From dead-end jobs to disasters at the school gates, the Irish actor and writer is a master at mining real life for laughs. What inspiration will her most ‘intense’ decade bring?
“Do my boobs look weird in this? I’m wearing quite a weird bra,” Sharon Horgan is asking the room when I arrive at a photographer’s studio in London. She is having her picture taken and is wearing an elegant green silk dress, although the elegance is a little mitigated by the way she is clutching her chest, Carry On-style.
Reassured of boob non-weirdness, Horgan spots me. “Oh, hi! A character in the show I can’t talk about yet wears the same trousers as you!” she says, referring simultaneously to my tracksuit trousers and, slightly more glamorously, Bad Sisters, which she has made as part of her deal with Apple TV+, and which at the time of our interview is still under embargo. Wears bad bras, has mega TV deals: it’s a one-two summation of Horgan’s public image as someone who seems utterly normal to the point that she could be a type, yet is successful in a way that makes her sui generis. Someone you can imagine doing the school run in the rain, probably won a Bafta the night before.
