Siobhán Cullen finds herself drawn to graveyards – not out of morbidity, she says, but because of the stories they tell.
Her fascination started long before the Dubliner’s lead role as the prim small-town obituarist Elvira Clancy, who reappears on screens this month in the second season of Obituary, RTÉ’s dark comedy.
“I love walking through a cemetery,” she says. “They’re really beautiful spaces to walk around in and get little snippets of people’s lives. I find it really interesting what people choose, or what their families choose, to have written on their headstones.”
At home in London, Abney Park Cemetery is a Cullen favourite. Highgate – the resting place of Karl Marx, George Michael and Christina Rossetti, to name a few – is close behind. The tours of Glasnevin Cemetery, in Dublin, also get the stamp of approval.
“You often see people are buried with their pets, or it’s a family plot, and you just create little narratives and stories. I think it’s a fascinating way to tap into history. If there’s one available nearby, pop into your local graveyard and have a look,” she says, laughing.
Strolling through graveyards isn’t the only way Cullen gets into character. For the first season of Obituary she made mock articles as parting gifts for the crew.
“At the end of every block when we were losing crew members, I’d write an obituary for them. A bit dark, a bit weird, but, I think, very in keeping with the tone of the show. Sometimes then I’d be looking on RIP.ie to get some inspiration.”
Playing a brooding journalist is not unfamiliar territory for the actor, who also stars as one in Bodkin. In the Netflix thriller her character works with a wide-eyed American podcaster to document a mystery in a town in west Co Cork.
But Elvira is a bit more twisted than the average journalist: life as a freelance is tough, and with obituaries going for €200 a pop, she ends up on a killing spree in an attempt to rustle up business.
The new series is a “lot more mature and grown-up” than the first, Cullen says. “If in season one we were teasing the premise, in season two we go hell for leather.”
It is November 2024 when we first meet, in a windswept Ballyshannon. A small office in the Co Donegal town has been turned into the newsroom of the Kilraven Chronicle.
Inside, fluorescent lights flicker, and cables coil at our feet. The narrow corridors are full of lighting and sound technicians, and other crew; you can hear hushed chatter coming from one of the dressingrooms.
Although the filming of the second season is almost complete, Cullen is about to shoot one of the first scenes viewers will see of her with a newcomer to the series: Máiréad Tyers, the Bafta-nominated star of the Disney+ superhero comedy Extraordinary.
The Cork actor, who now also has a key role in The Walsh Sisters, RTÉ’s new Marian Keyes adaptation, is playing the paper’s acting editor-in-chief, the “outlandish outsider” Vivienne Birch.
As we watch from a viewing room upstairs, the pair of them pace back and forth, slipping in and out of character as they run some lines together before the first take. We hear some laughter but can’t quite tell what it’s about, as the mics are still off.
Then a clapperboard enters the shot, and recording begins. Cullen, whose Obituary costumes remind you of Wednesday Addams – everything black, with a bob to match – and Tyers have folded themselves into Elvira and Vivienne, and they spar with a mischievous energy that fills the set.
Tyers, whose character is larger than life, with a take on office fashion to match, nonchalantly leans back in her chair, then swings her feet up to land on the desk with a thud. She’s wearing boots, but not just any boots: they’re some pretty snazzy cowboy boots – perfectly acceptable office attire in Vivienne’s book. Her styling makes clear she’s not afraid to take up space. (Tyers’s hair is so curly and voluminous that it brings to mind the Mean Girls line “That’s why her hair is so big. It’s full of secrets.”) Crew exchange knowing glances as we watch the actor in her element: brazen and unpredictable.
Elvira’s answer is all in the eyes, what the cast and crew call the kill look. It’s a stare so finely tuned that, when Cullen unleashes it, the temperature in the room seems to shift. Her sleek bob – a new cut for a more mature version of the character – makes for a stark contrast with Vivienne’s look.
Both actors are fans of the show’s costume designer, Suzanne Keogh, who has also worked on Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, Northern Lights and the upcoming Leonard and Hungry Paul, as well as on films such as Love, Rosie, Greta and Oddity.
The hair-and-make-up ritual is a key part of becoming Elvira, according to Cullen. “Because her look is so specific, so sharp and precise, the costumes are so integral to the character and in how I move within them and hold myself and sit at her desk,” she says.
Vivienne, on the other hand, “feels like she’s come fresh out the plane from New York or London working in a high-stress environment as an intern in some publishing office. She’s completely unapologetic and completely confident in everything she says and does,” says Tyers, who moved to London when she was 18, to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and hasn’t looked back.
“This has been my first time working in Ireland, which feels kind of mad to me. It’s something I’ve been yearning for ages, and it’s just been a joy and everything I’d hoped it would be.
