Eva Birthistle is drinking tea with oat milk in a Dublin hotel. As an avid Bad Sisters watcher, I have to keep reminding myself that it’s Birthistle I’m talking to and not Ursula Garvey, one of the compulsively watchable sisters from that show. In a useful contrast she looks a lot less harried and far more serene than Ursula, who works as a nurse in the series and who, in common with all the sisters, carries some dark secrets. Mention of the show, the second season of which is coming soon on Apple TV, brings a massive smile to her face: “I can’t tell you how much I love it, I consider myself to be a hugely lucky actor because it’s a total and utter joy.”
Birthistle is wearing a copper-coloured silk shirt, jeans and understated gold jewellery. She has porcelain skin, striking blue-green eyes and an accent that’s mostly still Bray, Co Wicklow, where she spent her early childhood, with fainter traces of London which has been her home for nearly 30 years.
A regular visitor to Ireland for personal and professional adventures – her parents live here and half of Bad Sisters is filmed in Dublin, the other half in London – she has flown in to promote her debut feature film, Kathleen Is Here. Early signs look good for the film.
Earlier this year she won an award for “best new talent” at the Galway Film Fleadh and the movie had a glittering world premiere at Raindance Festival in London, where her long-time friend actor Andrew Scott conducted the post-screening Q&A. So it’s a proud if slightly nerve-racking time for the first-time director.
Speaking of nerves, she says Bad Sisters creator and fellow London-based Irish woman Sharon Horgan was helpful with settling any jitters that surfaced during the film-making process. “I suppose I was trying to find my voice as a director and not to feel that impostor syndrome. I would have a tendency to tell myself that I’m not going to be good enough at something, where Sharon is wonderful at telling you to stop doing that to yourself,” she says. “She’s such a strong, impressive woman. It’s not like she doesn’t have her own insecurities, but she was just very supportive in helping me battle through all those negative voices.”
Since watching the film, I tell her I can’t get it out of my head. Hazel Doupe is darkly mesmerising as 18-year-old Kathleen, a complex young woman who has aged out of the foster care system and moved into her now dead mother’s home in a seaside town in Ireland. In the absence of a maternal figure, she develops an unhealthy attachment to an older neighbour played by Clare Dunne. Also starring Love/Hate’s Peter Coogan, it’s grim, tense and moving, as well as claustrophobic in parts. Birthistle is glad to hear it. “I suppose your hope is that the audience is going to be moved, so the fact that you got all of that from it is a good sign,” she says, sounding genuinely relieved.
Birthistle came to the subject of life after foster care accidentally, having started writing the screenplay 10 years ago while working on Swansong directed by Douglas Ray. Writing was something she’d been wanting to try, and Ray encouraged her to bring in a page a day. She did what he suggested and by the end of the 20-day shoot she had 20 pages.
She was pregnant with her first child at the time, dealing with the usual worries about impending motherhood. “I’m very interested in mother-daughter relationships. And when I started writing, I had those fears as a mother about to have a child ... I think it’s probably very common, and it was feeding the subject matter.”
At first, the screenplay was a “much funnier and lighter piece” about someone on the margins of society. She was urged by a writer friend to bring the screenplay into darker territory. Seeing massive billboards for the Kardashians’ reality TV show gave her inspiration for a young character who was immersed in that world. At the same time, she happened upon a vlog by a teenager in America who was in foster care and putting herself out on social media “in a very raw, candid way ... I wondered what she was trying to achieve. I was really struck by her, I thought ‘gosh, that’s so brave’ and it sparked the idea about someone in her position coming out of care, what her needs were ... and it just went on from there”.
She had in mind a character who was lost, in need of connection, someone trying to escape her own reality. Then she had a conversation with her father which helped push the idea further. The family had moved to Derry from Bray in the late 1980s and her parents still live in the area. Her dad told her about a group he was working with called Heal who offer a safe space to lots of people on the margins, “particularly young adults who are ageing out of care. So I met with a group of young people in Derry going through that process and it was enlightening and informative and shocking ... these were young people taking that next step, trying to find out: what next?”.
The stories I’ve been leaning towards, the ones I am interested in telling, generally involve individuals that are on the outside
— Eva Birthistle
“Their stories were all different; some people had support as they took those next steps, while most of them didn’t. They were turning 18 with no support, they were just cut adrift to fend for themselves ... the odds are stacked against them, they’re expected to navigate trying to become an adult and go to college or get a job ... how do they manage, you know?” It was a story she felt needed to be told. “I’m not necessarily qualified to tell it but I hope with the guidance from the people at Heal and the research we did, and with Hazel doing such a great job, that it’s shining a bit of a light. It’s a conversation starter.”
