Bad Sisters (TV Program)

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    How Sharon Horgan Shaped a Monstrous Brother-in-Law

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    John Paul, the compelling villain of Horgan’s new show “Bad Sisters,” was inspired by the TV tradition of “dangerous sexy men,” priests and a former president.“Bad Sisters,” now streaming on Apple TV+, opens with the funeral of John Paul Williams. The show’s ten hourlong episodes unfurl how he died, and whether his four sisters-in-law had a hand in that death.We soon discover that John Paul had long emotionally abused his wife and terrorized her sisters. The show — created by Sharon Horgan, Dave Finkel and Brett Baer — tells “a serious story about the damage that ripples outward from one angry and devious man,” Mike Hale wrote in his review for The New York Times.But, like Horgan’s previous show “Catastrophe,” “Bad Sisters” is also darkly funny. It’s adapted from the Belgian show “Clan,” which aired as “The Out-Laws” on British television in 2016. Horgan found the setup of four sisters trying (and failing) to kill their brother-in-law “inherently comical,” she said in a recent video interview, and she also related to the sisters’ strong ties, describing her own four siblings as having her back “no matter what.”Horgan — who also stars as the eldest sister, Eva — changed several aspects of the Belgian original: She cut the slapstick humor, brought down the collateral death count, fleshed out the sisters’ back stories and moved the story to Ireland.She also adapted the character of John Paul, played by Claes Bang, in several ways. To shape him into a fascinatingly horrible — and familiar — villain, Horgan drew on varied references from other TV shows, the Roman Catholic church and contemporary politics.Jean-Claude, from ‘Clan’Dirk Roofthooft plays the horrible brother-in-law in “Clan.”Caviar FilmsIn “Clan,” the dead brother-in-law is Jean-Claude Delcorps, played by Dirk Roofthooft. Horgan kept the sisters’ nickname for their brother-in-law: It’s “The Prick,” in “Bad Sisters” and “De Kloot” in “Clan,” which have the same connotation, though the Flemish version translates as “a testicle.” She did, however, change the character’s appearance, and thus, the way he navigates the world. In the original, Jean-Claude was “a bit of a gargoyle,” she said, but Bang’s John Paul is debonair and pays a lot of attention to his appearance — he’s what Horgan called “an attractive abuser.”John Paul is vain and arrogant, but outside of his own home, he’s often embarrassed or dismissed: In one episode we see him furiously trying, and failing, to keep up with his hiking group; throughout the series, he panders to his boss for a promotion while his co-workers talk about how vile he is.“I don’t know if it’s Shakespearean,” Horgan said, “but the idiot provides relief. I like that he was someone who was incredibly in control and dangerous, but at times, was also an ineffectual person.”A Scandinavian ColdnessHorgan always knew John Paul wouldn’t be fully Irish, she said, which creates immediate distance between him and the sisters. “You can’t really slot in, if it’s not your nationality,” she said of Irish culture.She specifically wanted the brother-in-law to be from Scandinavia, she said, so she could integrate the “sort of coldness and a sort of warmness at the same time” associated with that region into the character. Horgan said she wanted “Bad Sisters” to also nod to the gritty crime dramas countries like Denmark and Sweden are known for producing.Before all the episodes were written, she had cast Bang, a Danish actor, as John Paul. They discussed how to approach the character, and Bang wanted to lean into the character’s coldness, Horgan said.It proved difficult to find a Danish actress to play John Paul’s mother, Minna, and Horgan cast the Swedish actress Nina Norén in the role. Bang can also speak Swedish, and so John Paul became Swedish. Minna has a straightforwardness about her, reflected in the clean lines and classically Scandinavian design of her home, and how she delivers revelations about John Paul’s childhood.The Roman Catholic ChurchHorgan also made John Paul a strident Roman Catholic, who gives his daughter a pin of a 10-week-old fetus’ feet, the international anti-abortion symbol, before her confirmation.Growing up in Ireland, the Catholic Church played a large part in Horgan’s life, she said, adding that, historically, people in the church had sometimes performed evil acts under the guise of morality. In recent years, Catholic priests’ widespread child sexual abuse has been revealed in Ireland, as in the United States. In the twentieth century, orders of Catholic nuns in Ireland effectively incarcerated women and forced them to perform unpaid labor, in the Magdalene Laundries.