Shiv show
DQ visits Dublin to meet the cast of The Dry as they reunite to film the second season of the ITVX and RTÉ comedy-drama about a family’s battle with addiction – and each other.
Like most families, the Sheridans treat their garage as a mixture of storage shed and dumping ground. But it also doubles as a workshop for the crew of ITVX and RTÉ’s The Dry, who are busy picking up or dropping off technical equipment needed by director Paddy Breathnach (Viva, Rosie), who is shooting in the main house next door.
Shelves are stacked with jam jars full of paint brushes, above large painted canvasses and model figures. Standing next to various monitors and tripods, one member of the props team is preparing a fake roast chicken, which is about to be delivered to the front door by two visitors in an upcoming scene. “We brought a roast chicken,” they announce. “We didn’t cook it.”
This detached house in the leafy Dublin suburb of Foxrock once again doubles for the Sheridan family home as DQ arrives in the Irish capital to watch filming for the comedy-drama’s second season. Written by Nancy Harris (Dates), it picks up the story of Shiv (Roisin Gallagher), who in season one returns home from London sober, after years of partying. But as she faces this new phase of her life, her family must also come to terms with her new lifestyle – and confront their own issues.
Now seven months later, Shiv is sober, celibate and solvent; little brother Ant has hung on to his job at the estate agents and his relationship with Max; and sister Caroline is making up for lost time on the dating scene after her failed engagement.
Yet while everything appears to be normal, how normal is it for three grown adults to still be living at home with their parents? With Shiv determined to get sobriety right this time, she must cut the toxic influences out of her life for good. But what if the biggest threat to Shiv’s stability turns out to be closer to home?
“Although Shiv is the heart and the centre of it, the family dynamic and the survival of the family is crucial to the show,” says executive producer Emma Norton, from producer Element Pictures (Normal People). “This family is all living under one roof and it’s just a petri dish of dysfunction. Shiv coming home is one thing, but they’re all there now.”
Inside her trailer at the production’s unit base, a short drive from the house location, Gallagher is preparing for a day on set, with scenes from episodes seven and eight on the schedule.
“Coming back to something that’s already in existence, which you were part of creating, is really special,” she says. “There’s an ease and a fluidity in returning to something you know works. That gives you confidence and there’s less nerves, certainly for me anyway.
“I was a little bit nervous about finding Shiv again. Was I going to be able to slip back into her energy, her complexities and all of her quirks? But actually, coming back on to set in the Sheridan house, working with Paddy… The first time I felt really connected to Shiv was Paddy and I having a phone call and talking through some of the scenes. His observations and perception of the story was what made me feel, ‘There she is, we’re back again, ready to go.’”
After Shiv falls spectacularly off the wagon in the season one finale, and is then surprised to be joined by her mother Bernie (Pom Boyd) at an AA meeting, she’s now “relearning how to live in the world, with no toxic highs,” while also reconnecting with her passion for art, solving the mystery of who owns the canvasses in the garage. But she’s also frustrated to live within the barriers she has built for herself to avoid repeating her mistakes.
“It’s the fear that your life will be on one level, and Shiv isn’t on one level,” Gallagher explains. “She’s an artist, she’s creative. She sees colour and adventure and she wants to be vital and feel alive and she has to find a way to do that that’s not going to lead her back to drink. We’re following that kind of journey with her, while she’s still living in an environment of chaos with her mum and dad, which is just a brilliant storyline, and a sister who’s going through her own thing, Ant’s got his things going on. Interestingly, Shiv starts off being the most put-together character.”
With Shiv, Caroline (Siobhán Cullen) and Ant (Adam Richardson) all living together at the family home, matter are complicated further by Bernie’s new companion, Finabar (Michael McElhatton), whose presence has forced their father Tom (Ciarán Hinds) to live in the garden shed as the cracks in their open marriage become wider.
“It’s just so funny, it’s so well observed,” Gallagher says. “It’s kind of reflective of the world we’re in, where younger people are living with their parents well into their 20s or 30s. The family has moved into a whole other realm of chaos. I can’t give anything away with how we finish, but they find each other somehow, through the chaos, which is pretty special and astounding.”
With a new man on her arm and seemingly confronting her own alcohol addiction, Bernie, like Shiv, is in a happy place at the start of season two. However, tensions are likely to simmer from her ambition to “do AA better” than Shiv, with Bernie seemingly treating it like a popularity contest.
That’s also where she met Finbar. “She’s been sad for so long,” Boyd says of her character. “She and Tom have had this open marriage, which is a lonely place for her. So she’s really in a great place at the start of this season. She’s going great guns in AA, she’s got lots of friends, she’s popular, she’s got a new man and life is fun and exciting.”
Boyd is also a writer, and says one of the reasons she started penning her own scripts was because there are fewer “really good parts” for women of her age. That’s also why, when she first read The Dry, Bernie “jumped off the page.” The actor then had to complete several rounds of auditions before winning the part.
“She was just such a meaty character, and Nancy understood a woman like her, the drinking thing and the humour,” she says. “That’s always what I would be looking for – humour alongside tragedy.”