Kathleen is very much an outsider, something Birthistle has experienced herself in very different circumstances. She grew up in Bray but moved to Derry during the Troubles, aged 14, when her father became managing director of a hosiery factory in Strabane. It was 1988. She and her brother were culturally Catholic – she rejected the religion as a teenager – but they were sent to a mainly Protestant coeducational school so the siblings could be educated together. Does she relate to that feeling of being on the outside looking in? “I did feel like an outsider for a large chunk of my teenage years ... Derry was so different, a vastly different lifestyle and social scene, that I felt outside for most of that.”
She has spoken before about life at school, her art work graffitied with stuff like ‘Get out, you Fenian bitch’ and packed lunches thrown at her. “They were nice, welcoming people,” she told an interviewer 20 years ago. But she remains grateful for that formative experience. “I did have Protestant schoolfriends who really put their necks on the line by being friends with me, because it wasn’t easy for them either. And so I definitely felt what it was to be an outsider in those terms. And the stories I’ve been leaning towards, the ones I am interested in telling, generally involve individuals that are on the outside.”
As an actor, she has also portrayed a lot of outsiders. After leaving school she went to the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin and landed a role in Glenroe, playing what back then was described as “posh farming totty” Regina Crosbie. After three years in upmarket wellies she moved to London, where she worked as a waiter for several years while auditioning for parts. She appeared in Alan Gilsenan’s All Souls Day and Sunday, Jimmy McGovern’s drama about Bloody Sunday. Her first big break came with the lead role in Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss – a love story about two outsiders set in Scotland – which allowed her to jack in the restaurant jobs for good.
She was, she has said, “spoiled” on Loach’s set and it was a feeling she wanted to recreate for the cast both on Kathleen Was Here, the award-winning short she made as a prologue to the feature, and on Kathleen Is Here. “Considering the subject matter, I’d like to think it was a warm and healthy set where people felt safe and supported ... we also managed to carve out a lot of time for having a laugh. It was a really fun set considering the subject matter we were dealing with.” She adds, “I think if you don’t have a laugh, that’s when it’s damaging for your mental health. You can get too bogged down.”
Birthistle has worked consistently over the decades in both television and film, from Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto to John Crowley’s Brooklyn. She was in Mark O’Rowe’s The Delinquent Season starring opposite Cillian Murphy and has featured in several series of British historical drama The Last Kingdom. Lately, the global hit Bad Sisters introduced Birthistle to a new and even wider audience.
I’d go to cast and crew screenings and sit there feeling sick and sweaty, an awful experience, hating what I was looking at – myself I mean, everything else was fine
— Eva Birthistle
Will there be a third season? “I really hope so,” she says but insists she cannot confirm anything. I can report that there is a sort of glint in her eye as we talk about the prospect of Bad Sisters 3, so I’m staying hopeful too. She talks about the brilliance of Fiona Shaw, who has a pivotal role in the new season. “She’s extraordinary, just unbelievable. I think we were all a bit intimidated at the start but she’s such good fun and so playful.”
Of her work sisters on the show, she says: “I adore them all, I go to work and I laugh all day, and we have great chats. We’re supportive of each other, and we’ve just become really close.”
She worked alongside one of her Bad Sisters, Eve Hewson, on the Netflix series Behind Her Eyes. When I tell Birthistle I admired her work on that, she confesses: “I never actually watched it.” Does she tend not to watch herself? “Sometimes I do. I watched Bad Sisters because it’s so good but generally over the years, I’ve found I’m disappointed by myself.” She’s her own harshest critic. “I think most actors are,” she says, remembering a valuable lesson she learned from Saoirse Ronan 10 years ago.
“I used to watch everything I was in, I’d go to cast and crew screenings and sit there feeling sick and sweaty, an awful experience, hating what I was looking at – myself I mean, everything else was fine,” she laughs. “But I remember going to a screening of Brooklyn and Saoirse Ronan, who was half my age, didn’t sit in. And afterwards I said ‘did you not sit in?’ and she said ‘god no, like I might watch it in a year or something’ and that was it for me, I drew a line under it.”
