When the first season of the Channel 4 sitcom Derry Girls debuted in 2018, the show’s lead actor Saoirse-Monica Jackson had something of a flip out. Her performance as Erin Quinn, one of four Catholic schoolgirls (and an English fella) living in Derry on the Northern Ireland border in the final throes of the Troubles, was – she now realised – quite out there: full of adolescent facial contortions that dripped with awkwardness, disdain and indignation. Jackson had been inspired by the punk irascibility of her teenage cousin and the animated comic tics of Jim Carrey and Rowan Atkinson. But now she feared that she had blown her big break.
“I felt in a perpetual state of fear,” recalls the 30-year-old Jackson now. “It’s crazy: I didn’t think of it as a risk when I was doing it because Lisa [McGee], the writer, instilled such faith in me. I’d basically auditioned and I just thought that Erin was very physical and that the madness of the world and all the characters around her would lend itself to a physical comedy performance.”