Fate almost conspired against Boyd, however, when she broke her wrist just weeks before filming was due to start on season one. “I was on holiday and I slipped in a river, cooling the dog down,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ I called my agent and said, ‘You’ll have to tell them,’ but it was so nice when they just wrote back and said, ‘No, they’ll take you whatever way you rock up.”
Her injury was then written into the script, with Bernie wearing a splint on one arm. “Then the splint comes off in episode four and I get hit by a car.”
Cullen, who was recently seen leading the cast of Irish drama Obituary, says The Dry “felt like a small show that really packed a punch,” so she was delighted when season two was confirmed. “It’s hilarious, but also incredibly moving. It just feels quite relatable.”
She describes Caroline as an amalgamation of lots of people she knows, and some parts of herself too. “I hope I’m not as uptight as she is,” she jokes, “but I just thought she was so well written and so hilariously observed by Nancy. She’s really nuanced and capable of cutting someone down with a look, but also clearly has a heart as well. Immediately it was a project that I really wanted to be on board.”
Now “very single and mingling,” Caroline is looking for a man who can fit into her five-year plan for marriage and children. “She’s on the hunt. She’s downloaded all the apps and she’s testing out everything Dublin has to offer – and it’s been relatively unsuccessful thus far. But she’s totally OK with it.”
It’s The Dry’s balance of comedy and drama that Cullen believes is the magic of the series – which is distributed by ITV Studios – with characters just as likely to be laughing or crying, or both, in the same scene.
“That’s the special thing about our show,” she says. “Now season two is following these characters we’ve got to know really well and saying, ‘Well, what happens next for them? And how does Caroline cope with her world falling apart? How does Shiv cope with seven months of sobriety?’”
Meanwhile, season two of The Dry marks the first time Richardson has returned to the same role. “So that’s been pretty interesting,” he says. “There’s a certain familiarity there within the world. But the exciting part is that there are so many new characters coming in and they all add their own element, which does change what we’ve already created.”
The new episodes find Ant falling deeply in love with boyfriend Max (Emmanuel Okoye), while he has a job and money coming in.
“He’s put in a bit more effort, and Max has been a great influence on Ant in the fact Ant isn’t looking for validation through alcohol or drugs as much,” Richardson says. “In the first season we see Ant reaching for happiness through external stimulus that just isn’t very sustainable. This time he has Max, who is probably his primary source of happiness. That gets him through a lot.”
However, he is also battling with his own relationship with alcohol, while the only thing stopping him from achieving his dreams is himself.
“He hopes Max might be his get-out-of-jail-free card from this mad family, but he’s constantly getting in his own way, whether it be from anxiety, depression or self-doubt, and he doesn’t have the skills he needs to deal with what’s going on in his head,” Richardson adds.
Getting back into character, Richardson was able to draw on ‘Ant’s journal,’ which he created in season one – a “database” to which he can refer for details about Ant’s relationships with different characters. He also zoomorphises Ant, “so the first season he was a fox, because he was living in the shed out the back. He very nocturnal, he’s out all night and a bit cunning and sly. He’s graduated to a deer now – take from that what you will.”
Gallagher likens coming back for the first week of filming to a family reunion, with many of the initial scenes set in the family home. “Paddy and Nancy and the team at Element really worked to make very strong foundations in the first season, so coming back to work where you know you’ve got a strong foundation, and you know you’re grounded in something that really works, means you can evolve more. You can dig deeper, go further.
“But you don’t rest on the success of something that’s already been done because it’s gone. Moving forward, that’s so important, and I never feel as a performer, ‘Right, that’s it, I’ve got it.’ I’m always looking for where this is going to go next.”
From a production perspective, potential problems were avoided when the locations team managed to secure the same house for the Sheridans. “If the owners hadn’t been open to us filming here again, it would have been a big rethink,” Norton notes. “But the challenge [of the series] is we are still quite a low-budget show by modern standards. It’s also a time of drama funding being on a downturn, essentially, and comedy always gets funded at a lower level.
“We also want the best cast that we can have, because that’s one of the great assets of the show. Certainly in Ireland, the first season was very well received so it opened doors for us in terms of casting people who want to work with Paddy, because he’s such a great director. For other cast members, it’s a nice opportunity to work with Ciarán Hinds on something fun.”
The chaos that awaits the Sheridans in season two, which debuts on ITVX on March 14, might still just be the tip of the iceberg. When it came to developing the second run, Norton remembers Harris had already prepared a fully formed outline of storylines – and the exec says there’s plenty more story to come should the show continue to a third season.
“I don’t know how far we’ll go with this one. But Nancy just has so much to tell with these characters,” she says. “It’s not running out. We’re not running out of story yet.”
tagged in: Adam Richardson, Ciarán Hinds, Element Pictures, Emma Norton, ITV Studios, ITVX, Michael McElhatton, Pom Boyd, Roisin Gallagher, RTÉ, Siobhan Cullen, The Dry