Unlocking Keyes
Irish actor and writer Stefanie Preissner and author Marian Keyes tell DQ how they came together to bring some of Keyes’ most famous characters to the screen with The Walsh Sisters, a comedic drama about five chaotic yet lovable siblings navigating their late 20s and 30s.
Since Marian Keyes first published her novel Watermelon in 1995, millions of readers around the world have followed the stories of the chaotic, dysfunctional yet loveable Walsh family. Mammy and Daddy Walsh, plus their five daughters, have appeared in seven novels so far, each one focused on a different sibling at different stages in their lives as they tackle issues such as addiction, immigration, depression, domestic violence and abortion.
A six-part series, called The Walsh Sisters, now brings those stories together on screen. Set in their Dublin hometown, the comedic drama follows the lives of Anna, Rachel, Maggie, Claire and Helen as they navigate the peaks and troughs of their late 20s and 30s.
When Rachel’s addiction spirals out of control, it sets off a chain of events that shakes the entire family to its core. Anna faces a profound personal crisis, while Rachel is forced into rehab and must face the chaos she’s created. Claire is struggling to redefine herself as a single mother, Maggie is desperate to start a family of her own, and Helen, stoic and sharp, is hiding battles that no one can see. As they stumble through secrets, family feuds, and moments of grace, each sister must confront who they really are and the roles they’ve always played.
Directed by Ian FitzGibbon (Hullraisers), the series comes from writer and actor Stefanie Preissner, who first laid out her ambitions for the show in 2018 after producer Cuba Pictures picked up the rights to four of Keyes’ novels – including Rachel’s Holiday and Anybody Out There? – and put out an open call for writers to discuss their ideas.
“I told them my vision for the show, and also how me and Marian, the show and the books overlap on a Venn diagram,” she tells DQ. “I knew Marian casually, just moving in some of the same circles. I had been in recovery myself, so I knew Rachel’s story quite well. I’m also married to a widower so Anna’s storyline really resonates with me in that regard.”
Claire is the protagonist of Watermelon, but without the rights to that particular novel, Preissner chose to pick up her story after the book ends, with her dealing with life as a single mum facing up to the challenges of co-parenting and how society unfairly views her as a mother compared to the father.
“I’m excited by her character, because I think a lot of women in particular will judge her quite harshly, but hopefully I’ve done enough with her that there’s a bit of understanding there,” Preissner (Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope) says.
But when she wrote the scripts, she didn’t realise she would also appear on screen as Maggie, who faces fertility issues in a bid to start a family of her own. The cast also features Louisa Harland as Anna, Caroline Menton as Rachel, Danielle Galligan as Claire and Máiréad Tyers as Helen. Aidan Quinn is Jack ‘Daddy’ Walsh, with Carrie Crowley as Mammy Walsh.
“I didn’t know that I was going to be playing Maggie when I wrote Maggie, but I relate to her a lot,” she says. “I also had a lot of fertility struggles so that storyline really resonates with me and is written from a place of very much knowing. But if I had known I was going to be playing her, I probably wouldn’t have put in the sex scenes.”
Behind the bickering and banter between the sisters, Keyes’ novels tackle extremely hard-hitting topics – a process Preissner describes as “hiding the vegetables in the sauce.” “I knew that I wanted to keep that element. She’s talking about really important things.” Adapting the novels for television, she had to update them for present-day audiences more open to discussing subjects like alcoholism and abortion that were considerably more taboo in the 1990s and early 2000s.
But the writer’s chief task was to find a way to bring storylines from multiple books into one TV series. She compares Keyes’ novels about the Walsh sisters to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books, which were written chronologically, “but imagine if Harry Potter 1 was just about Harry, his whole story from [books] one to seven, and then book two was just about Ron. So you’re sometimes hearing some of the same stories, but from a different perspective,” she explains. “In Rachel’s book [Rachel’s Holiday], Rachel is 30, but Helen is 15. But in Helen’s book [The Mystery of Mercy Close], Helen is 30 and Rachel is much older.
“I had to find a way to get all of the stories to be in one world, because it was the ‘Walsh sisters,’ and I was very adamant that it was about all five of them. I liked to imagine them as five faders on a sound desk. In season one, Rachel and Anna are dialled up to 10, and Claire maybe starts at a three and comes to a six by episode six. Maggie is on her own journey in and around a four, and Helen’s probably sitting at a three, sometimes dragged up to a four through different people’s storylines.”
Then in season two, which Preissner is already developing, “Helen’s up to a 10, so I get the opportunity to move those faders around, and it really felt like that on set as well. It didn’t feel like, ‘Oh, this is the lead actor, and now we all have to just play to her storyline.’ I think everyone felt that they had a three-dimensional enough story to work with, and that they weren’t just serving other people’s stories.”
Preissner was even writing while on set as filming progressed, as she molded the scripts to the actors’ performances. “But I’m not a very precious person about my work,” she says, “so if they’re like, ‘This line just feels a bit clunky in my mouth, can I say this?’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely.’”
Furthermore, a lot of the novels convey the characters internal thoughts. “What Marian is incredible at doing is seeing someone’s inner world. Unless I’m going to have a voiceover – and I’m really not a fan of voiceovers on TV – I have to find a way to capture that in action and dialogue, and that’s quite tricky.”
Her favourite scenes to write, however, were those featuring multiple characters, whose often-chaotic conversations overlap one another.