“The church was more important than the individual,” Horgan said of both these atrocities. “The cover-up was more important than the victim.”She applied this conception of morality to John Paul, who sees himself as a soldier against sin, however hypocritical that may be. In Episode 3, he tricks one of the sisters, who’s having an affair, into sending him an intimate picture, which he then holds as leverage. What the sister is doing is wrong, Horgan said, but John Paul never questions his frequent porn watching or his refusal to have “an emotional relationship with his wife.”The ‘Dangerous Sexy Man’Alexander Skarsgard in “Big Little Lies.”HBOHorgan also drew on the TV tradition of “dangerous sexy men,” she said. In the HBO show “Big Little Lies,” Perry (played by Alexander Skarsgard) physically abuses his wife, is disliked by her friends and is eventually killed. He was “very attractive on the outside but also had a sexual danger,” Horgan said, which she also recognized in Don Draper from “Mad Men,” whose toxic version of masculinity Horgan called a “romanticization of control.”Horgan made John Paul frightening, like these characters, but also ineffectual. “I like the idea of him being, to a certain extent, a street angel and a house devil,” Horgan said. “These men get away with what they get away with because it’s often happening behind closed doors — they’re not walking around with signs on their head exuding danger. It’s always a shock, isn’t it?”Humanized MonstersIn “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) is evil, but also has moments of humanity.Sophie Giraud/HuluHorgan was also inspired by the characters of Aunt Lydia from “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Cersei Lannister from “Game of Thrones,” she said, in terms of how they command power, and how the temperature changes whenever they walk into a scene. Both “Handmaid’s Tale” and “Game of Thrones” also create moments in which the viewer is encouraged to empathize with Lydia or Cersei. “It makes a character more unnerving,” Horgan said. “You see these occasional moments of humanity, so you’ll forgive them — it’s how abusers operate.”With John Paul, his presence in a scene instantly introduces danger for the sisters, but we also see him cherish his daughter. “It’s not just a straight-up monster that you have to get away from; it’s far more subtle than that,” Horgan said.The Republican Party“I can’t say Trump was an influence,” Horgan said, “but he was so prevalent” when she was making the show. Former President Donald J. Trump “can appear less dangerous because he’s a clown and so weak and so vain,” she said, adding those qualities felt similar to John Paul’s. She also drew parallels between the brother-in-law and the British prime minister Boris Johnson, whom she said “gets away with so much by playing the buffoon.”John Paul systematically tries to take down others around him, based on what he judges to be wrong, while engaging in suspicious behavior of his own: lying to his boss, blackmailing his sister-in-law, falsely accusing a neighbor he dislikes of being a pedophile.In recent years, Horgan said, she has seen this kind of righteousness in the wider Republican Party. “There are other members of the G.O.P. who would seem a lot more frightening,” she said, “the ones who are clearly trying to restrict women’s freedom while, at the same time, having morally dubious behavior.” More

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      ‘Bad Sisters’ Review: The Family That Kills Together (Maybe)

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      Sharon Horgan headlines a twisty, comic take on the avenging-women thriller for Apple TV+.A despicable male is found dead, and the prime suspects are a group of women who wanted to protect one of their number from his constant oppression. The killer or killers are eventually revealed; a lot of driving is done up and down a picturesque coastline. It’s the “Big Little Lies” scenario, but “Bad Sisters,” premiering Friday on Apple TV+, adds something new and refreshing to the formula: a sense of humor.The Irish writer and performer Sharon Horgan, who created “Bad Sisters” with Dave Finkel and Brett Baer, has been behind some of the most caustically funny shows on British television this century, like “Pulling” (raucous female friendship) and “Catastrophe” (the chaos of marriage). Earlier this year, she branched out, recasting “The Shining” as a family sitcom in “Shining Vale” on Starz.