Horgan, Sharon (1970- )

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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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      ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ Review: Being Nicolas Cage

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      Nicolas Cage plays Nick Cage — maybe, kind of, not really — in a comically romantic, buddy-movie thriller that is also an ode to him in all his Caginess.Those eyes, that hair, those choppers and, oh, that purring, whining adenoidal voice, which can change pitch and intensity midsentence (midword!) and often seems a bit stuffed up. To know or, anyway, to watch Nicolas Cage is to love him and sometimes also be confused by him (which is A-OK). He can be a joy and a conundrum, startling and remarkable, but also fantastically, gloriously untethered. Who is this? you sometimes wonder, agog. What is this?In his latest, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” Cage fidgets and swaggers and smiles so broadly he looks ready to swallow the screen whole. He charms and alarms, jumps off a cliff and, drink in hand, walks straight into a swimming pool without breaking stride. (Holding onto the bottle, he sinks and then he drinks.) What’s it about? Does it matter? Does it ever? It’s another Nicolas Cage joint, a romp, a showcase, an eager-to-please ode to him in all his sui generis Caginess. That’s the idea, at any rate. Mostly, though, it is a single joke sustained for 106 minutes, amid many rapid tone shifts, mood swings and set changes.It’s a pretty good joke: Cage plays himself, or rather a variation on a star also named Nick Cage. Wrung out, inching toward bankruptcy, proud yet humbled, and yearning for a role that’s worthy of his self-regard, this avatar looks and sounds like the real deal. Certainly, he resembles the star who, since swiveling heads with “Valley Girl” and Uncle Francis’ “Rumble Fish” back in 1983, has made films both sublime and forgettable, married repeatedly (Elvis’s daughter!), won an Oscar (“Leaving Las Vegas”), whipped up vats of tabloid slobber and accrued a cult following that will giggle at this movie’s every reverent allusion: Not the bees.Nicolas Cage: Hollywood’s Greatest SurrealistFrom bleak dramas and Hollywood blockbusters to quiet character studies and psychedelic horrors, the mercurial actor has made over 100 films.His New Movie: In “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” Nicolas Cage plays “himself” — in all his meme-ified glory.Interview: In a conversation with our Talk columnist, the actor discussed his philosophy of acting and his search for the Holy Grail.First Leading Role: The 1983 movie “Valley Girl” started as a cheap exploitation film but managed to become a star vehicle for Cage.Anatomy of a Scene: The director David Gordon Green breaks down a scene from the 2013 film “Joe” in which Cage used a real venomous snake as a prop.There’s a story, way too much of one, crammed into an overstuffed, self-reflexive entertainment that soon finds Cage flying abroad. Paired with a second banana (an amped Pedro Pascal), he embarks on an adventure that — in its vibe, beats and banality — is closer to “National Treasure” than David Lynch’s cold, cruel “Wild at Heart.” There’s also an ex (Sharon Horgan) and a daughter (Lily Sheen), who pop in and out and seem to have been written in because: a) producers know they now need more than one woman in the cast; and b) they want to prove, à la US Weekly, that celebrities are just like us, except for the private jets.“Massive Talent” finds its mojo once Cage and Pascal team up and start trading quips, dodging obstacles and vamping for the audience. It’s very Hope and Crosby loosey-goosey, though sometimes it’s more blotto Snoop and Martha. Cage and Pascal bounce off each other nicely, with Pascal playing the wall to Cage’s ricocheting ball. Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz show up as spies who dragoon Cage into a covert operation that allows the filmmakers to shift to more commercial terrain and bring out the heavy artillery. That partly explains all the love here for John Woo’s ballistic, balletic “Face/Off,” even if someone forgot the doves.The director Tom Gormican, who wrote the script with Kevin Etten, gets the job done, churning the nonsense. There are no surprises other than the movie is watchable and amusing, though it’s too bad Gormican didn’t let Cage and Pascal just go with the absurdist, shambolic flow. Cage doesn’t need a reason for you to watch him, least of all good material. He’s Nicolas Cage, master of his own universe, maker of strange poetry, breaker of hearts. He can eat a roach, love a pig and inhabit a movie so profoundly that its quality is superfluous. “He’s up there in the air,” Pauline Kael wrote in a review of his freak-fest “Vampire’s Kiss,” “it’s a little dizzying — you’re not quite sure you understand what’s going on.” Amen to that.The Unbearable Weight of Massive TalentRated R for language and gun violence. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Together’ Bears Witness to Britain’s Lockdowns