Birthistle is funny and open and a joy to spend time with. I confess I’ve been googling her husband Ross J Barr – he’s an acupuncturist with an A-list client list who is so conventionally good looking he’s been described as “London’s hottest healer”. She laughs at this: “It makes him squirm, it’s a bit embarrassing.” Refreshingly, Birthistle does not clam up, as is the preference of a lot of well-known actors, when you mention their personal lives. She was married before, to session musician Raife Burchell. Their divorce was amicable. “We remained very good friends – we had no children so it wasn’t complicated in that respect. It was very sad but not an angry divorce.”
She first met her husband Ross because she lived above his acupuncture practice. “I’d spotted him around, ‘who is that person?’ kind of thing,” she laughs. (They are well matched in this: obviously, Birthistle is also head-turningly lovely.) Later she went to him for acupuncture. “And then I figured I better stop going to him for acupuncture,” she says, laughing again. She recommended him to her niece, who went to him for treatment, so they kept in touch. And then one day, “in a moment of madness, I thought, ‘I’m going to ask him out, I’ve nothing to lose’, so I did. We went for a cup of tea and we got on very well. The cup of tea turned into a pint and, well, it was a long, very long date.”
The midwife came in and said ‘your husband did so well’ and I was like ‘sorry what?’ and she went ‘we see a lot of husbands but he was really great’. I was like ‘walk away now before I throw something at you’
— Eva Birthistle
Thirteen years later the couple have a home together in North London and two children: a son, Jesse, aged ten, named after Jesse James, and a seven-year-old daughter, Joni, named after Joni Mitchell. “My kids are hilarious, such characters, mad as a box of frogs,” she says.
Her husband gets a lot of attention for his looks. She must do too? “I think he gets more,” she grins. Luckily, she’s not the jealous type. “I think as long as you talk and there is trust it’s absolutely fine.” She does remember, after the birth of her daughter Joni, an incident where her husband’s looks might have swayed the nursing staff in the hospital. “I had pushed my daughter out, without an epidural. It had felt like I was being murdered – and I don’t mean to pat myself on the back but I had worked very hard. The midwife came in and said ‘your husband did so well’ and I was like ‘sorry what?’ and she went ‘we see a lot of husbands but he was really great’. I was like ‘walk away now before I throw something at you’.”
She is, not surprisingly, a big believer in acupuncture, but says when she was in labour with her son Jesse, it was the last thing she wanted during what she describes as a traumatic labour. “I remember Ross came at me with the needles and I wanted to punch him in the face. And whatever way I looked at him, he shrunk backwards.”
Earlier this year Birthistle turned 50, and is not ashamed to say she milked the occasion with a party for Irish friends in a house in Carlow – “super fun” – and another one in London. How does she feel about the milestone? Pretty good so far, it turns out. Having said that, she was fine with 40 until she turned 41, “so check back in with me at 51” she says.
So what’s next? She is working on a treatment for a film that’s set in the west of Ireland. “It’s a full-on thriller, a bit of a revenge story with a folklore element to it as well. It has a lot of themes I relate to, it’s about living and growing up in Ireland. Again very much looking at the outsider, about trying to belong and not being accepted.”
Is she at the stage now where she doesn’t have to worry about where the next acting job is coming from? “I don’t know if any actor is there to be honest with you. You never really know ... I’m concentrating on writing at the moment, so that will keep me busy and interested. It does help when you’re in a hit show and you get more offers. Having said that, I haven’t got an offer,” she laughs. “So you can never really sit back and go ‘I’ve got this’, you know?”
There’s lots to look forward to if things fall into place over the next few years. Finishing her script, filming a – fingers firmly crossed – third season of Bad Sisters and directing another feature-length movie. She is also thinking about moving her family back to Ireland to be closer to her parents.
There’s another reason Birthistle is feeling optimistic about the future as she faces into her 50s. Her husband surprised her with the gift of something called a Human Design Reading. “Have you ever heard of it?” she asks and I tell her that I haven’t. “I was a bit sceptical, but it’s a woman in New York who does this reading on the phone based on your astrological chart and the time and place you were born. It’s very detailed and she gives a very thorough breakdown of you as a person.”
And what did she find out? “Well the big takeaway was that there is no sort of downward decline. She said ‘you’re going to hit 50 and it just keeps going up, things will just keep getting better and better’.
“I told her I didn’t need to hear any more,” she laughs as she heads off to a screening of her new movie. “I’ll take that, thank you very much.”
Kathleen Is Here is in cinemas now.