“Shining Vale” and “Bad Sisters” don’t send up the horror and avenging-women-thriller genres; they employ humor, strategically and affectionately, to give the genres new life. The 10 hourlong episodes of “Bad Sisters” (based on a Belgian series, “Clan”) tell a serious story about the damage that ripples outward from one angry and devious man, but Horgan and her collaborators use the structures of comedy to maintain energy and keep up our interest, and they mostly avoid the tendencies toward moralism and melodrama that this sort of narrative often lapses into.The villain of “Bad Sisters” is John Paul Williams (Claes Bang), who works in the finance department of a Dublin architecture firm. We first see him in his coffin at his wake, which is where we’re introduced to the five sisters of the title: Grace, his long-suffering wife (Anne-Marie Duff), and his in-laws Eva (Horgan), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene) and Becka (Eve Hewson).The circumstances of John Paul’s death are kept from us until late in the series, but we know that it has been ruled an accident because Tom (Brian Gleeson) and Matt (Daryl McCormack), a pair of slightly feckless half brothers who own a small and failing insurance agency, have set out to prove otherwise. If they can show that it was murder, they won’t have to pay off on the life-insurance policy that Grace holds.Their stumbling but bullheaded progress — they’re like low-rent cousins of Edward G. Robinson in “Double Indemnity” — is one of the show’s clever comic storytelling devices. The investigation they carry out is remarkably effective, largely because no one gives much thought to talking with them, and the audience is always a step or two ahead in putting together the facts they’re uncovering.Tom and Matt unwittingly guide us through the larger story, in which continual flashbacks illustrate John Paul’s awfulness and the increasingly dire steps the sisters take in response. Each sister proves to have her own reason to want him dead, which complicates the narrative and fills out the 10 episodes. The most baroque of these subplots involves the loss of one of Bibi’s eyes, which requires Greene to wear a pirate-like eye patch that’s a neat visual joke in its own right.The trickiness and delayed revelations mean that “Bad Sisters” is a forest of spoilers, about which it can perhaps safely be said that the sisters-in-law find themselves willing to contemplate murder and that John Paul proves, through a series of misadventures that are grisly in nature and slapstick in form, to be comically indestructible, right up until he isn’t.Beyond the smart construction and tart dialogue, especially in the episodes (four of 10) written or co-written by Horgan, “Bad Sisters” succeeds because the five lead actresses convince us that they’re a family unit, sometimes for worse but mostly for better. The characters are types — strong and overprotective Eva, angry Bibi, flighty but sensible Becka — but the performers make them distinctive and make us feel their fierce devotion to one another.Particularly good is Duff in the difficult, thankless role of Grace, who sticks with John Paul despite being gaslighted, debased and controlled; it would be easy to write her off and disengage from the show, but Duff keeps us with her, showing the layers of insecurity, fear and honest devotion that make sense of the character.The real key to the show, though, is the performance by Bang, who pulls off an even more impressive feat with John Paul, expertly portraying his ghastliness while also rendering him as absolutely human and never for a moment descending into caricature. John Paul’s sociopathy is, with a few exceptions, a matter of conversational malevolence and tactical maneuvering rather than physical violence, and Bang executes his attacks with the self-satisfied joy of a childish virtuoso; instead of playing up monstrousness or soullessness, he puts a twinkle in John Paul’s eye and a hint of uncertainty beneath his bravado, and you can’t take your own eyes off him. More

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      Daryl McCormack Has More Than Luck on His Side

