“Do my boobs look weird in this? I’m wearing quite a weird bra,” Sharon Horgan is asking the room when I arrive at a photographer’s studio in London. She is having her picture taken and is wearing an elegant green silk dress, although the elegance is a little mitigated by the way she is clutching her chest, Carry On-style.
Reassured of boob non-weirdness, Horgan spots me. “Oh, hi! A character in the show I can’t talk about yet wears the same trousers as you!” she says, referring simultaneously to my tracksuit trousers and, slightly more glamorously, Bad Sisters, which she has made as part of her deal with Apple TV+, and which at the time of our interview is still under embargo. Wears bad bras, has mega TV deals: it’s a one-two summation of Horgan’s public image as someone who seems utterly normal to the point that she could be a type, yet is successful in a way that makes her sui generis. Someone you can imagine doing the school run in the rain, probably won a Bafta the night before.
Today we’re here to discuss yet another Horgan project, the film The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which she plays, of all unlikely things, Nicolas Cage’s ex-wife. Horgan is known for writing and often starring in wildly adored sitcoms, including Pulling and Catastrophe, which show slices of British life in all of their painfully recognisable glory, so it’s quite something to watch her fighting off gangsters with Cage in an exotic setting. She has starred in a Hollywood comedy before (2018’s Game Night), yet Horgan – one of the funniest women around – doesn’t get to be very funny in this one. Instead, she has the classic Hollywood role of Long-suffering Woman, rolling her eyes at her male co-star who has all the good lines. Over a late lunch, and now dressed casually in jeans and a loose jumper (although with very expensive-looking glossy blond hair), she says she agreed to be in it “because I felt it would be a blast, and I thought it would be one of those things I could write about one day”.
Well, she was right about the latter. But a blast it was not. For a start, Cage wasn’t the “superfun, like, ‘woo!’” guy she expected, but “very quiet and studious and sweet. I felt sometimes like a bit of a messer next to him.” Also, they were filming in Budapest during the pandemic, meaning there were shutdowns and delays. “I was away from my daughters and the shoot kept getting prolonged. I felt really weird, and we were all in this hotel, and by the end we were eating in the foyer because no one could go to the restaurant bar [due to Covid restrictions]. Listen, it was a fancy foyer, where someone might have a cocktail or whatever,” she adds, anxious not to sound self-pitying. She is quieter and more careful with her words now that it is just the two of us, compared with when she was surrounded by assistants and stylists, and being photographed.
She took up running during the shoot to lift her mood, although she might have stymied the endorphins with her “sad playlist”, featuring 80s Irish pop band Something Happens, Loyle Carner and Arcade Fire. “I wanted to reclaim the emotions attached to those songs, which was a bit mad and weird,” she concedes. So, instead, she and one of her co-stars, Narcos’ Pedro Pascal, “had a sort of sadness together. We would drink cocktails at night and share our woe. But it was so surreal because, like, there’s Nicolas Cage.”
What was the sadness about? “Oh!” she says, embarrassed, as if she has said more than she realised. “Oh, you know. Just, I … I don’t know if I can really go into it. But it was definitely exacerbated by lockdown. You know, it was really tricky for families.”
Horgan has always had a tendency, she says, “to see things in scenes”, meaning she is often mentally reworking the present real life into a future TV show. “It’s a bit of a problem I have. So running around Budapest in shorts crying, that’s definitely, well … ” She trails off, already visualising the shot.
She has charted her adulthood through her pin-sharp sitcoms, from the BBC’s Pulling (2006-9, about three messy youngish women sharing a London home), to Channel 4’s Catastrophe (2015-19, about marriage and early parenthood), to Motherland (2016-present day, about mums at the primary school gates), to HBO’s Divorce (2016-19, about, well, have a guess). She has a gift for locating the original and the funny in the most mundane situations, such as Julia’s (Anna Maxwell Martin) fruitless search for childcare in Motherland. “Remind me why we don’t have a nanny?” her husband asks. “Because I wanted them to be raised like I was – by my mother!” Julia snaps back. Horgan has won a Bafta and been nominated for an Emmy (both for her writing on Catastrophe; she has also been nominated for Baftas for her performances in Pulling and Catastrophe). At the time of our interview, her horror comedy series Shining Vale, starring Courteney Cox and Greg Kinnear, is about to start airing. Plus there’s the Apple TV+ series we can’t talk about (yet).
