It‘s a glorious spring morning when I meet Emily Taaffe, albeit over video, between London and Dublin. The actor (41), originally from Skerries, and later Tullyallen, near Drogheda, has lived in London for about two decades. Her red hair is tied back, fringe framing her face, and she wears a collared denim item that could be a shirt, or a jumpsuit, or a dress – it‘s hard to tell with the screen’s limited frame. But even from the waist up, she has the poise and posture of a seasoned actor, and that warm familiarity that good actors always seem capable of generating. Maybe she’s just in a good mood. After our interview, she’s off to “brunch in the sun with some of the other Little Disasters” – that is, cast members of the show she wrapped last year, soon to be released on Paramount+.
The show, based on the novel of the same name by Sarah Vaughan (who also wrote the successful book-to-screen drama, Anatomy of a Scandal), is a high-spec and pacy thriller that explores themes of motherhood, class privilege and the dark secrets that lurk behind seemingly perfect exteriors. It centres on four women: model-perfect stay-at-home mother Jess (Diane Kruger), stress-burdened A&E doctor Liz (Jo Joyner), overachieving lawyer Charlotte (Shelley Conn), and free-spirited Mel (Emily Taaffe), who have maintained a close friendship ever since their first antenatal class 10 years ago. But the bonds that join them threaten to break, tensions between all four women boiling to the surface, when Jess shows up at Liz’s hospital with her baby daughter, whose life-threatening head injury she can’t explain, and Liz is forced to make the decision whether to call social services.
“To see a story about four women who are so different and yet who were thrown together in this situation – the situation being motherhood – was really attractive,” says Taaffe. “The part of Mel is such a joy to play. I mean, it‘s always fun to play the slightly garrulous, smart-arse person who’s the irreverent one in the group.”
A self-described “incorrigible nerd”, Taaffe comes to roles having done substantial preparation. She has explored her character’s backstory, imagining what came before the moment we meet them. She also uses the trick of giving each character she plays a signature scent, meaning it‘s easy to step back into the role quickly when hopping from project to project. For Mel, the scent was Jo Malone, Orange Blossom – “she’s a citrussy type of person”.
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“I was really interested in the duality of Mel – how she presents as a very confident, devil-may-care person, but there’s huge depth underneath that. She’s facing her own personal challenges, which are revealed throughout the series.”
The depth beneath the surface is a central theme of the show. Taaffe says she hopes viewers will “really value” its exploration of the dark and underexplored issues that sometimes accompany motherhood.
“I notice, in the media in general, there’s a sort of opening-up about issues – without giving away anything – about the challenges that women face when they become mothers ... I think anything that sparks a conversation – that allows us to admit things are difficult – can only be a positive thing.”
As an actor, she is no stranger to maternal roles. She played a grieving mother, Maria, in the Sky drama The Rising, and has just finished shooting Trespasses, the Channel 4 adaptation of the Louise Kennedy novel, in which she plays Betsy McGeown, mother to the vulnerable young Davy. In real life Taaffe is mother to five-year-old Sammy, an experience she brings to her performances.
“The lovely thing about getting older and having a variety of experiences is you can play richer parts and bring those to the parts that you play,” she says. “All four of us are mums – the four [lead] actors. So it was a great shortcut, because you have that shared experience and you can empathise with each other.”
In the context of the unacknowledged challenges of motherhood, I’m curious (though it even feels taboo to ask such things in interviews): are there barriers to being a mother in a precarious business like showbiz?
“I think every job that you do has inherent challenges,” says Taaffe. “I have friends who are lawyers, and they have to be in an office all day. I have other friends who are freelance. I have more friends who are stay-at-home mums and that comes with its own particular challenges. In terms of being an actor and being a mum, I think I have one advantage, which is that I love to play. My son will say to me: what‘s your job? And I say, it‘s kind of like yours, I’m just bigger.”
Taaffe grew up the youngest in a family of five kids. “The joke goes that I’m the only one who’s made a living out of being a drama queen,” she says. While neither of her parents was involved professionally in the arts, her mother was a big reader, and “could still recite her Portia speech that the nuns had made her learn when she was 12”.
“[My parents] were very interested in the arts. I think that‘s something about being Irish that‘s very true – the arts aren’t something that are separate or that belong to somebody else. They’re part of the fabric of who you are.”
Her local youth theatre at Droichead Arts Centre was where “I really started to think, oh, maybe I could do this”.
“Amazingly, I recently bumped into Sharon Cromwell – she was my youth theatre leader – and it was lovely to get to say to her that the work she did was so important. Not just because I’ve gone on to do it professionally, but because it‘s so brilliant, I think, for young people.”
She went on to study drama and theatre studies at Trinity College Dublin, before landing a place to train at the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (Lamda).
“I had quite an old-fashioned start to my career,” she says. “For me, the goal was always to be onstage. I wanted to be a theatre actor ... Going to Lamda was the gateway to learning how to be an actor in the traditional sense.”
From appearing at the UK National Theatre, the Abbey and elsewhere, to securing on-screen roles in the likes of War & Peace, The Beast Must Die, and the 2018 indie film The Dig (which earned her an Ifta-nomination), Taaffe has honed her craft in the only real way possible, by putting in her 10,000 hours. She’s also been the nearly-woman on more than one occasion, auditioning for roles and coming a close second to the person who ended up getting it. Dealing with this kind of rejection is something she’s got better at with age, she says.
“Experience teaches you that these things shall pass, and also you learn what‘s really important in life ... Often, I’ll just have a good old cry about it and then dry my tears and pick myself up. You have to be incredibly resilient in this business, and in a lot of businesses, and in life. I feel very lucky that this is something I seem to have: resilience. I’m fascinated by it, because it‘s something I’d love to instil in my child. I’m sort of trying to unpick what it is that gives somebody that.”
If resilience is necessary in the business, so too is enterprise, and Taaffe showed plenty of the latter when, in 2017, she wrote and starred in her own short film, Little Bird. She told the story of her great-aunt Christine, who left Ireland for England during the war never to be heard from again. The work was recognised with a number of awards and nominations, but perhaps more notable still was Taaffe‘s instinct to lift other boats with her own, and provide opportunities for women in a male-dominated industry – she hired a crew that was majority female.
We all make judgments on people all the time, based on how they present themselves in public. But that‘s not always what‘s really going on
— Emily Taaffe
Working alongside Kruger, Joyner and Conn, in a show centred on female friendship, has been a special experience, she says.
“I have admired the other actors in the foursome from afar for ages, so it was a really amazing experience to get to work with them and learn from them.”
Shooting on location in sun-soaked Budapest can’t have been bad either, as some of her Instagram photos attest. Also pictured: the choice activity among cast members – crossword puzzles.
“We weren’t making TikTok videos. We were there with the Guardian, going, okay, 5 across,” she laughs. “Patrick Baladi [who plays Andrew, Charlotte’s husband], he’s a crossword king.”
But just like the illusion that is an Insta-perfect life, Taaffe hopes the show “reminds people that the things you see and the way people present themselves are only part of the story”.
“We all make judgments on people all the time, based on how they present themselves in public. But that’s not always what‘s really going on. My mother used to say, ‘You never know what battles people are fighting’ – she often used to say it when someone was rude to you in a shop. And I think it‘s really true. You might think, gosh, why did they not smile at me on the school run? But you don’t know what people are dealing with.”
Little Disasters drops on Paramount+ on May 22nd