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      The Irish actor’s performance as a sympathetic sex worker in “Good Luck, Leo Grande” this summer “has definitely opened up doors for me,” he said. Next up is the Apple TV+ series “Bad Sisters.”Early last year, Daryl McCormack’s East London neighbors seemed determined to do some matchmaking: “Oh, you should meet Sharon,” they said. “My friend is writing a show; I’ll make sure to say that I know you.”“People do that all the time,” the Irish actor explained in a recent video interview from Melbourne, Australia, his arresting green eyes making it hard not to stare. “They’re like, ‘Let me tell my friend,’ and nothing comes of it.”Sharon — as in the writer and actor Horgan, who has lacerated motherhood and marriage in “Catastrophe” and “Divorce” — had been getting an earful, too.“He lived above my friend’s jewelry shop just around the corner from where I live, and most of the female-owned stores along the street were pretty excited about him,” she said, laughing. “I told them I was making this Irish thing and I was looking for a youngish leading man. And they were like, ‘Well, what about Daryl?’”That Irish thing was “Bad Sisters,” a darkly comic thriller debuting Friday on Apple TV+, about the five inseparable Garvey women, one of whom is married to a man so misogynistic and nefarious that the other four would do almost anything to boot him from their lives.The youngish leading man was needed to play a handsome, heartbroken insurance agent who gets dragged into a convoluted policy investigation when the Garveys’ loathsome brother-in-law turns up dead.Lo and behold, McCormack’s name was already on the casting director’s list of contenders.“I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s the guy that all the women in Hackney fancy,’” Horgan said.McCormack stars as a heartbroken insurance agent in “Bad Sisters.” (With Eve Hewson.)Liam Daniel/Apple TV+McCormack, who eventually got the job, of course, has been the object of a great deal of fancying since the June release of the British dramedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” which stars Emma Thompson as Nancy, a widow in her 60s, and McCormack as Leo, a sex worker she hires to guide her through an erotic awakening.Critics praised the film for its sexual positivity, authenticity and zing, as well as Thompson’s daring performance. But just as remarkable was the relatively inexperienced McCormack’s ability to match the virtuosic Thompson quip for quip. “McCormack moves between wit, compassion and vulnerability with grace,” The New York Times wrote in its review of the film.Given the abundant physical and emotional nakedness Thompson’s role required, she held considerable sway in the casting of her co-star. She had seen McCormack’s audition tape, but before making a final decision, she asked him to take a walk with her.“Knowing where these two characters go and how vulnerable the film can get, I think it was important for her to really feel a sense of safety with me and a sense of trust,” McCormack said.As they strolled, Thompson found him instantly calming, she wrote in an email — “gentle and curious and apparently unsaddled with too much in the way of personal ambition. Somehow he was going to be able to relax Nancy, who is in a state of tension comparable to a first-time bungee jumper.“He was the right person to step off the bridge with,” she continued, “and fly down hoping the cord won’t break but knowing if it does, it was all worth the effort.”When Thompson texted “I’ll see you on set” the next morning, McCormack, stunned to learn he’d been cast, checked to make sure that she hadn’t notified him by mistake.“It was quite life-changing, that moment,” he said. “My world just did a somersault.”After taking a walk with McCormack, Emma Thompson concluded that “he was the right person to step off the bridge with” in “Good Luck, Leo Grande.”Searchlight PicturesCalling from Australia, where he and Thompson were promoting the movie, McCormack, 29 and laid back in a gray hoodie, looked more like the ace athlete he was as a schoolboy (in the Irish sport of hurling) than the seductive, silky-voiced fantasy man he conjured in “Leo Grande.” He knows the sex comedy, considered an Oscar contender, has changed his career.“The film has definitely opened up doors for me in a big way,” he said, “like just even speaking to people that I’ve admired for a long time, work finding me a lot quicker, having a bit more of a selection to do work that I really want to do.”He was still in the midst of shooting the movie when Horgan reached out about “Bad Sisters.”McCormack may have been consumed by Leo at the time, but Horgan could see Matthew Claffin, the insurance agent, in his magnetism, his nimble acting chops and, when needed, his goofiness. And in the audition process, his chemistry with Brian Gleeson, who plays his half-brother, as well as Eve Hewson, who plays the youngest Garvey and a potential romantic interest, was undeniable.In fact, McCormack initially found it nearly impossible to keep it together through scenes with Gleeson because of the desperation Gleeson brought to his version of a bad cop.