dp“Every single move you make in your sixth decade is significant, monumental. There’s a constant loud metronome beating out the time you’ve left on earth … No decade moves faster than 50 to 60. You have to make Every. Single. Second of your time count.”
On the set of Youth, a new comedy that begins with those lines as a voiceover, Sharon Horgan is busily living up to the premise that underpins her new series for HBO. We’re supposed to be doing an interview, but every second counts, so, while we talk, her assistant sets up a laptop to enable Horgan – the programme’s creator, writer, showrunner and executive producer – to watch a scene being filmed nearby.
“If you create a show you just end up doing everything,” Horgan says. “You’re constantly having to be on the ball … I could probably do with being less controlly, I suppose. But I find that hard. It’s part of the job.”
Viewers should give thanks for Horgan’s controlly instincts. Over the past two decades she has been responsible for some of the funniest, most relatable woman-centred television, from Pulling to Catastrophe, and Motherland to Amandaland, not to mention two seasons of the blackly comic awardwinner Bad Sisters.
The Co Meath woman is arguably at her finest when creating TV shows inspired by her own life. Youth, which is about a fiftysomething woman, has been on the 56-year-old’s mind for years.
“I knew I wanted to write about this particular time in a woman’s life. And then, once I started living it more, getting further into my 50s, I felt that I really had something to say. You need a strong driver to bother going through this hell. You really need to want to do it.”
It’s a sunny day in May, and we’re at Clerkenwell Green in London, in the Old Sessions House, the setting for the literary agency where Horgan’s character works. By coincidence the 18th-century building has serious literary pedigree – Charles Dickens had Oliver Twist appear in front of the magistrates’ court that once operated here – but Horgan’s mind is firmly in the present, eyes fixed on the laptop screen.
The name of her show is a nod to the decade between 50 and 60, aka the youth of old age. Earlier I watched a scene on the building’s sweeping staircase in which Horgan, playing Alex, a newly divorced literary agent, jokes about how she’s “a smug bitch, having it all: the partner, the job, the balance”.
When I mention it, Horgan counters that Youth is less about “having it all” than it is about “the load” women find themselves having to carry at this time of life. “It’s about a point when time begins to move at a different rate, and then, suddenly, all these things come along to f**k things for you, you know?”
In theory, Alex should be enjoying her freedom, but instead her carefully balanced life is coming undone. Conscious of the need to “get back out there”, she’s also menopausal, neurotic about ageing and hampered in her romantic endeavours by the fact that her teenage son, Ruairí, is struggling emotionally.
Also wrecking her head is the fact that her actor ex-husband is about to leave the country with his younger girlfriend, abandoning his fatherly duties. She’s worrying about ailing parents and wanting to make waves in her high-powered but chaotic job.
“It’s about a woman trying to find love again, but suddenly her kid is going through this really difficult time, and he doesn’t move out when he’s supposed to, and then her parents need to be cared for. It’s all those difficulties of the sandwich generation.”
Horgan’s father died three years ago. “Most of our parents are hitting that age where they are either struggling or are no longer around. That’s riding alongside the kind of existential insanity that’s already going on. Add in some menopausal madness and you’re not in the best shape.”
Horgan – who has two daughters, Sadhbh and Amer, who are 22 and 18 – got divorced six years ago, which has inevitably informed the themes of the show.
“If you are in your mid-50s and you haven’t found your person to get old with, then you’re kind of f**ked. Because how do you put yourself out there as a sexual person when you’re a pensioner, nearly?
[ Sharon Horgan: ‘I’m even more hyper now. That could be the hormones. I’m on a lot of testosterone’Opens in new window ]
“I’d sort of marginalised myself and given myself this stupid, fake ticking clock that put so much pressure on me, almost as much as the biological clock puts on women,” she says.
“To suddenly find yourself single and thinking, well, what now? What kind of partner will I attract? At a certain age, who will be left? Will it just be the weirdos and the freaks and the institutionally single bachelors and the old men? Who will be out there?”
Compounding those relationship fears was a crippling bout of career angst. It might sound implausible that someone as professionally successful as Horgan would suffer from self-doubt, but she had plenty of questions on that score too.
“Are you still relevant? Why would anyone want a show from someone who is hitting 60? Am I suddenly going to be persona non grata? It all kind of dumped itself on me – and I also thought it was kind of funny.”
There’s a scene where Alex is ironing and talking on the phone with a friend about whether a woman can be sexy at 60. “Has any man ever said, ‘You have to meet my girlfriend. She’s sexy, she’s fun, she’s 60′?” Alex says.
This is a direct quote, according to Horgan, from the actor Courteney Cox, whom she says pondered the same thing when she was turning 60. “And what does that f**king mean? It’s a real-life patriarchal conditioning we’ve placed on ourselves – and we buy into it.”
The show is rife with awkward sexual and romantic encounters. In the first episode Alex’s best friend and boss, Sam (played by Sharlene Whyte), sets her up on an awkward blind date with an older man.
Alex texts Sam from the restaurant toilets in the middle of the date, providing a classic Horgan moment: “He’s old as f**k … I told you how I feel about a new penis, let alone an old penis,” she protests.
She ends up back at his house, where the sex chat is one of Horgan’s most memorable pieces of dialogue.
The older guy never stood a chance. The man Alex is actively pursuing is an “institutionally single 47-year-old manchild” named Patrick – or Ex Pat, as she has him saved in her phone – even though he’s clearly much more friends-with-benefits than forever-partner material.
Patrick is played by the charming Rupert Friend, who, during a break in filming, praises Horgan’s ability to pull off a story that combines depth with humour.
