Amy Huberman: Finding Joy with a baby on the way, a new puppy, and filming her TV series

Amy Huberman

In a period terraced house in south County Dublin in December, filming of the second series of Finding Joy is underway. Joy’s bedroom has been built and lovingly detailed while Aidan — the pet pooch who has become a star — is ready for his close-up nearby.

It feels like another world. Face masks are unnecessary, members of the crew are huddled closely together around a monitor, and the word Covid-19 doesn’t even exist. Within weeks, we now know, a new disease would emerge in Wuhan and begin to wreak havoc across the globe. The series was completed in the nick of time, though some post-production work was carried out remotely.

“Even when we were filming feels like a world ago, before we even knew what was coming down the line,” agrees the show’s creator and star, Amy Huberman.

“Getting Finding Joy finished before Covid was just complete luck of the draw. I think we had one or two weeks left for post-production with music and last little bits, but they were done remotely. It's a really tricky time for filming. I have friends who have started projects who are waiting to finish them, who have started to finish them five months later. That's really difficult for the arts and for productions. So many industries have been hit by this and it's a constant unknown.”

Amy Huberman

In an extraordinary year, it’s also been a time of adventures for Huberman. As well as her new series, a new baby is on the way for the actress and husband Brian O’Driscoll, and the family also has a new puppy, a rescue dog named Phoebe.

“I found out that I was that was pregnant early on in lockdown and so it's been a really nice little distraction, ongoing through all this madness,” she says.

Her young children, Sadie and Billy, are thrilled that another sibling is on the way: “Sadie wasn't even two when Billy was born so she has no recollection of it. They're both so excited. They've been asking me to have another baby for a long time. And now I can use it as leverage for getting what I want and sitting down and not running around for them which is good as well.

“I have felt really well — I've probably felt my best of my pregnancies and maybe it's because I am doing less running around. I was particularly ill nausea wise with the other pregnancies and I've had a little bit of that but not too much. I feel good and I feel very grateful for that, having known what it's like to not feel good.”

Gaaaaaaaaah! Lads I’m so excited we have our date launch for series 2 of #FindingJoy @RTEOne Saturday 10th October oh Mammy 🤸‍♀️🤸‍♀️🤸‍♀️🤸‍♀️ https://t.co/hErgdKXixR

— Amy Huberman (@amyhuberman) October 1, 2020

Her canine companion, Phoebe, has brought unconditional love and cuddles to her family, but a little bit of chaos too: “People say a dog's hard work. I was like: ‘Sure we've always had dogs growing up’ — and then realised it was my mum who trained them. And my mum who dealt with them as young dogs and puppies. It's not just cleaning up the poo, that doesn't really bother me. It's the wildness and managing a puppy with kids and the kids not dive-bombing on her and rugby tackling her and her having her own space. She is actually really great. We're still training her. That's an ongoing process.”

Like parents across the country, Huberman recently had the emotional experience of bringing her kids back to school following months of home-schooling. For her family, she feels it’s been a positive move.

“I feel like them having the mental stimulation of being in school is preferable, because then we can concentrate on doing the fun stuff that we normally do at home or in our afternoons. I loved the family time, I really did, but I knew that they were struggling with not being at school, not having the fun and the busyness of school life.

“I was happy for them and I was really happy for me because I do like a bit of routine. I do like a bit of structure, I do like a bit of time on my own to work and to plug into the things that I really enjoy and that refuels my batteries in a way. So I think everybody is definitely the better for it.”

Over the long months of her children being out of school, the actress also noticed how much they were missing the company of their friends: “How formative their friendships are and their time with their friends is really hit home to me. I'm glad that they have that back again.”

What have they made of it all?

“I tried to keep it out of their little heads as much as I can. They know it's going on. They know it's affected their world, but I think probably like adults as well, it's the sense of the ongoing unknown, and I think that's quite frightening for kids. I try to tell them that it's all going to be okay because it will be and they probably don't need to know every single detail in between.”

Finding Joy: I felt really privileged to get an opportunity to do something that I always wanted to do

Season two of Finding Joy will bring audiences some badly needed comedy and drama following a long summer where programming shutdowns and repeats became the norm. Having experienced serious first-night jitters as her TV show, which she conceived, wrote and starred in, debuted, Huberman is feeling less anxious this time around.

“I feel like season two was possibly easier because I gave myself less of a hard time,” she says. “It was that thing of: ‘I only have to do it for the first time once’ and I was so nervous on series one, not the filming of it, not the writing of it, but when it came out.

“So many of those things that I was worried about are things that I was either in control of, or I wasn't, and it came down to that. I kind of let go of that a little bit and just allowed myself to enjoy the process. And now I'm just really looking forward to it rather than going: ‘Oh my god, this is terrifying’. I also learned a lot from series one.

“I'd never written TV before and I felt really privileged to get an opportunity to do something that I always wanted to do. I was trying to make sure that I was learning and growing and developing as a writer involved in a production and to make it as best as we possibly could and to go forward with the show in a way where it evolved and developed and improved.”

That’s why she jumped at the opportunity to get involved in a writers' room where concepts and storylines are discussed and thrashed out — a common practice for TV series in the US.

“I love collaborative efforts. It was never for me where, for my ego, I would like to do the following things: write it all, act in it, produce. And I know my strengths as a writer. I know that I am probably not as attuned to do the broad-scale dissecting of story arcs, character arcs, and I'm still getting to grips with that a little bit. So having help in that, in just bouncing ideas off other creatives — there were three of us in a room and my producer, and we just troubleshooted storylines, which if I had gone away, and tried to formulate on my own, would have gotten there, but it probably would have taken me four times the amount of time. We formatted a story for series two, decided what was going to happen in each episode. And then I went away and wrote all the episodes. But there's definite flavour in there jokes-wise, and storyline-wise from the writers that we had, which was really brilliant.

“I’d never been in a writers' room. For comedy, just bouncing those jokes off each other is really nice. Sometimes you have an idea in your head and you’re thinking, is this insane? Sometimes it's nice to hear that it is and that it won't work. And other times no, that it's really good. Let's do it. That was really encouraging and I really enjoyed that process.”

Having done her best through extraordinary times like the rest of us, Huberman has started to write again since the kids returned to school.

“I am playing away with a couple of new ideas. I've enjoyed the escapism, actually, of writing again, and the focus of having something tangible has been really nice.”