“The camaraderie that’s on Irish sets is remarkable. It feels like everyone has known each other for minimum five years, because they’ve all come up the ranks together to get to the positions they’re at.”
That camaraderie extends to Irish actors in London, where they’re a tight-knit group, so it’s not surprising that Tyers and Cullen have mutual friends in the city.
“It felt like we already knew each other, because we have a lot of the same circle, a lot of the same friends, and we became fast friends,” Cullen says about meeting Tyers for the first time. “I watched Extraordinary while filming Obituary and then became a bit of a fangirl.”
Cullen also had friends in common with Ronan Raftery, another London-based Irish actor, who plays Elvira’s journalist boyfriend, Emerson Stafford. (Ballyshannon “beats the people’s republic of Hackney,” he jokes.)
In the first season the reporter was covering crime, unaware that his bloodthirsty girlfriend was responsible for a great deal of it. In the new season Vivienne promotes him to political correspondent – local elections are under way in Kilraven – pitting him against Elvira for the paper’s editorship.
Raftery’s acting career started after he charmed audiences as the first witch in his sixth-class telling of Macbeth. Since then he has starred in Moone Boy, Chris O’Dowd’s semi-autobiographical comedy; the American supernatural horror series The Terror; the spooky thriller The Rook; and Royal Rendezvous, a romcom set in Ireland.
To play Emerson convincingly, he spoke to reporters “about crime stuff. Just about what a journalist would know or not know. Emerson pushes the ethics of journalism a lot.”
Like Cullen, Raftery has developed an appreciation for obituaries, including the way that newspapers prepare those for prominent people a long time in advance, to publish as soon as they’re needed. “When a well-known figure passes away I’m, like, ‘I wonder how long they’ve had that sitting in the drawer,’” he says.
Given the Irish obsession with death and small-town gossip, the show’s appeal in Ireland is clear. But it’s now also watched internationally, via Netflix and Hulu. “Its Irishness is not its theme,” Raftery says. “While the town is parochial, the writing is not. The show is about universal topics: loss and death. The topics are big and the town is small.
“This could have so easily been a Protestant character who somebody didn’t like in this show,” he adds. Ballyshannon is, after all, a Border town. But “the country’s just moved on from that kind of stuff”, he says. “Certainly, it’s important that TV shows and films do, and that we’re not exclusively focused on that aspect of our history and our culture.”
For Cullen, shooting in Donegal, especially with a crew that includes a lot of Gaeilgeoirí, brought back memories of a spell in Gweedore as a teenager, when she went to the Gaeltacht at the age of 14. “It was all coming back to me,” she says when we catch up in September.
She inherited her love of acting from her parents, who were involved in amateur theatre. “I would always tag along to their rehearsals. I remember being fascinated by it, totally sucked in by the magic.”
Cullen got her first professional acting job at the age of eight, in the first production of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, at the Abbey Theatre. Then, after attending acting classes through her teens, Cullen did a degree in drama and theatre at Trinity College Dublin.
She has good memories of filming in Donegal. “When people imagine what Ireland looks like having never been there before, that’s kind of it,” she says.
In addition, “there’s something incredibly indulgent about shooting away from home. When I’m working in Donegal you’re kind of relieved of any responsibilities. All you have to do while you’re there is work.”
That work hasn’t stopped. Earlier this year Cullen was back in Dublin for the third season of The Dry, the RTÉ comedy drama about addiction and family dysfunction in which she stars alongside Róisín Gallagher, Ciarán Hinds and Pom Boyd.
Between the two – within 48 hours of finishing filming in Donegal, in fact – she was in London to make a six-part BBC drama called Babies, in which she and Paapa Essiedu play a young couple who are trying to become parents but facing pregnancy loss. “We wrapped Obituary on Saturday and I started it on the Monday,” she says.
Babies was a welcome gear change – it’s “actually really helpful when you’re trying to shake off one job and one character and immediately go into another. I do sometimes find that I’m carrying on a hangover from Elvira in Obituary or Caroline in The Dry, certain quirks or ways of behaving that don’t belong in the show that I’m currently working on. There often is a bit of a detangling.”
Cullen doesn’t take her success for granted. “So much of it is luck, and it’s not a linear career,” she says. “Our industry isn’t purely a meritocracy. Some of the best actors I know have never worked. When you are working you just do your absolute best. You have to think about all the other people that would like to be in your position.”
In the meantime, as Halloween closes in, and the new season of Obituary arrives, she doubtless has some more cemeteries to visit. So if you’re inspired to take a leaf out of Cullen’s book and wander some graveyards this month, keep an eye out for her.
The first episode of series two of Obituary is being screened at Disappear Here Film Festival, in Ballyliffin, Co Donegal, on Saturday, October 4th, at 10am; the season starts on RTÉ One and RTÉ Player on Tuesday, October 14th, at 10.15pm