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      The new film, starring Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy, is a tensely funny relationship drama, as well as a chronicle of the first year of the pandemic.LONDON — In “Together,” Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a couple in meltdown. And then the pandemic begins.Ten minutes into the film, which debuts in theaters in the United States on Aug. 27, the unnamed female protagonist (Horgan) tells her partner (McAvoy) that he is the worst human alive.“You’ve got the same level of charm as diarrhea in a pint glass,” she says.“Lockdown’s going to be hard then,” he responds.The drama, written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), begins on 24 March 2020, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown. It unfolds, claustrophobically, over the course of a year in the couple’s home, which they share with their young son.As well as taking a wide view of the virus’s deadly impact — captions mark the rising death toll in Britain, from 422 in the first scene to 126,284 in the last — “Together” also zooms in on the disintegration and tentative rebuilding of a relationship. It’s sad, but also scabrously funny — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” with added hand sanitizer. There’s shouting and crying, reminiscing and makeup sex, panic buying, jostling for vaccines and shocking, visceral grief.Stephen Daldry, top left, directed the film, which was shot over 10 days in London.Peter Mountain/Bleecker StreetHorgan said in a phone interview that the film was, on one level, an exercise in bearing witness, in particular to the “hidden trauma” of those families who lost loved ones in nursing homes. More than 39,000 nursing home residents in England died with the virus between April 2020 and March 2021, according to a study by the Care Quality Commission, a government agency. For many of those people, because of visiting restrictions and staff shortages, it was a lonely death.In “Together,” the mother of Horgan’s character moves into a nursing home at the start of the pandemic. “She’ll be safe there, right?” the daughter says. In the following scene, her mother is on a ventilator.Horgan said she felt “an enormous responsibility” in telling the story of what happened in Britain’s nursing homes. “We were incredibly shocked by it as a country, but the specific experience that families were having — of not being able to say goodbye, of watching loved ones die on FaceTime — people felt like they weren’t seen,” she said. “We wanted people to feel the pain of it.”The drama was filmed in London over 10 days in April this year, and was broadcast here by the BBC in June, in the same week that the government delayed the lifting of restrictions because of a surge in the Delta variant of the virus. As it premieres in the United States, just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated, but the long-term effects of the pandemic — physical, psychological and financial — are still being felt.“I’ve never written anything as immediate as this,” Kelly said in a phone interview. The script required little research, beyond observing day-to-day events, he added: “It’s the one event we’ve all been through.”Perhaps that’s why a number of recent films have tackled the strains of life in a pandemic. “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, throws an improbable heist into its story of a bored, bickering couple. “Lock Down Love” and “The End of Us” play out as more straightforward romantic comedies, in which being forced apart or together makes couples reassess. If “Together” stands apart, it is because fury and horror at what is happening in the wider world run in parallel to the central love story.Writing the movie was a cathartic experience, Kelly said. “There are a lot of people out there who are really angry. They lost people, and they know they died alone,” he said. “We still haven’t got anywhere near processing what we’ve been through.”Before Kelly approached Horgan about starring in “Together,” she had little interest in making a lockdown film: She had already turned down scripts based on the pandemic, she said. In the shows she was working on, including the BBC comedy “Motherland” and the second series of Aisling Bea’s “This Way Up,” the current circumstances were more or less glossed over, she added. Then she read “Together.”“I could see it was really important,” Horgan said of the script. “Of course, it’s rooted in Covid. But it transcends that, as a voyeuristic, in-depth X-ray of a relationship.” For that reason, Horgan doesn’t think people will feel fatigued by the events of last year and a half while watching it. “If it was just related to the pandemic, you couldn’t watch an hour-and-a-half of it,” she said.It helped that Horgan and Kelly are old friends. Horgan grew up on a turkey farm in Ireland, but has lived in London since the early 1990s, when she and Kelly met performing in a youth theater production. Years later, they bumped into each other in a pub. Horgan was in her late 20s and working at a job center; Kelly mentioned he’d written a play, called “Brendan’s Visit.” The next day, Horgan called and convinced him to put it on.“She was unbelievably driven,” said Kelly, who went on to win the Tony Award for Best Book with “Matilda the Musical” in 2013. “If it weren’t for Sharon, there’s no way I’d have been a writer.”From left: Tanya Franks, Rebekah Staton and Sharon Horgan in “Pulling.”HuluThe pair started writing together and created “Pulling,” a cult comedy about three 20-something female housemates, which debuted on the BBC in 2006. Watching it now, Horgan’s character, Donna, seems like a godmother to Fleabag from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2016 TV hit, as well as the many chaotic, honest portrayals of womanhood that have followed, but at the time there was no one like her on television.If “Pulling” was based on Horgan’s 20s, “Catastrophe,” the dramedy she co-wrote and starred in with Rob Delaney about a couple who get pregnant after a one-week stand, was based on her 30s: She and her now ex-husband Jeremy Rainbird had been together for six months when she found out she was expecting a daughter.Now, she is working on the third part of her loose trilogy based, as she described it, on the “life cycle of a woman.” It will encompass turning 50, divorce and watching her children grow up, she said.Horgan spent lockdown in London, with her two teenage daughters, who were “like caged animals,” she said. “So as a separated family we had to negotiate that, and make that work,” Horgan said. “It was intense.”The boundaries between her life and work have always been porous, Horgan said. “I don’t think I give too much of myself to my work; my work gives an awful lot to me, if I’m honest,” she said. “I’ve never really given away something incredibly personal that I haven’t felt better for having got it off my chest,” she added.When it came to rehearsing “Together,” in April, Horgan’s own experiences came pouring out.“Everyone was sharing stories, not just about Covid, or lockdown, but about relationships,” she said. “The emotion of it felt within arm’s reach.” More