voices.
Silence, confusion and inability to communicate are major elements in the film, in which the couple’s future feels at stake. “I think because she's dealing with something that's more metaphysical and more, dare I say, leaning into the supernatural, that it was interesting trying to figure out the ways to stay grounded,” says Bolger.
“Going through an awakening is the best way I feel like I can describe what Sarah's journey is. It's a body awakening. It's a mind awakening. It's a sexuality awakening. It's a truth awakening. I think holding onto that was the key. She’s truly trying to fit in. She's truly trying her best. She learns as much Korean as she possibly can. She can understand more of it than she can speak it.
"And it's just that removal: he's subconsciously or not removing her from his life, making her life harder, making her life more removed, and there's almost a cruelty to that from the husband, a lack of awareness and a lack of understanding, and how that can slowly creep in and infect the entire dynamic.”
Korean cinema has long been respected and revered by audiences in world cinema, a respect only underpinned when Bong Joon Ho’s brilliant became the first non-English language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020. Bolger embraced the opportunity to film in Seoul.
“There’s a fable-like element to so many Korean films, and I think that's what we tried to do in our own way, create a story that could have been like a riddle, or a fable,” says Bolger. “It seemed like we were building on something grand, and I loved that.”
Like many of us, the Dubliner has visceral memories of watching some of the best horrors and psychological thrillers. and Anthony Hopkins’ subsequent films as serial killer Hannibal Lecter “scared the bejesus out of me”, she recalls. She remembers when Lecter escaped, and the impact it had on those tasked with finding him.
“They have these beads of sweat running down their faces. I was like: ‘God, that's the most horrifying thing of this movie: that the men with the weapons, who are trained professionals, are scared of this man, are scared of his abilities, and that the idea of him is more is more scary than the guns in their hands’, and that really stuck with me.”
Bolger was just 10 years old when she was cast in Jim Sheridan’s touching and tender tale of the Irish emigrant experience in New York. Her interactions with her parents (Paddy Considine and Samantha Morton) as they struggled to navigate grief marked her out as a major young talent.
In truth, she had been acting for years before that. She remembers being as young as six and thinking she should be reading a script instead of doing her homework.
“It was that, and it's still that — whatever that is,” she says of that passion she has always known. “I don't know how to describe it, but I'm not sure the direction of the job ever changed for me. I'm very fortunate that some projects have been so successful and made more of an impact.
"The desire and dream doesn't feel to have faltered in any way. I don't think it ever peaked or ebbed — it seems to have been the constant thing in my life that has not just brought me endless joy but also the perfect creative outlet that I only could have imagined I got to do.”
Most recently, Bolger starred opposite JK Simmons and Titus Welliver in new TV series which has become a major hit for MGM. Set in the 1980s, it was brought to our screens by creator Chris Brancato. It centres on the notorious New-York based Irish gang, who wreaked havoc on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen as they took on the might of the Italian mafia.
“That was very different to what I'm used to doing — not in terms of the content, in terms of '80s New York,” she says. “I felt like that time and era is special and unique, and also is muscle memory-ed in everyone's brain. Even if you didn't live in New York in the 80s, there's an iconicness to it, and to embody that is really fucking cool.”
There have been calls for a second series, and Bolger is well up for it. “I think eight episodes are too few, and that's my stance on it always. I think the show deserves more, and I am fingers crossed for it.”
- Following its world premiere at Frightfest, will get a general release. is now on MGM+