Through her production company, Merman, which she founded with Clelia Mountford in 2014, she produces her own shows and the work of others, including There She Goes, Shaun Pye’s acclaimed drama-comedy about raising a daughter with a chromosomal abnormality, and Aisling Bea’s This Way Up, which Horgan co-starred in as Bea’s older sister. “Sharon can make any character more nuanced and grounded, and as a writer her notes are impeccable,” Bea tells me. “She can always spot the dusty gold coin in the pot of old coppers. That is a metaphor which I am sure she would have been able to improve.”
During the interview, Horgan’s publicist makes regular interjections warning us about the time because later Horgan has to run across town to do two voiceover jobs. “What I learned from Sharon is that talent is great, but hard work is the not-so-secret sauce,” says Rob Delaney, who co-wrote and co-starred with her in Catastrophe. “I can’t think of anyone who has the inherent talent she does who also works so hard and so consistently in the world of film/TV production.” I ask him what the worst thing about Horgan is. “She eats lunch in about four minutes, so when you’re writing with her, lunch lasts four minutes, and then you keep writing,” he replies.
What Horgan makes, people want to watch. There are many reasons for that, not least the brilliance of her female characters, who are spiky, weird and real. “I’m at my happiest when I’m writing characters who I would want to hang out with in real life,” she says. Does she notice when she acts in someone else’s script and her character is a bit, well, underwritten? “Yeah, of course. Of course! But if I really love the story, and the character is a bit surface, you can sometimes bring your own life force,” she says.
In her own scripts, Horgan never settles for the surface, eschewing generic cliche for nailed-down truth, and it’s often autobiographical. Motherland – she co-wrote seasons one and two, its peak era – was unsparing in its depiction of exhausted mothers, but it never slipped into “slummy mummy needs wine” stereotype. “God no, I hate that with a passion. It’s just of no interest to me,” she says with a curled lip. She talks about the episode at the beginning of the second season, when the main characters go out one night with Meg (Tanya Moodie), the alpha mum who goes crazy on alcohol but is totally fine the next morning at the school gate. “Meg is based on this great mum who I absolutely fucking love, and if you go out with her you’re just destroyed. But she is so capable, and she runs our football club and she’s the one who organises presents for the teacher. That felt like a different slant on it, and that’s the only thing we’re interested in, the non-cliched perspective,” Horgan says.
In Catastrophe, Sharon (played by Horgan) gives her daughter the Irish name Muireann, even though her very non-Irish husband (played by Delaney) can’t pronounce it. That incident came straight from Horgan’s own life. (She and her then husband Jeremy Rainbird compromised and gave their older daughter the relatively easier to pronounce Irish name Sadhbh.) When the hard-drinking Karen (Tanya Franks) in Pulling had been out all night, then pulls the waistband of her knickers above her skirt the morning after and shouts, “Whose knickers are these?”, one of Horgan’s friends called her and said, “That’s me, isn’t it?” (It was.)
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Horgan, 51, split up from Rainbird in 2019, and says for her next show she wants to write about “a woman starting again at my age. It’s my secret little project, mainly on my phone at the moment. But I think this time in a woman’s life is really interesting, when you’re in your 50s and a sort of madness descends and everything becomes heightened and intense.” She has already dipped her toe into this subject with Shining Vale, in which a fiftysomething female character (Cox) cheats on her husband (Kinnear) then thinks she is seeing ghosts, literalising Horgan’s perspective on that “heightened and intense” decade.
“If you find a genre where you can talk about that stuff, it feels much less exposing. But when I deal with subject areas in my work that people might attribute to my personal life, it feels one step removed, and that’s because it is. I’m talking about stuff that affects me, or I’m interested in, but it’s through a different lens. My life is really, really handy raw material, but it goes through a lot of processes before it goes on telly, and the shows are not, you know, dumping grounds for my feelings,” she says.
Is writing them into a scene a way of taking a vague and maybe unpleasant memory and turning it into something more positive? “Yeah, and when you sit down to write something, you immediately develop a different perspective on it, and that means you can figure out things that you would never have been able to figure out on the spot at the time. So it’s that Holden Caulfield thing, isn’t it? You know it’s too late, but it’s nice, even after the fact, to make sense of things,” she says. “A few” people have complained to her when they see themselves in her shows, but not since Pulling, and she’s careful to leave her daughters out. After all, as she says, Motherland was about the friendships between the mums, not the mothers’ relationships with their kids.