“To have comedy that is resting on a sort of emotional heart, to have that pathos in it, is a really hard trick to pull off. Sharon writes from such an empathic place, and she’s hilarious. I’m not sure I can think of many people really doing that.”
Friend, a frequent Wes Anderson collaborator who has also starred in Homeland and The Death of Stalin, was intrigued by the prospect of playing Alex’s love interest. She isn’t going to be having any more children. Patrick, who is only slightly younger, hasn’t fully grappled with the issue.
The show, Friend points out, explores a question not often asked of male characters: “Do you love someone enough to overlook the fact that you haven’t examined whether or not you want kids of your own or whether you are happy without them?
“There’s an element of Peter Pan syndrome in this character, where some men are slightly dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood, even if they’re well into their 40s. He’s not the aggressively macho type or the sort of scumbag cheat. He’s someone who’s quite lovable but perhaps has a bit of growing up to do.”
There’s another aspect of youth that dominates the show: Alex’s troubled teenage son, Ruairí, who is played by the relative newcomer Aran Murphy. The Dubliner is outstanding.
Upstairs at the Old Sessions House, he explains that he had a lot of personal experience to draw on.
“He’s at the same stage in his life that I’m at, where you’re on the cusp of graduating into the real world,” Murphy says. “I guess it’s a good way of showing 18-year-olds just figuring stuff out. All the anxiety and uncertainty is familiar in a lot of ways. It doesn’t seem too far from what I’ve heard or experienced in my life. There’s a lot of dread.”
Ruairí’s story arc addresses the challenges young men now face and some of the issues thrown up by the acclaimed drama Adolescence. “The manosphere features, but it’s more that I just wanted to show how f**king difficult it is to be a young man now,” says Horgan, who consulted Murphy on aspects of the script as they filmed, to ensure authenticity.
Murphy says, “A lot of the time, in Ruairí’s case, anyway, he’s in this kind of whirlwind of uncertainty and emotion.” So the manosphere “is somewhere that he can try and find solace and answers. I feel like that is pretty true to how it is for most people. It’s something that is easily accessible. It’s their way of coping, I guess. But oftentimes it leads people down the wrong paths.”
Murphy lived in London with his brother and parents until he was seven, when the family moved to Dublin. “I think my seven-year-old self was pretty pissed off, but I’m glad now,” he says.
He thinks his parents probably knew he’d gravitate towards acting before he did. His father is the Oscar-winning actor Cillian Murphy and his mother the artist Yvonne McGuinness. “I was always that kid who liked to dress up in my parents’ clothes and wear dresses and stuff.”
A few years ago his dad was one of the editors of a book about empathy; does that come into his approach to acting?
“Definitely. I think it’s a really incredible tool. Listening and understanding people is the name of the game, and if you are raised that way, I think it definitely helps.”
Horgan describes Murphy as an extraordinary talent. “He’s dramatically brilliant. He’s comedically hilarious. He’s a real kid. He’s not a showbiz kid. He plays the reality of being an 18-year-old so truthfully.”
Friend is equally impressed. “His delivery, his timing, his insouciance with the character, his choices … When I was 18 I was just a gibbering nervous wreck.”
Having taken a year out to pursue acting after his Leaving Cert, Murphy is facing a hectic period when he will have three projects out in quick succession. Youth begins next weekend; War, the TV series starring Dominic West and Sienna Miller that he has a small part in, starts on HBO on October 2nd; and the Taika Waititi film Klara and the Sun, featuring Murphy’s first lead role in a movie, is due in cinemas in late October.
“I’m going to roll with the punches, see how it goes. I’m very new to this whole thing. I thought it would be nice and staggered, but it’s very much ripping the Band-Aid off.”
A few months after the set visit I get to catch up with Horgan. This time she’s in the back of a car hurtling through east London. Why did she base Youth in the world of publishing? In Catastrophe her character was a teacher and that of Rob Delaney, her costar and cowriter, worked in advertising. Both had experiences of those worlds through their partners.
“It’s always fun to write about workplaces that you know and you’ve lived in, but with the literary world I knew nothing about it,” Horgan says. “All I knew is that I wanted Alex to be in a high-stakes job where she had to be mother to a lot of people. I just thought, I haven’t seen that world played out before. And I knew I could have some fun with it.”
The literary world, perhaps unsurprisingly, turns out to be ripe for comedy and juicy subplots.
Harriet Walter, from Succession, plays a blinder as a woman trying to get her elderly mother’s racist novel published.
Horgan’s character gets into trouble when she rejects a romantasy book series called Goblin Seed that becomes an unlikely bestseller. Damian Lewis plays an obnoxious actor trying to write a ridiculous-sounding book in a bid to emulate Stephen Fry. There’s a cameo from a well known podcaster and an episode set at Frankfurt Book Fair.
“It was a world of fun,” Horgan says. “In a way it’s very similar to the TV and film world, in that there are people dealing with talent and egos and sensitivities, and at the same time it’s all about the deal.”
Is there any chance of more Bad Sisters? “I would love it,” Horgan says; she misses it all the time and had dinner recently with her costars, who have remained close.
She has also just finished a “gorgeously fun stint” on the hit Disney+ show Only Murders in the Building. “Getting to hang out with Steve Martin and Martin Short and Meryl Streep was incredible.”
Horgan is no longer single. Has being in a relationship helped her age-related existential crisis? “I’m definitely more chilled and calmer,” she says. “I do think about it, just not as darkly or incessantly. I think it’s connected to happiness, and living in and appreciating today rather than fixating on the future.”
Youth is on HBO Max from Monday, September 21st