“I just sit down at my laptop, and it just happens with my fingers. It all happens very fast,” she says. “Then if I walk away from my laptop and I come back, I’m like, ‘I don’t remember writing that.’ It’s weird, it just all kind of happens. Now, especially writing season two, I find I know the characters so well, and I know the actors so well, that it’s happening even more easily, where you know this is exactly what she would say in this moment.”
Then whenever Preissner would hit a stumbling block, Keyes was always on the end of the phone or an email to answer questions about which political party Daddy Walsh might vote for or what kind of engagement ring Maggie would wear.
“She’s so generous, she’s so excited. She loves it,” Preissner says. “It’s an honest adaptation in the way that it’s not page for page of the book, because it can’t be, but I’ve kept the spirit of it and the tone of it and the characters, and she’s happy. She’s telling me she’s happy, and I believe her. She’s not a dishonest person.”
She isn’t wrong. “I’m loving it,” Keyes tells DQ ahead of the show’s launch in Ireland on RTÉ last month. It will soon be airing on the BBC in the UK, while Cineflix Rights is handling international sales. Metropolitan Films produces with Cuba Pictures.
Notably, Keyes says she feels no ownership at all over the adaptation, and describes Preissner as “a complete genius” for the way she has woven numerous storylines together.
“I don’t know how she did it, but she did an amazing job, and she kept the feel of the novels, the bickery warmth and the undercurrent of darkness, but she has made it into something new and beautiful,” she says.
Mixing heavy subjects with humour, the author describes her own novels as “an Irish approach to misfortune and darkness.” “Maybe that confuses people who are not used to it,” she says. “Balance is always important. The idea of something so dark that it’s unbearable, I couldn’t write it. But there always has to be something of substance in any novel for me anyway. Or else, there isn’t any point in writing it.”
Preissner and Keyes had early meetings to discuss the series in “broad strokes,” before the author became a sounding board for different ideas, with Keyes offering names for new characters not in her books.
“I’m in complete awe of her,” Keyes says of Preissner. “She did the adaptation, but she also acted in it, and she was also the person that I contacted about, ‘Can I go on set, or can I bring someone?’ She was a one-man show, except, obviously, there were other people, but she had an overview. She knew everything that was going on at all times.”
The one place Keyes did want to have her say was in casting – and in particular, the casting of Jay Duffy as Luke Costello, Rachel’s love interest, who she describes as an “iconic character.”
“They’ve done an amazing job on casting. The women were all cast fairly early on, and Luke remained elusive,” she says. “When it comes to Luke, all I could say is, ‘Do not fuck this up,’ and they didn’t. I just felt I had a big responsibility to my readers who were all, ‘Who’s going to play Luke?’ so at least I conveyed how important it was.”
The reasons for the focus on Luke is because “he had to be really quite sexy,” Keyes notes. “He’s a particular kind of man in that he doesn’t take any nonsense from Rachel, and that’s very important when you’re dealing with an addict.”
She spoke to Duffy about how he might play Luke, just as she had “sessions” with the actors playing Anna, Rachel, Maggie Claire and Helen to discuss who held the power in the family and the “very discreet dynamics” between them.
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Then the first time she visited the set with her husband, she watched a scene featuring Claire, Maggie and Helen visiting Rachel in rehab. “It was so weird. It was like they had just walked out of my head,” she exclaims. “Claire was strutting along, and she had gold-rimmed sunglasses, a choppy blonde bob and this oversized blazer, and she was just being really cool. Then Helen was coming along, in trousers that were just slightly too short for her, and this little bomber jacket, and her hands were fists in the pockets, and she was just so Helen. She was just radiating, ‘God, this is crap. Everything in the world is crap. I hate it all.’
“Then there’s Maggie, who was just being sensible. It was the weirdest, loveliest feeling. They had completely embodied these imaginary people. I was so happy, I felt like crying. Tony, my husband, felt the same because we’ve lived with these people for a very long time.”
Ahead of production, Preissner joined the rest of the main cast for two weeks of rehearsals led by director FitzGibbon. It was at this stage that the director encouraged her to step away from her writing duties and embrace her on-screen role.
“I felt like some weird aunt hanging out with the cool kids for the first few weeks,” she jokes, “but then by the time we got to set, it was just the relationship that we all have. It is like we are sisters, and it’s really good to hang out, and there’s a real casual comfort. It feels really nice, and there’s a real warm relationship with everyone on set.”
For fans of Keyes’ novels, “there’s going to be a part of you that’s slightly disappointed” by the series, Preissner admits. “That is something I have to reconcile with. What Marian is magical at is understanding the observational intelligence and the emotional intelligence of an inner world, and how people feel about themselves and about other people, which is actually impossible to capture on screen. So you will be a little bit disappointed.
“But books should always be better, and they will be, and that’s why we love to read.”
For those who aren’t familiar with the Walsh sisters, however, the writer promises a “really engaging experience. “Then the lucky bastards have multiple books to go and get more and more information about the characters. Those guys have a lot of enjoyment in store.”
With The Walsh Sisters, Keyes says its “really nice” to see a depiction of a family to whom terrible things happen, “because that’s real life,” but to also show that those things are survivable – and can still be filled with humour.
“I hope that people see that families are really messy,” she adds. “They’re messy and they’re painful and they’re beautiful and they are survivable, and they can be a great resource at times.”
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tagged in: Aidan Quinn, áiréad Tyers, Caroline Menton, Carrie Crowley, Danielle Galligan, Ian FitzGibbon, Ireland, Louisa Harland, Marian Keyes, Stefanie Preissner, The Walsh Sisters