She is, she says, not as tough as the characters in her sitcoms, and that’s true. I was expecting her to be prickly like Julia in Motherland, self-confident like Sharon in Catastrophe, maybe even a little cruel, like Donna in Pulling. (Arguably, more than anyone else, Horgan has exploded the myth that female protagonists on TV need to be endearing to be likable.) Instead, she seems mainly anxious, peppering her conversation with self-deprecation and hesitant “um, y’know”s. She has the nervy energy of someone who has 17 things left on her to-do list and it’s five minutes to midnight. She insists she is a lot calmer these days because, “I lost my interest in getting to the top a while ago.”
But Sharon, I say, you are at the top. “Um, but what do you mean by that?” she says, looking down, embarrassed again.
I mean you’re someone who people associate with high-quality comedy and they think, “Oh, Sharon Horgan’s made that show. I want to watch that”, I say. “Oh, well, that’s nice. Yeah. But, you know, it’s not across the world. It’s not like I’m Judd Apatow, so it’s relative,” she says. She has always had “extreme anxiety”, which is the engine for her incredible productivity. I suspect this has not been eased by the fallout from her split from Rainbird, whom she had been married to for 14 years. The same year they announced their separation, the show Divorce aired its third and final series. They have two teenage daughters, and they co-parent in London.
The main joke of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is that Cage is playing himself, exaggerating all the qualities he is known for, not least his chronic spending habit. When he is shown a statue of himself, he says, “It’s grotesque … I’ll offer you $20,000 for it.” Rainbird doesn’t sound a million miles from this, judging from an interview he gave last year, in which he described buying an Aston Martin for £128,000, only to decide six months later that he didn’t like it, and tried to sell it back to the dealer who offered him £48,000 (“a terrible investment”). Did playing a divorced parent in the film exacerbate her feelings of sadness during the shoot? “Oh no, not at all, because that’s just make-believe. Look, it’s all absolutely fine. It’s just a new way of living and everyone says it’s the new normal, and you think you’re used to it and then you suddenly realise you’re really not,” she says. She is talking about her personal life here, right? “Being separated, yeah. Being a separated family. It just changes everything. The way you work has to change and the way you live has to change, and you have to find a new way of operating within these new parameters. But we’re all happier, for sure, without a doubt,” she says.
I tell her I would like to see a show about how on earth she found time to get divorced, given how time-consuming it is, and how busy she is. “Yeah, we had to down tools because of that. Like, life really, really got in the way and we both went, ‘Look, shall we just park this for a bit?’ Because it was unbelievably time-consuming. Divorce, the show, was supposed to be more about the feeding frenzy that all these different industries have around two people going through the worst time in their lives, but by the second series it became much more about what happens afterwards. Whereas what I’d seen and read about when I was researching it was how long these things can drag out and how they can destroy people. But I wrote Divorce when I was in my marriage, you know?” she says.
Horgan generally avoids talking about her personal life, preferring to work things out through her work. She is not really a talker, she says, and speaking about herself makes her feel “dirty”. She recently tried therapy, having avoided it in the past out of fear it would take something away from her work. But it wasn’t a success.
“I just think I’m not very good at therapy. I kind of sit outside it and watch my conversations with the therapist. And I get frustrated with someone telling you everything’s OK, because sometimes it’s not OK. Although it’s true, I do give myself a fucking hard time, and my last therapist would point out all the reasons why I wasn’t a piece of shit, and, OK, it makes you feel a bit better. But isn’t that what your mum’s there for?”
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Horgan’s parents were originally publicans, in east London where she was born, then in Ireland. They switched to turkey farming in County Meath when Horgan was four. “God knows why. I think they thought the pub wasn’t a good environment for young kids. So my dad saw this plot of land and they built the house, spent money on chicks, and away they went, with no experience of doing that. But we had a good childhood,” she says.
A good one, but a slightly stressful one, with her parents depending on the two-week run-up to Christmas for their annual income, and if it looked like they wouldn’t make enough, “it was just absolute panic”, she says.
Horgan was the second eldest of five kids, and I tell her that I was struck, when reading about her family, by the fact that none of her siblings stayed in farming. “Really?” she says, with a “why would you be surprised by that?” wrinkle of her nose. “God, no. Running the farm was really tricky. But it was a great source for all our adult neuroses, and we experienced it as a group, that underlying panic and anxiety in all of us.”
It seems to have worked for all five of them: Shane is a former professional rugby player who won 65 caps for Ireland, Mark is an acclaimed podcast producer, Maria is a TV producer, and Lorraine is an actor.
“I’m still ridiculously needy with them. On our WhatsApp group, if I send a joke I keep checking the phone, waiting for their reactions. Like, why is no one laughing?” she says.