“Daryl is a giggler all right, but obviously a consummate professional,” Gleeson said. “I tend to over-worry things, and that has the weird effect of trying to do too much acting, basically. At one point, Daryl just kind of burst out laughing. But it had a great effect of relaxing everybody.“He’s got a lovely gentle sort of disposition,” he added, “but there’s a lot of steel in him.”McCormack grew up in Nenagh, in County Tipperary, the son of a white Irish mother and a Black American father he rarely saw. But his paternal grandfather, Percy Thomas, who runs a theater company in Maryland, helped fill that void.“The second he heard of himself having a grandson, he instantly made his way over to Ireland and connected with my family,” McCormack said. “Our relationship is so special. I think because we both had such an interest and connection to the performing arts, he just loved me because I was someone he could speak to about acting all the time and I’d never get bored, never get sick of it.”When McCormack was 17, Thomas took him to see “A Raisin in the Sun” at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, England.“That was actually quite fundamental to me in terms of wanting to pursue acting,” McCormack said. “It just blew my mind, completely moved me. I really saw the power of storytelling in that night.”Thomas has been a sounding board for McCormack throughout his studies at the Conservatory of Music and Drama at the Dublin Institute of Technology, and later at the Gaiety School of Acting, and his work: a post-drama school soap opera part, two seasons as a gangster in “Peaky Blinders” and his breakout as a leading man in “Leo Grande.”McCormack said that, throughout his career, he had given up parts that were easy in favor of ones that left him feeling daunted.“I want to pick roles that scare me a little,” he said. “It’s probably my main antenna in terms of trying to find the next job.”“I don’t want this ever to become a job,” McCormack said. “I want this always to be an experience.”Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York TimesHe was drawn to “Bad Sisters” by Horgan’s sharp-fanged writing and the chance to work with many actors he admires, most of them Irish, including Eva Birthistle and Sarah Greene along with Gleeson, Hewson and Horgan.Other films and series are on the horizon. He recently wrapped Alice Troughton’s psychological thriller “The Tutor,” alongside Richard E. Grant and Julie Delpy, playing an ambitious writer hired to tutor the son of a famous author with whom he is obsessed.“Daryl is an incredibly gifted young actor,” Grant wrote in an email. “Seemingly without any neurosis and as collaborative as one could wish for.”And it was announced on Wednesday that McCormack would star opposite Ruth Wilson in “The Woman in the Wall,” a BBC and Showtime thriller inspired by Ireland’s infamously abusive Magdalene Laundries, where “fallen women,” orphans and abandoned children were forced to perform unpaid labor by Roman Catholic nuns.It will be yet another performance opposite a formidable female lead, a situation McCormack has repeatedly sought out in his still-burgeoning career. For instance, in late 2019, when McCormack learned that Ruth Negga would be doing “Portia Coughlan” at the Young Vic in London, he made it his mission to play the role of her lover.“She was such an inspiration,” he said. “As a biracial Irish actor, there’s not many people you can look up to that have the same experience as you.”He hounded his team to get him an audition, and after being told that the production team was looking for someone older, he hounded them some more. Finally, he was asked to read for the part.“I’m about to go in, and it was around late February, March 2020, and we all know what happened then,” he said, referring to having his dreams dashed by Covid.Working with Negga remains on his bucket list. He also hopes to one day write a movie or a series inspired by his mother and her efforts to protect him against the struggles that sometimes came with being biracial and, in the eyes of others, different.“I keep chasing that feeling of not feeling comfortable,” McCormack said before pulling on a baseball cap and heading out into a world that is increasingly aware of him. “If I continue to take roles where I feel like my back is up against the wall, that makes me excited — because I don’t want this ever to become a job. I want this always to be an experience.” More