For a long time, success seemed to Horgan as distant as the moon. The first setback came when she left home to go to art college in Dublin and promptly had what she has described as “a bit of a breakdown”. “I just lost my confidence because I wasn’t good enough to be an artist and they shouldn’t have accepted me. It’s shitty to feel the worst at anything. It was a sadness I couldn’t cope with, so I dropped out and moved to London,” she says.
Most of her 20s passed in a semi-haze of squat-hopping and parties. She worked for six years at a jobcentre in Kilburn, finally quitting when her boss told her to clean up some human faeces behind the building. Much of this period is immortalised in Pulling.
“I had a lot of fun, but it became less fun, and I was never a full-on loony because I had this mad work ethic even then, doing drama courses and trying to put on plays. But I was never willing to go at it full-time, and that’s just confidence. Like, ‘Why should it happen to me?’”
In her late 20s, she and a friend, Dennis Kelly, started writing together. They eventually wrote Pulling, which was bought by the BBC and nominated for a Bafta. It was cancelled at the end of the second series in 2009, but great things were expected of Horgan. Instead, she fell straight into another crisis of confidence. “I had a weird five years of shows not getting picked up, and that’s a big ol’ chunk of time. I was making pilots up the wazoo and had deals with networks, but I couldn’t get anything made. And, deep down, I was always kind of relieved when they didn’t get picked up, you know. Because, first of all, scared of change. And, secondly, if they did, that would mean I’d have to write more of them,” she says.
Catastrophe changed everything. When Horgan was finally allowed to make the show she wanted, the critical and public reaction was universal adoration, and as the opportunities rolled in her confidence finally took root and grew.
“It’s great when you realise the scope of your abilities, because it’s lack of confidence that holds you back. Like, in a writers’ room and you’re too nervous of your idea to say it, and someone else says it and you’re [she makes an ‘Oh, damn!’ gesture]. When you feel you can hold your own, a whole new world opens up for you.”
She has to rush off to record her voiceovers, so we arrange to speak on the phone in a few weeks’ time, to talk about Bad Sisters once the embargo is lifted. When I call her, she sounds exhausted. She has been filming all day for yet another project, a BBC drama called Best Interests, written by Jack Thorne. Horgan stars opposite Michael Sheen; they play a couple battling over whether to let their severely disabled daughter die. “It’s pretty heavy going. I mean, it’s really beautiful and I care about it, but it does wipe you out. Then, after that, I had to Zoom with the divorce lawyers,” she says and makes a wry laugh.
It must be quite weird, to go from shooting a show about a couple fighting with one another to talking to real divorce lawyers, I say. “Yeah, yeah. You always need lawyers, even if it’s straightforward and amicable. It’s just another interesting part of life – no, not interesting. It’s really tiring! But you know what I was saying last time about how sometimes I float above myself and see the scene? I was doing that while on the Zoom with the lawyers,” she says.
Her publicist comes on the line to tell us that, contrary to plans, we still can’t talk about Bad Sisters, so, instead, we discuss Shining Vale. I say I really like how Cox’s character is sometimes genuinely horrible to her husband and kids, but we’re encouraged to empathise with her. “It was amazing how Courteney really went for that, because stars who are known worldwide can be quite protective of how they appear on screen. It’s not easy bringing characters like that to the screen, for a variety of reasons, and there are some scenes in Shining Vale where you’re like, ‘Whoa, you’re a bad person, fuck me.’ It takes balls to commit to that and not worry about how you look,” she says.
I tell her I felt an unexpected kind of catharsis when watching Cox’s character, which is exactly how I felt the first time I watched Motherland, and Catastrophe and Pulling. “I really hate the idea of repeating myself, but I know what my skillset is,” she says.
What is her skillset? “I suppose not feeling scared to talk about stuff that isn’t cosy. But in a way that doesn’t alienate people. I turn on the TV and I want to escape, but I’m most comforted by TV when I recognise a character and they’re going through something that makes me relax a bit with my terrible choices,” she says, then laughs at herself. “That is a long-winded answer. You could just say relationships, right? What I’m good at is women and relationships.” And then, after a long day of playing a woman in a complicated relationship, and dealing with the complications of ending a real-life relationship, Horgan says goodbye and goes to bed.
• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is released on 22 April.
• This article was amended on 11 April 2022 to correct some errors. Horgan co-founded the production company Merman with Clelia Mountford, not with Jeremy Rainbird, and Horgan co-starred in Aisling Bea’s This Way Up but did not co-write the show as an earlier version said. In addition, the sitcom Motherland was twice misnamed as Motherhood.
